Il6
THE MESTA
Granada to keep to the functions assigned them and not to inter-
fere with the management of such purely administrative affairs
as those of the Mesta.1
The now thoroughly independent attitude of the courts soon
found expression in even more aggressive steps, such as the exer-
cise of jurisdiction over appeals from decrees of the President of
the Mesta. The latter innovation brought forth a vehement
protest from the crown against this “ gross interference with the
purely executive powers of the Royal Council’s senior member.” 2
In 1577 the Council made an unsuccessful attempt to curb the
court at Granada by ordering it to refrain from tampering with
any entregador’s decision involving such administrative functions
of the Council as the regulation of pasturage and of sheep high-
ways.3 Two years later came another decree which forbade the
courts to interfere with the entregadores in the hearing of cases
on the extension of arable lands.4
It is hardly necessary to follow further the details of the strug-
gle. By the time that the troubled reign of Philip II had come to
a close in 1598, every decision handed down by the high courts
at Valladolid and Granada regarding the Mesta showed the
bitterest hostility toward the entregadores. The whole episode is
of especial interest as an illustration of the strength of popular
government in Castile in an age of supposedly triumphant autoc-
racy. The Cortes and the Chancillerias were defending the
ancient rights of the Castilian third estate — the townsmen and
the rural population — in the face of the institutions of absolut-
ism — the Mesta and its corps of entregadores.
ɪ Arch. Mesta, V-ι, Valladolid, 1569; ɑ-ɪ, Granada, 1569.
2 Ibid., Granada, 1572.
3 Ibid., 1577.
4 Ibid., 1579. Some of the above decrees are printed in the Ordenanzas de la
. . . Chancillerla de Granada (ι6or) and Rceopilacifrn de las Ordenanzas de la
Chancilleria de Valladolid (1765). See also Nov. Recop., lib. 7, tit. 27, ley 5, caps.
22, 27.
CHAPTER VII
DECLINE OF THE ENTREGADOR
Hostility of the Cortes in the seventeenth century. Appeals to the chancillerfas.
Inefficacy of royal aid to the Mesta. Collapse of the entregador system in the
eighteenth century.
The Mesta, working through its President and the Royal Council,
continued its attempts to hold back the steadily rising tide of
opposition. These efforts, continued through the first decades of
the seventeenth century, were all centred around one object, the
maintenance of the ancient traditions of the judicial and ad-
ministrative supremacy of the crown and its Council, especially
in matters concerning the Mesta.
The crown itself, to which the sheep owners had been so
largely indebted for their great privileges in times past, had
degenerated almost to impotence. The impecunious later Haps-
burgs were quite as ready to dicker with the opponents of the
Mesta for subsidies, as they were to bargain for ‘ loans ’ from a
scarcely solvent organization whose chief asset in such bartering
was its protestation of past loyalty to the crown. In 1602, by a
fundamental revision of the entregador commissions, the king’s
share in the profits of that office was greatly increased. This was
obviously an effort on the part of the Mesta to secure a revival of
its old favors from the crown. Even more was it intended to give
warning of the losses which the royal exchequer would suffer if the
rapidly increasing opposition to the Mesta in the Cortes and the
chancillerfas was not stopped.
This measure of 1602 was the first of a long series of increas-
ingly frantic endeavors on the part of the Mesta to secure, by
royal favors, a continuance of the dominant position which it had
long enjoyed under its ancient but now quite antiquated priv-
ileges.1 The dire financial straits of the crown made it a willing
* The confusion of this question of the distribution of the profits from the office
of entregador was finally cleared up, after considerable legislation, by the acuerdos
(resolutions) of the Mesta in 1637 and 1644, by which the king was given one-third
ɪɪ?