124
THE MESTA
the Mesta, and no appeal from the sentence of an entregador was
brought before either of them without the assurance of fair and
probably favorable consideration. If the sentence was not act-
ually reversed it was greatly modified, the usual form being
“ that the defendant stands convicted as found by the entre-
gador, but the penalty is withdrawn.” By this simple expedient
the sting was deftly removed from the once dreaded decrees
of the itinerant magistrates, who soon heard the ridiculing
jibes of every peasant landholder along their once absolute
domain.
Another typical activity of the chancillerias, during the crucial
decades at the opening of the seventeenth century, was the recog-
nition of all forms of exemptions from the visitations of entre-
gadores. Some were based on ancient privileges, as we have seen
above. Others had been recently purchased from the sovereign,
whose sore financial straits made such transactions common at
that time.1 Still others had as their foundation the fact that no
entregador had visited the locality in question for many decades,2
or that the lord of the town in question had been granted such an
exemption from entregador visitations in another section of his
domain.3 These exemptions sometimes covered only the harvest
months, or applied to certain districts, which sought to be re-
lieved of entregador fines in order to use their funds for such
laudable objects as building churches or maintaining militia com-
panies. The latter was a prevalent excuse for exemptions during
the Portuguese wars of 1640 and following.4
The Mesta protested that these temporary or limited curtail-
ments of the entregador’s activities tended inevitably to become
permanent and more extensive. Nevertheless, the crown was
forced by its need of funds to continue granting them; the friends
of the Mesta on the Royal Council went through the forms of
withholding them; and the recipients forthwith put them into
* Arch. Mesta., B-4, Bureba, r648, and Arch. Hist. Nac., Consejo Castilla,
leg. 48, Benavente. 1664.
2 Arch. Mesta, Alcala de Henares, 1617: the recognition of such an exemption
by the court at Valladolid.
3 Arch. Osuna, Béjar, caj 56, no. 16 (1627).
4 Arch. Mesta, Prov. ii, 37.
DECLINE OF THE ENTREGADOR
125
effect against the entregadores regardless of Mesta or Council.1
It mattered not how dubious the basis for such an exemption
might be; the high courts were always ready to concede the
benefit of the doubt to the agrarian petitioners, unfairly so in some
instances, perhaps, but thoroughly in keeping with the tendency
of the times. However essential to the country the great sheep
owners’ organization may have been in the past, it had outlived
its usefulness, and all Castile was rapidly coming to realize that
fact.
The aggressive steps taken by the Chancillerias against the en-
tregadores steadily continued. About a score of decisions were
handed down each year restricting the activities of these now
thoroughly discredited magistrates. The bitter denunciation of
this situation in 1631 by Leruela, a retired entregador, is indica-
tive of the despair of the Mesta: “ The Chancillerias are taking all
business pertaining to the Mesta as a huge joke; its cases are
passed upon and the sentences of entregadores reversed without
consulting any part of the documents submitted except the ru-
bric.” 2
The sweeping decree of 1633, the last and most reactionary con-
firmation of the antiquated claims of the Mesta, was inspired
largely by the hope of checking the chancillerias. By this meas-
ure the Royal Council wished to impede the steadily growing
prestige of its adversaries, particularly in the matter of their
hearing cases involving pasturage leases, a question which it had
long regarded as being reserved to its own jurisdiction.3 This and
1 In 1646 the Council attempted to cancel one of the most important of these
local exemptions from entregador visitations, namely that long enjoyed by Seville.
The vehement protest of that city, whose control of the trade with the Indies proved
a powerful lever against the Council, soon brought a reconsideration of this action.
1 Miguel Саха de Leruela, Reslauracion de la Abundancia de Espana (Madrid,
1632), p. 192. The author was an entregador from 1623 to 1625; and this classic
defence of the Mesta as the chief basis of Spanish prosperity was the result of his
observations during that service. His later experience as an official in Naples,
where the first edition of his work appeared in 1631, gave him much material for a
comparative study of the problems arising from the migratory pastoral industry in
the two countries.
3 See below pp. 339-340; also Concordia de 1783, i, fol. 70. In 1595 the Royal
Council had been made the court of last appeal in all cases of despojo de posesi6n∙.
the ejection of a Mesta member from a pasture in violation of the ancient privilege