132
THE MESTA
further decrees issued by the Council in 1746, 1751, and 1752/
the entregadores were able for a time to bid defiance to th∣⅛
chancillerxas, but their day of reckoning was not far off.
The accession of Charles III in 1759 opened the final chapter
in the history of the entregador. The Neapolitan reign of that
enlightened monarch had given him ample experience in handling
the perplexing problems arising from the conflicts of a large-scale
migratory pastoral industry with agricultural and local interests.
On coming to Castile, he found the Mesta weakened after two
centuries of strenuous hostilities, but with its itinerant judiciary
still intrenched behind its ancient privileges, which his unprin-
cipled predecessors had just been rehabilitating.
The mainstay of the Mesta had ever been the crown and its
Council, the one the creator and the other the unfailing protector
of the entregador. The indispensable prerequisite of the whole
system of such a highly organized migratory institution was the
superiority of the centralized national authority over the separate
local units, whether provinces, towns, or individuals. Therein
lay the explanation of the supremacy of the Mesta under the
aegis of the early Hapsburg absolutism. By a curious anomaly,
this very reliance upon the crown was destined to bring about the
downfall of the entregador and the complete disruption of the
Mesta. That organization now found itself in the hands of a
monarch, who, though not at first openly hostile to it, was quite
ready to give a full hearing to its opponents, a favor which no
previous sovereign had ever dreamed of granting. Even more
distressing to the Mesta was the discovery that after he had given
this hearing, and had become convinced of the grave need for re-
form, the king was quite willing to forgo the immediate profits
which he received from entregador fines and to work unselfishly
for the ultimate good of the agrarian interests of the country.2
1 Varias Décrétas . . . mandados agregar d las Ordenanzas de la Chancilleria de
Valladolid (1765), p. 134; Concordia de 1783, iɪ, fols. 178v-179; Arch. Mesta, B-3,
Biloria, 1751-83. None of these documents is given in Matias Brieva, Colecci6n de
6rdenes Pertenecientes al Ramo de la Mesta (1828), the official and supposedly com-
plete compilation of all Mesta documents of importance for the period τ73t-1828.
2 The agrarian policy of Charles III has been carefully examined by Rudolf
Leonhard, Agrarpolitik und Agrarreform in Spanien unter Carl III. (Munich, 1909).
DECLINE OF THE ENTREGADOR
i33
The details of this final campaign against the Mesta need not
concern us. We may only observe that it falls into two parts : the
exhaustive preliminary charges by the province of Estremadura,
which comprised the chief Southernandwesternpasturelands; and
the subsequent hearing of both sides of the case before Campo-
manes, the great reform minister.1 In the course of these pro-
ceedings, which covered some twenty years, every important
point in the long and varied career of the Mestawas touched upon.
Most attention, however, was devoted to the question of pastur-
age — public lands, enclosures, and commons. The entregador,
though frequently discussed in the citations of historical evidence,
came in for less mention because he was by that time only a figure-
head. A large part of the attention given to him was spent in the
examination of the innumerable cases of systematized bribery of
entregadores by towns. The widespread evidence of this or-
ganized backmail was used by the prosecution as one of its most
effective arguments to prove the utter inefficacy of the itinerant
magistrates as officers of justice.2 In the final polemic of the
the prosecution, the reform leaders took the same view of
the entregador as did Acevedo, the great jurist,3 who had main-
tained that the Mesta judiciary was “ an enemy of the towns,”
an opponent of that ancient heritage of every entity of Spanish
population —∙ be it village, city, province, or kingdom — namely,
its independence from outside interference in the management of
its local affairs.
This procedure under Charles III was, strictly speaking, not a
trial of the Mesta. It was simply an exhaustive hearing of the
whole agrarian problem, a summing up of the centuries of discord,
accusations, denials, and evidence. The real object of the inves-
tigation was not to pass formal sentence upon the Mesta, but
rather to discredit that institution in all its functions, including
its system of itinerant judges, before the eyes of the nation. Cam-
pomanes felt that the most effective method of accomplishing the
desired reforms was to subject the actions of the Mesta and the
1 See below, p. 414, for the titles of the published results of these proceedings.
2 Concordia de 1783, ii, fols. 234-282.
3 See edition of the Nueva Recop. (1612), lib. 3, tit. 14, ley 3.