Chapter VII—
La Mata

The city of Salamanca is built on a group of low hills on the northern bank of the Rio Tormes some distance upstream from its confluence with the Rio Duero. The Duero is the major river of the northern meseta, and the Tormes is its main tributary from the south, bringing waters from the northern slope of the massive Sierra de Gredos. An impressive Roman bridge of twenty-six stone arches crosses the Tormes at Salamanca, a witness both to the volume of the river at its height and the secular importance of the city as the center of a rich agricultural region.

The urban skyline stands out above the valley, marked by the two cathedrals, the new one of the sixteenth century with the older Romanesque one tucked in its shadow, and the numerous convents and parish churches, so many that Salamanca has been known familiarly as Little Rome. Lying lower and less visible are the buildings of the university and associated colleges, mainly of the Renaissance. Under Felipe V, a more worldly age, the heart of the city was torn out to create the Plaza Mayor, a large open square surrounded by a four-storied building with arcades and shops on the street level and apartments above. The city hall dominates its northern side. The Plaza Mayor is a beautiful example of early modern city planning and a reflection of the wealth pouring into the metropolis in the eighteenth century, for it rivals the older Plaza Mayor of Madrid in size and surpasses it in elegance.

Behind the eighteenth-century limits of the city is a rise; over the top of it stretches to the north a broad, gently rolling plain marked by the beds of a few streams and an occasional low hill. The plain of La Ar-

muña is one of the richest grain regions in dry Spain, characterized by thick, red soil that can be plowed deeply and holds its moisture when regions of thinner cover have dried up. In the eighteenth century many nucleated villages dotted the plain, as they still do today. They lie only three or four kilometers from each other, so that the view from any of the low rises includes a number of distinct settlements, each surrounded by wheat fields, green and lush in the spring, brown and dry after the summer harvest. Communication by cart was easy from town to town and into the city.^[1]

Near the center of the plain, at an altitude of 818 meters, lies the village of La Mata, about twelve kilometers due north of Salamanca. Like most of the villages of the region, in the eighteenth century it was classed as a lugar, the lowest administrative entity with its own government. Approaching La Mata one saw first a stocky granite church sitting on a slight knoll in the middle of undulating fields. The church was squat and simple, lacking the square stone tower that decorated those in neighboring villages and suggesting that this community might be less wealthy than its neighbors. Around the church and running down the gentle gradient to the southwest were the public buildings and the low stone houses of the townsmen. The casa consistorial, or town hall, faced a small square below the church and held also the town jail. In addition the town council possessed a butcher shop and a smithy, which it rented out, and a storehouse that was used as the town granary (pósito). La Mata had sixty inhabited houses and two others that were empty, thirteen barns (pajares ), eight corrals, and two more granaries (paneras ), which belonged to the church and stored the product of the tithes. In one of the houses a vecino ran a tavern, where he sold wine and a few groceries.^[2]

La Mata had a population of somewhat more than two hundred. According to the catastro, fifty-nine of these, including ten widows, were vecinos or heads of household. Twenty-two vecinos, including two widows, one-third of the total, made their living from farming. Twenty-three were arrieros, muleteers who transported goods for hire. A linen weaver, a shoemaker, the tavernkeeper, a schoolmaster, a surgeon-bloodletter, and the parish priest were the remaining male vecinos,

[1] For a fuller description of the geography of La Armuña, see Chapter 17 and Appendix Q.

[2] AHPS, Catastro, La Mata, libro 1421, resp. gen. QQ 22, 23, 29; libro 1419, maest. ecles., ff. 8, 48.

while the other eight widows had no specified means of support (Table 7.1 and Figure 7.1).

The término, or area of the town, was small; only half a league from east to west and three-eighths from north to south was what the vecinos reported to the makers of the catastro.^[3] From the top of the knoll they could see similar towns in all directions. To the east La Mata bordered

[3] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 3. A legua was traditionally the distance covered in an hour's walk, about five kilometers.

Figure 7.1.
La Mata, Employment Structure, 1753

on Carbajosa de Armuña and to the west on Castellanos de Villiguera. Slightly further to the south was Monterrubio, at the foot of the small reddish hill that gave it its name, and to the northeast the twin towns of Palencia de Negrilla and Negrilla de Palencia, hardly a stone's throw apart. In addition, La Mata bordered on three despoblados or alquerías (the terms meaning literally "depopulated place" and "grange" were used almost interchangeably and indicated that a caretaker, a herder, and a few others might live there, but probably not the owner): Narros de Valdunciel on the northwest and Aldealama and Mozodiel del Camino on the south.^[4] These occupied poorer land, some of it good only for grazing. So flat is the terrain, despite its gentle roll, that, even today, on clear days the vecinos of La Mata see La Peña de Francia, a sharp mountain on the southern border of the province, seventy-five kilometers away (see Map 7.1).

The catastro, dated 1753, and the register of tithe payments at the end of the century permit the reconstruction of the economic and social

[4] Ibid. Q 2.

Map 7.1.
La Mata and Its Environs

structure of this small rural community.^[5] It is convenient to determine first insofar as possible the income of the different households and the total income of the village. With this economic profile before us, we can then observe how this society was evolving in the second half of the eighteenth century and what impact the disentail of Carlos IV had on the course of its development.

The makers of the catastro recorded the area of La Mata outside the town nucleus as 1,073 fanegas (480 hectares).^[6] This is about 18 fanegas

[5] For the tithe records, see Archivo Parroquial, La Mata. I was able to copy this record thanks to the hospitality of the late parish priest, don Jerónimo Pablos, who made me welcome in his house for some ten afternoons in 1964 and 1969. This venerable gentleman also told me much about the town itself and the Armuña district. The pleasure of such interchanges is one of the unsung perquisites of the historian's craft.

[6] This is the total given at the beginning of maest. segl. La Mata, resp. gen. Q 10, says 1,100 fanegas but is less accurate. The local fanega was 400 estadales of 16 square varas each, or .447 hectares 1.13 acres) (ibid. Q 9). See Cabo Alonso, "La Armuña," 113.

for each of its vecinos, far below the Armuña regional average of 48 fanegas per vecino.^[7] The fertility of La Mata's land, however, compensated partially for what it lacked in extent. The catastro's estimate of the productivity of the land in La Mata averages out at an annual return of forty reales per fanega. This is well above the regional average of twenty-seven; only five towns in La Armuña had more valuable land, and La Armuña was the richest district in the province. The value of La Mata's soil lay in its ability to produce first-class wheat, trigo candeal. Ninety-one percent of the término was wheat land (sembradura de secano que produce trigo ), 3 percent was devoted to rye (centeno ), and the rest was meadow (prados de secano para pasto ). None of the land in the town was barren or waste. Furthermore, both wheat and rye fields were sown every other year, whereas in most parts of arid Spain the land could produce a crop only once every three years or less often. The meadows were mowed for hay every year. Few towns in arid Spain could match the fertility of La Mata's soil.

The término was divided into many plots, very irregular in shape, scattered higgledy-piggledy across the rolling fields. The biggest plots were one of nine fanegas (four hectares) belonging to the town council and one of eight fanegas of the parish church. Altogether the catastro listed 551 arable plots and 33 meadows, which means that the average size of the first was under two fanegas and of the second hardly one. The larger holdings did not consist of larger plots but only of a greater number of them. As was common practice under such a system, the término was divided into several large fields (hojas ), and all the plots in each field were sown and harvested in the same year. In the late spring, the landscape of La Mata and its region would alternate between large patches of rippling green and others of fallow red and brown earth.

The scene had not always been so neat. Records preserved from earlier times suggest that prior to the population expansion of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when much of the region was still waste and available for pasture, farmers planted and harvested their individual plots as they wished. As more of the land of a community was put under the plow, an arrangement had to be made to feed the livestock: draft animals and sheep, both essential to the local economy. The solu-

[7] The data on the Armuña region refer to one of the geographic zones into which I divided the province for analysis (see Appendix Q). The data come from an analysis of the provincial returns of the catastro, AHN, Hac., Catastro, Salamanca, libros 7476, 7477, 7478, in each volume under letra D, "Producto de cada medida de tierra en reales de vellón."

tion in the fertile grain regions of Castile, which could produce wheat regularly, was to establish large fields within each término, alternating between a year of grain and another of fallow, half the fields in one cycle and half in the other. After the summer wheat harvest, the fields would lie untilled through the winter, and the animals would pasture on the stubble (rastrojo ) and weeds. Fallow plowing followed in the spring, to renew the soil and retard evaporation, until time for the autumn sowing of the next wheat crop. Henceforth all farmers of a village had to follow the same pattern, called familiarly año y vez, but each farmer needed to have plots scattered through all the hojas in order to equalize his harvest.^[8]

The information in the catastro provides an easy estimate of the annual harvest of La Mata, since it includes the number of fanegas there were of each quality of land and the size of crop each quality produced annually per fanega. The latter figure was obtained by halving the expected harvest because each plot was sown only every other year (Table 7.2). These figures can hardly be expected to be exact. The makers of the catastro did not survey the plots but had to accept the best estimate of their size, and it was a matter of judgment into what class of land they

[8] García Fernández, "Champs ouverts," 705–9.

assigned each plot, since there was a continuum in the quality of the soil from the poorest to the best.

A more reliable measure of the harvests is provided by the tithes (diezmos ) reported in the catastro for the five-year period ending in 1752. In describing the different plots, the catastro defined them as being planted in either wheat or rye, but in fact the tithe returns show that the farmers also planted other crops, barley, oats, algarrobas (carob beans), and garbanzos (chick-peas). The farmers paid one-tenth of their harvest of all these crops as tithes.^[9]

The tithes fell into three categories. The larger part were lumped together for distribution to those institutions that were entitled to a share of the town tithe fund, the cilla . These were known as the divisible tithes, or partible . The property of certain religious institutions was exempt from tithes, and the owners required the tenants who farmed these lands to pay them a substitute for the tithes. These payments were called the diezmos privativos, or more commonly the horros, from the expression horro de diezmos, exempt from tithes. Rather than a stated proportion of the harvest, the horros were a fixed payment, such as some proportion of the rent, and were usually less than a full tithe.^[10] The property of the benefice of the parish church (emolument of the priest), of the fabric (building and maintenance fund) of the church, and of a monastery and two convents in Salamanca enjoyed this privilege.^[11] Finally, by a special concession, the cathedral of Salamanca received for its fabric the tithes of the fourth largest tithe payer of each parish in this region, the cuarto dezmero .^[12] The horros were paid into the tithe fund, which then distributed them to the owners of the land; the tithes of the cuarto dezmero, however, never entered the tithe fund but went directly to the cathedral.^[13]

The catastro recorded the average amounts collected in tithes from 1748 to 1752 shown in Table 7.3. The total harvest indicated by the reported tithes has about 17 percent more wheat and 41 percent more ryethan estimated in Table 7.2 from the size and quality of the fields and

[9] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 15.

[10] See Archivo Parroquial, La Mata, tazmía, f. 1, where horros are stated to be 1/10 of the rent of the lands of the benefice of the parish and 1/15 of the rent of other lands subject to horros.

[11] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 15 and maest. ecles., ff. 41, 48, 177 (Convento de Santa Clara), 179 (Convento del Corpus Christi), and AHN, Clero, libro 10668, f. 74 (Monasterio Nuestra Señora del Jesús, whose exemption is not mentioned in the catastro).

[12] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 15.

[13] This information is revealed by the tithe records of the end of the century, Archivo Parroquial, La Mata, tazmía.

includes other crops as well. I shall consider the figures in Table 7.3 more reliable and proceed on this basis.

To analyze the economy of the town, one must know the combined value of the harvest of all crops. It is possible to state this in reales because the catastro gives the current local prices of each crop, but I shall convert all the crops into their equivalent value in fanegas of wheat on the basis of their prices. The fanega of wheat was the unit in which most rents were paid and a unit that remained constant, whereas prices rose and fell. To make this conversion, one calculates the total value of each crop in reales and divides the result by the price of one fanega of wheat, which at the time of the catastro was fourteen reales in La Mata. Table 7.4 shows that the average total harvest of the town was equivalent in value to approximately 4,186 fanegas of wheat (hereafter the abbreviation "n EFW" will be used for "equivalent in value to n fanegas of wheat").^[14]

Information provided by the records of the nearby village of Villaverde, which will be studied next, shows that it was the custom in this region for a farmer who tilled lands outside the limits of his town to

[14] See Appendix N on the use of EFW as a unit of value. Le Roy Ladurie agrees that grain is a more reliable medium than gold or silver to measure purchasing power in the early modern period (Paysans de Languedoc, 28).

divide the tithes on the crops from these lands evenly between his parish's fund and that of the parish in which the harvest was grown. If the harvest of vecinos of neighboring villages on fields inside La Mata was the same as that of vecinos of La Mata from land they farmed outside the town limits, then the two balanced out, and the harvest indicated by the total tithes represents the gross harvest of La Mata farmers; but if one harvest were greater than the other, then the difference between them should enter into the calculation of the total income of the vecinos of La Mata. The catastro gives no information on this question, since it does not say who farmed the plots, only who owned them. One can obtain an answer from the tithe roll (tazmía), which has been preserved for the years 1762–1823.^[15] Only after 1791 does this book list the names of the individual tithers and their payments of each kind of crop. For the three years 1800–1802, the average tithes given to other towns by La Mata farmers was 2.7 percent of the total tithes collected; while the average tithes paid to La Mata by outsiders for harvests collected within its limits were 2.0 percent of the total. At that time the balance was slightly in favor of La Mata, but so little that we can omit it from our calculations, especially since the situation might have been different in midcentury.

In order to estimate how much of the total harvest represented net income for the town, one must deduct the various charges against it. First among these was the seed for next year's planting. The makers of the catastro asked how much seed each quality of land needed. From the answers one can calculate the total seed requirements, keeping in mind that each field was sown only every other year. One recalls that the tithe returns showed the wheat crop to be 17 percent more than the catastro figures predicted and the rye crop 41 percent more (Tables 7.2 and 7.3). I shall assume that the seed was equally underestimated and that the requirements should be corrected upward by these proportions, as shown in Table 7.5. The requirements were then 482 fanegas of wheat and 9 EFW of rye. These data can be converted to predicted yield-seed ratios (compare Tables 7.2 and 7.5): 8 : 1 for first-quality wheat land, 7.2 : 1 for second quality, and 6 : 1 for third quality, or 7.2 : 1 overall. For rye it was 9 : 1.

The farmers also had to provide seed for minor crops. The catastro does not say how much, but the approximation will be not far off if we use the same ratio as for wheat, one-seventh of the crop. The minor

[15] Archivo Parroquial, La Mata, tazmía.

crops were 623 EFW (Table 7.4), so that their seed was approximately 89 EFW. This brings the total seed requirement to 580 EFW, leaving a net harvest of 3,606 EFW.

2

After paying their tithes and deducting their seed, the vecinos had to meet their obligations to their landlords. Although they were blessed by living in the midst of fertile fields, it was their misfortune that very little of the land belonged to them, a condition made dramatically clear by the information in the catastro. By totaling its records of the different properties of each individual and institution, one can determine the amount in the hands of the different categories of owners, in number of plots, in area, and in value. The catastro measured the value of land by the sale price of the average annual crop and the value of houses and

other buildings by their fair annual rent. In analyzing the structure of land ownership, I have used the value assigned by the catastro rather than the area of the holdings as the basis for comparison because it has more economic significance (Table 7.6 and Figure 7.2).

In all, the vecinos, including the priest, owned only 3.2 percent of the land in the town. The vecinos also profited from the propios, council lands that were rented to them to provide town income and were worth more than all the local private property. Adding the property of vecinos of nearby villages who lived near enough to farm themselves, one finds that about 10 percent of La Mata's land was in the hands of local residents. A larger proportion belonged to the benefice and the fabric of the parish, and the four confraternities (cofradías ) of La Mata, while a

Figure 7.2.
La Mata, Ownership of Land, 1753

small amount belonged to similar church institutions in neighboring villages. Among vecinos, town council, and ecclesiastical funds, about 29 percent of the land by value (it was 31 percent by area) was owned locally, but two-thirds of this belonged to religious institutions.

The situation of the buildings in the town was strikingly different. Of the sixty-two houses, lay vecinos owned fifty-three, the priest, the town

council, and the parish church one each. There were thirteen barns (pajares); lay vecinos owned ten and the priest one. Of the nine corrals, vecinos owned seven and the town council one. Based on value, altogether 91 percent of the buildings was owned locally, but because the total value of the buildings was only 7 percent of that of the land, the property in local hands still represented less than one-third of the total value of all property.

By far the largest part of the land belonging to nonresidents was in the hands of persons and institutions located in Salamanca city, and again the church held the lion's share. Ecclesiastical funds of Salamanca owned 52 percent of the agricultural land in the town. This was divided among the benefices (beneficios ) of two parish priests and four other benefices (capellanías ) attached to parish churches, the fabric of another church, five secondary schools (colegios ) of religious orders, six convents (male and female), two hospitals, and five endowments (memorias ), three in the cathedral and two in convents. An additional 11 percent belonged to individuals, lay and clerical, living in the city. Two percent belonged to individuals located elsewhere, including the Vizconde de Villagonzalo of Valencia. A capellanía of Madrid owned 5 percent of La Mata's land, and a convent in another town in Salamanca province owned 1 percent.

In sum, nonresidents owned 71 percent of the land. Or looking at the situation through the eyes of the statesmen who planned the catastro, religious institutions, both local and outside, owned 78 percent of the land. These were the hard economic facts facing the peasants who plowed and reaped the fields.

How the nonresident owners exploited their land is shown by account books of monasteries and convents in Salamanca that were confiscated when the state dissolved the religious orders in 1837.^[16] These provide examples of the agreements between the ecclesiastical owners of land and those who did the actual farming. I have not seen rental agreements of lay owners, but their practices must have been similar if not identical. Contracts were usually signed formally before a notary for six- or nine-year periods, "de tres en tres," meaning that they could be renegotiated at the end of each three-year period. The tenant (rentero ) had to have a third party sign as guarantor of his payments, the fiador, usually another farmer in the town. The tenant agreed to deliver to the owner's granary in Salamanca (or elsewhere) a specified number of fan-

[16] I have used the following account books: AHN, Clero, libros 10653, 10668, 10854, 10869, 10880, 10888.

egas of first-class wheat (trigo candeal) on 15 August of each year, to care for the land, to maintain the drainage ditches, and not to sublet. Sometimes other payments were stipulated in addition to wheat: rye, barley, garbanzos, straw, firewood, and, for Christmas, chickens.^[17] Monetary rents were collected for pastures and houses but not normally for arable land. The tenant was also to pay the tithes on the harvest, or the horros in lieu of tithes to those owners whose property was exempt from tithes.

The tenant kept for himself all the harvest over and above the rent and tithes. These were not sharecropping agreements, for the rent was fixed. In a good year the tenant would get a larger share of the total crop than in a bad year. The account books show that tenants sometimes fell behind in their payments, usually as the result of a poor harvest. On such occasions the religious institution usually e xacted no penalty but kept a record of the amount of grain due, which the tenant paid along with the following year's rent or at the next possible opportunity.^[18] Sometimes a tenant fell so far behind that his lease was not renewed, "por haberse perdido este rentero";^[19] but the standard practice was to renew the lease, usually on the same terms, time after time. When a tenant died, his widow or sons would take over the contract. If the property was more than one peasant could handle, two or more joined to sign the lease, with each specifying the amount he was to pay. This was often the case when the religious institution owned lands in several towns and leased them as a single block.

The account books do not say what share of the average crop was represented by the rent. The catastro states, however, that the usual practice of ecclesiastical owners was to charge as rent a flat rate of 1 fanega of grain for each fanega of land, whatever the quality.^[20] This must have been the local rule of thumb in renting land; in the twentieth century absentee owners still calculated the rent of their fields in La Armuña according to their extent, regardless of the quality.^[21] A comparison of the property recorded in the catastro and the accounts of three

[17] For example, AHN, Clero, libro 10653, f. 2v.; libro 10668, ff. 50, 113.

[18] In 1802 the Convento de Corpus Christi added 9 1/2 fanegas of wheat as "costas" to the amount owed by two farmers of Calzada de Valdunciel. Their annual rent was 46 fanegas. They were 67 fanegas in arrears in 1799, and their deficit had grown to 97 fanegas in 1802 (ibid., libro 10880, f. 40). In 1803 the lease was renewed. One of the farmers was dropped but the other continued with a new partner (libro 10869, f. 76). This is the only example I observed of a penalty for falling in arrears.

[19] Ibid., libro 10854, f. 11r.

[20] La Mata, maest. ecles., f. 274v.

[21] Cabo Alonso, "La Armuña," 377.

institutions owning land in La Mata indicates, however, that the owners in practice received somewhat less than this rule would provide. The monastery Nuestra Señora del Jesús of nuns of the Order of Saint Bernard owned twenty-four plots in La Mata with a total area of 38.25 fanegas, but the account book shows that the nuns rented the holding in 1751 for 35 fanegas of wheat delivered to their door. In 1777 they raised the rent to 38 fanegas but dropped it to 30 in 1789, where it remained until 1809, when the book says the holding was sold.^[22] The convent of La Concepción of sisters of the Order of Saint Francis owned twenty-five arable plots totaling 53.5 fanegas, and one meadow of little value. The rent was 37 fanegas in 1756, raised to 39 in 1781. In 1804, at the height of the great famine, the nuns renewed the agreement for only 33 fanegas, and they were still collecting this amount in 1810.^[23] Finally, the convent of Corpus Christi of sisters of Saint Francis owned thirteen plots measuring 16.5 fanegas. Account books for the years 1800 through 1805 show that the rent was 14 fanegas of wheat. The sisters, however, were having difficulty collecting even this much. The tenant was behind almost a half year's rent in 1799. By 1802 the arrears were over three-fourths of a year's rent, they tripled as a result of the disastrous harvests in 1803 and 1804, and at the end of 1805 were still over two years' rent.^[24] This was not the only tenant of the convent in such straits. At the end of 1802 it had thirty-one tenants in different towns, of whom nineteen were in arrears. Either the nuns were complacent landladies or they were asking more than their tenants could provide.

In all three cases the owner received less than 1 fanega of wheat per fanega of land. From 1751 to 1776 the monastery Nuestra Señora del Jesús got 92 percent of this figure; from 1756 to 1780 the convent of La Concepción got 69 percent; and from 1800 to 1805 the convent of Corpus Christi asked 85 percent but failed to get this amount. These three cases cover about one-seventh of the land owned by outsiders. Lacking other information, I shall take them as a representative sample of both secular and ecclesiastical owners and use the figure 0.8 fanega of wheat as the best estimate of the rent for each fanega of arable land, whether used for wheat or rye. The fields owned by outsiders totaled 718 fanegas, according to the catastro. The annual rent for these would then

[22] AHN, Clero, libro 10668, ff. 74, 100; La Mata, maest. ecles., ff. 152–63. The account book speaks of twenty-two tierras in 1803. Had the nuns sold two plots in 1789, when the rent went down? Religious institutions did not often sell their land.

[23] AHN, Clero, libro 10854, f. 24; La Mata, maest. ecles., ff. 164–77.

[24] AHN, Clero, libros 10880, 10869, f. 91; La Mata, maest. ecles., ff. 179–89.

have been roughly 575 fanegas of wheat. One can calculate that the expected harvest on these fields would be 2,547 EFW, so that the rent amounted to 23 percent of the harvest.

In addition, the vecinos would have rented the fields in the town belonging to the churches of La Mata and neighboring parishes. These totaled 172 and 25 fanegas respectively, and the rent on all of them would have been about 158 fanegas of wheat.

Two minor payments to the church completed the charges on the farmers. In addition to the tithes, people who grew more than meager harvests had to contribute first fruits (primicias ). These consisted of 0.5 fanega of each crop from every farmer who harvested at least 6 fanegas of that crop, and the annual average of first fruits was 27 EFW. Farmers in Castile paid also the Voto de Santiago to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in fulfillment of a legendary vow to the saint made by the ninth-century King Ramiro of León at the battle of Clavijo. Every farmer liable for first fruits contributed to the voto 0.5 fanega of his best grain ("de la mejor semilla que coge media fanega"). In La Mata twenty-eight persons together paid 12.5 fanegas of wheat, 1 of algarrobas and 0.5 of garbanzos, or 14 EFW.^[25]

3

Besides their harvest, the farmers drew income from raising various kinds of livestock. The number of animals and the selling price of their young are given in the catastro. Those born each year would represent income for their owners and for the town, whether they were slaughtered for food or sold at outside markets, except for those animals, particularly draft animals, that replaced ones that died. One can estimate the number born annually as somewhat less than would be expected today and the life span also less because of poorer nutrition and medication. The process is described in detail in Appendix K, and the calculation for La Mata is worked out in Table 7.7. It shows that the income to the vecinos from livestock was approximately 4,946 reales, or 353 EFW. The vecinos also raised an unstated number of chickens, but since they sold for 1 real each, their total value could not have been much.

From the total income from their animals the vecinos had to pay the cost of pastures. Outsiders owned meadows that according to the catas-

[25] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 15.

tro produced 40 reales per year; one can consider this their rent. Local churches owned others that brought in 8 reales. Half the year the vecinos pastured their animals in the town and half outside, probably in adjoining despoblados.^[26] Within the town the vecinos had the right to graze their livestock on the meadows of the town council and after the day of San Juan, 24 June, on all private meadows, but the town council charged them 500 reales per year for the use of these meadows even though it was considered a common right.^[27] One may assume that for the half year that the herds were pastured outside the town the vecinos paid more, perhaps 750 reales. Pastures thus cost the vecinos 1,300 reales per year, 93 EFW, but the town economy lost only the amount paid to outsiders, 800 reales or 57 EFW.

By assembling all this information, one obtains an estimate of the net income of the vecinos from agriculture. One must keep in mind that its reliability depends on the accuracy of the data provided by the catastro. Table 7.8 summarizes the information. The total net income of the vecinos from agriculture is 2,682 EFW.

[26] Ibid. Q 20.

[27] Ibid. Q 24.

4

To give meaning to this figure and to clarify the agricultural economy of this small community, one must attempt to determine how this total net income was distributed among the population. Of the sixty vecinos, twenty-two, including two widows, were engaged in agriculture. Except for a mule herd (guarda de ganado mular ) and a warden of the fields (guarda de campos ), whose task would have been to keep the livestock off the crops and watch them when they were pasturing outside the town, all the others of this group were described as husbandmen (labradores) or day laborers (jornaleros), eleven of the former plus two

viudas labradoras, and seven of the latter (Table 7.1). The difference between a labrador and a jornalero was not whether he owned land or not, for only six labradores owned land and one jornalero did, but whether or not he owned a team of animals for plowing. All but one of the labradores owned one or more yokes of oxen (the other owned a pair of horses), while jornaleros had none. Since the word labrador comes from the verb labrar, to plow, possession of a yoke of draft animals was evidently the requirement for belonging to this category. The jornaleros probably worked on the land for a daily wage, as their name implies. In addition, some vecinos who were not labradores raised crops as a marginal source of income. These were called senareros, and the catastro says there were thirteen of them, including, presumably, the jornaleros and guardas.^[28]

Of all these people only one could be considered an independent landowner. This was the richest layman in town, Juan Rincón, who had ten oxen and twenty-two other large animals, five arable plots, one meadow, and five houses. He owned half the land belonging to the lay vecinos.^[29] He also had the largest household in the village: a wife, a twenty-year-old son, two daughters, and five children not his own called enternados, three boys and two girls, whether children of relatives or charity cases we have no way of knowing. Seven other vecinos and two children owned land, but each had only one or two arable plots or a small meadow. Except for Juan Rincón, all labradores had to rely on lands they rented to provide their livelihood, and even Rincón's fields produced too small a harvest for his family. Like the other labradores, he got most of his crops from rented plots.

The catastro does not say who rented the fields of La Mata, so that one cannot calculate directly the harvest of each farmer. One can approach the problem indirectly, however, from two sets of data, the number of draft animals each farmer had and the individual payments recorded in the tithe records of the end of the century.

According to the catastro, the eleven labradores and two viudas labradoras owned forty-eight oxen and two horses. At the other extreme from Rincón, with his ten oxen, were three labradores and one labradora with two oxen each and the labrador with two horses. Contempo-

[28] Ibid. Q 35. The register of tithes calls the tithers labradores and senareros, or sometimes all jointly cosecheros (harvesters). According to ibid. Q 15, twenty-eight persons raised sufficient crops to pay first fruits.

[29] La Mata, maest. segl., ff. 63–70.

raries calculated that a yoke of oxen could plow 22.5 fanegas per season.^[30] Since La Mata sowed its fields every other year, the twenty-four yokes of oxen were theoretically sufficient for 1,080 fanegas, a figure very close to the 1,017 fanegas of arable land reported in the catastro. One can thus hypothesize that the individual harvests of the labradores were roughly proportional to the number of oxen they owned. It is possible that they rented teams to each other or to the senareros in return for goods or services, and this would alter our results some, but the general pattern of land tilled was probably closely related to the number of yokes owned. If one assumes that two horses were equivalent to one and a half oxen, and that the senareros each averaged the share of one-half ox, the total net harvest (2,422 EFW, Table 7.8) can be divided into fifty-seven shares, each representing the output of one ox (about 42.5 EFW per ox). These shares can then be distributed among the farmers as shown in Table 7.9.

Labradores with more than one yoke of oxen had to have help to use all their teams regularly. Juan Rincón needed four men besides himself, and the others with more than two oxen needed another eight men (assuming the labradores with five and three oxen combined their odd oxen into one yoke and shared it). Only four, including Rincón, had sons in the household fifteen years of age or over. The two widow labradoras had sons above fifteen who could do their farming. The eight remaining hands would have been those of the seven jornaleros and a resident servant (criado ). The wages of these hired hands would have to come out of the net harvests of the labradores. The catastro credits the jornaleros with income of two and a half reales per day for 120 days,^[31] 17 EFW. If the wages of eight men are prorated among the labradores with more than one yoke according to the number of their oxen, their net income from farming is shown in the last column of Table 7.9.

These results can be checked by using the tithe register of the end of the century. After 1791 it lists each tither by name and states how much he paid of each crop. It thus permits one to determine with considerable accuracy the relative size of the individual harvests at that time. One should use reports of two consecutive years, when all the fields would have been harvested once, averaging over the two years the percent of

[30] The "Capítulos que deben observarse en la repoblación de Salamanca," 15 Mar. 1791, Nov. rec. VII, xxii, 9, says 22 1/2 fanegas "is what a yoke of oxen can plow [in one year]." Cabo Alonso says that in the nineteenth century a yoke of oxen was needed for each 40 fanegas for a two-year cycle in neighboring Monterrubio ("La Armuña," 382).

[31] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 35.

the total harvest of each year accruing to each farmer.^[32] I shall use 1801–2, when crops were plentiful. The first year sixty-seven people paid tithes and sixty-six in the second, but twenty-four of these, many of them women, contributed only small amounts and clearly were not fulltime farmers. On the other hand, two of the richest vecinos did not appear on the tithe roll. One was the fourth tither, the cuarto dezmero, whose tithes went directly to the cathedral. The other was the largest tither, the casa excusada or casa mayor dezmera. In 1571 the pope conceded to the king of Spain the tithes of the most wealthy farmer in each parish. Known as the gracia del excusado, the grant was renewed regu-

[32] The French rural sociologist Henri Mendras holds that ten years, or at least more than one rotation, are needed to determine the profitability of a farm (Vanishing Peasant, 71–72). I use one rotation here, as the only practical time span to deal with individual farmers rather than farms. Later it will become apparent that the harvests of individual farmers relative to each other changed considerably in less than ten years.

larly until the middle of the eighteenth century. During this period the crown gave the administration of the excusado to the church, and it appears to have collected these tithes along with the others. The excusado is not recorded as a separate payment in the catastro returns of the towns I have studied, whereas the cuarto dezmero is identified in that of La Mata. In 1760, however, on obtaining a renewal of the gracia del excusado, Carlos III took over its administration, and the tithes of the casa excusada would no longer have been collected with the rest of the town tithes.^[33] Therefore, in establishing the relative standing of the farmers from the tithe rolls in 1801–2, one should posit a tither whose harvest is larger than any listed on the rolls, the casa excusada, and another after the next two, the cuarto dezmero.

The largest three tithers on record for 1801–2 averaged respectively 7.13, 7.09, and 6.88 percent of the total tithes recorded for the two years.^[34] I shall project that the casa excusada paid about 7.20 percent and the cuarto dezmero 7.00 percent. (The casa excusada may have had a larger harvest, but I can only estimate a figure from the pattern of those below.) The total harvest was therefore 14.2 percent greater than that represented by the recorded tithes, and each individual's share was correspondingly a smaller percentage than the figures just given. Table 7.10 gives the approximate percentage of the various farmers' shares in La Mata at the turn of the century.

In 1801–2 the number of men engaged in agriculture was twice that of 1753, the date of the catastro.^[35] If one assumes that one man harvested in 1753 the share of two men in 1801, one obtains the distribution of the harvest in 1753 shown in Table 7.11, and this may be compared with the distribution calculated from the number of plow teams, as shown in the table.

Despite the differences in detail, there is considerable agreement between the two estimates of the distribution of net income from harvests. Both show three labradores with harvests larger than those of the main body of farmers, and both show about half the farmers cultivating their plots as a marginal occupation. Both agree that the minimum net har-

[33] Nov. rec., II, xii, 3. See Appendix G.

[34] Since the purpose here is to compare the harvests of the different farmers, I have applied the prices of the crops stated in the catastro in order to obtain the total value of the harvest of the town and of each farmer. Prices had risen in the fifty-year interval, and the relative price of the crops may have changed; but since wheat made up about 80 percent of the total harvest, it is not misleading to use the price ratios of 1753 (see Appendix H).

[35] In 1753 twenty-eight people paid first fruits; in 1801, fifty-five did and in 1802, fifty-seven.

vest of a labrador (first through thirteenth farmers) was about seventy fanegas of wheat. Unless the estimate for the casa excusada in 1801–2 is in great error, no single individual stood out then as the rich farmer of the town, and this fact is reflected in the projected table for 1753. It seems more likely that in fact Juan Rincón had a considerably larger harvest than the others in the way that the distribution based on draft animals indicates, although perhaps not this much larger. On the other hand, the projection is surely more accurate in dividing the lower half of the farmers into two distinct groups and is probably more accurate in showing more inequality among the lower labradores (fourth through thirteenth farmers). Despite Rincón's prominence, both tables lead to the conclusion that no individual or small group dominated the village economy. One had to go down more than half the labradores to get to those who harvested less than a third what Rincón did, even if one adopts the higher estimate of his yields.^[36]

In addition to their grain harvests, the farmers profited from raising livestock. They had almost all the oxen, cows, horses, and sheep, about half the pigs, and one-quarter of the donkeys. The estimated income from these was 3,364 reales or 240 EFW (Table 7.7). Against this one should set about two-thirds of the rent of meadows, 62 EFW. The net income, 178 EFW, was 7.4 percent of the total net income from har-

[36] See Appendix I.

vests. If the size of the farmers' herds was proportional to their harvests, then we can predict that the total income of each farmer was about 7 percent more than what he received from farming. The mean of the two estimates of the income from farming plus the estimated income from raising livestock is given in the last column of Table 7.11, which represents the best available estimate of the income of individual farmers.

To translate these incomes into some concept of a standard of living, one must determine the needs of an individual measured in fanegas of wheat. Lacking direct figures, one can approach the answer indirectly from available information on grain consumption in early modern Spanish and other societies. David Ringrose provides information on the grain consumed in Madrid at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1784 a population of about 180,000 needed between 2,000 and 2,250 fanegas of wheat per day, or 4.0 to 4.5 fanegas per person per year. In 1797, a year of high consumption, 200,000 people used 2,570 fanegas a day, 4.7 fanegas per person per year.^[37] Bartolomé Bennassar gives figures for Valladolid in the sixteenth century that work out to 4.2 fanegas per person per year.^[38] Similar estimates for other parts of western Europe vary widely, from 5.0 fanegas of wheat per person in rural England (a contemporary estimate that a modern historian believes should be lowered to 3.7 fanegas)^[39] to as low as 2.3 fanegas in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century.^[40] A comparable figure to the Madrid one comes from information on Paris in the 1780s provided by the contemporary scientist A.-L. Lavoisier, which gives 3.8 fanegas.^[41]

Although bread was the staff of life everywhere, local agricultural production and eating habits would vary the proportion of bread in the diet, and the Spanish rural pattern was probably more like that known

[37] Ringrose, "Madrid y Castilla," 71–72, 94–96, 121.

[38] Bennassar, Valladolid, 71–72. He estimates 234 liters of wheat per capita per year; the fanega was 55.2 liters.

[39] Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth, 63–65, quotes the estimate of Charles Smith, Three Tracts on the Corn Trade and Corn Laws (1766), of 8 bushels of wheat consumed per person per year in the wheat-growing regions of England. The contemporary bushel was 35.24 liters (0.64 fanegas). A modern English scholar, G. E. Fussel, believes this estimate too high and proposes 6 bushels (3.7 fanegas) as more likely (cited in Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth, 63–65).

[40] De Vries, Dutch Rural Economy, 172, says estimates ran from over 200 kg. to under 100 kg. per person per year (from over 4.6 to under 2.3 fanegas). De Vries also provides the estimate of 105 kg. (2.4 fanegas) for the city of Haarlem in 1733–35 (272 n. 161). A fanega of wheat weighs between 43 and 45 kg. (Porres Martín-Cleto, Desamortización en Toledo, 14–15, says 44–45 kg.; Cabo Alonso, "La Armuña" 112–13, says 43 kg.)

[41] Philippe, "Opération pilote," 60–67: 100,940 metric tons of bread per year for six hundred thousand people.

for Madrid and Valladolid, that is, 4.5 fanegas of wheat per capita per year, than the lower consumption reported for northern Europe. This is also the per capita minimum need of a rural family of four in the eighteenth century, according to the geographer Angel Cabo Alonso.^[42] One might imagine, however, that a rural community, doing harder work than an urban population and with food normally more available, would consume more per capita than people in the city. An allowance established by the Mesta for rations for able-bodied rural laborers was 1 fanega of wheat per month.^[43] In southern France a similar allowance for rural labor was about 10 fanegas per year.^[44] Adult males consumed more per head than a population that included women and children; nevertheless the 12 fanegas per year of the Mesta would have been generous. Let us propose that 6 fanegas of grain (3.3 hectoliters or 270 kilograms) per year, mostly wheat, was an adequate per capita allowance of grain for a population of all ages and both sexes for rural Spain in the eighteenth century.

Grain or bread, while the largest item in the individual budget, would be only part. Other items of food that the vecinos of La Mata produced—pulses and meat—have been counted in calculating their net income. Part of their harvests went to feed their livestock. In addition, however self-sufficient the village was, the peasants needed wine, oil, salt, wood for fuel, probably some additional preserved meat and maybe salt fish, items of clothing, occasionally tools and building supplies; some farmers needed to pay for the transport of their harvest to market or to their landlord's granary. There also had to be what the social anthropologists call a family ceremonial fund, savings to pay the expenses of the formalities and celebrations that marked rites of passage as well as the regular expenditures for religious ceremonies and festivals. One can estimate that the grain consumption for food represented about half the needs of a family. For a normal subsistence, then, a rural community required roughly the equivalent in income of 12 fanegas of wheat per person per year. Although only an estimate, the figure of 12 EFW can serve as a standard measure of adequate individual income, a benchmark against which to compare the conditions in our towns as we proceed. Individual families could, however, do with less, perhaps little

[42] Cabo Alonso, "Antecedentes históricos," 81–82. Cabo speaks of 800 kg. per year as the consumption of a family of four members.

[43] Le Flem, "Cuentas de la Mesta," 64. The exact amount is 1 fanega and 1 cuartillo (1/48 fanega) per person per month.

[44] Le Roy Ladurie, Paysans de Languedoc, 98: 5.6 hectoliters per capita for a travailleur de force.

more than half as much, if they went without sufficient bread, meat, clothing, fuel, and the amenities of life. And if the proportion of infants to adults in a family was high, its per capita need was also less.

From the lists of families in the catastro, one can know the average size of households in La Mata. Of labradores' households where both parents were alive, this was 5.1, of jornaleros', 3.6. The labradores not only had more children (2.6 per family compared to 1.6) but Juan Rincón's five enternados added to their average. At 12 EFW per capita, household needs averaged about 60 EFW for labradores and 43 EFW for jornaleros. The two viudas labradoras had an average household size of 4 and needed 48 EFW each. According to Table 7.11 the top thirteen farmers whose net annual income ranged down to 75 EFW had more than enough for their family needs. These would have been all eleven labradores and the two viudas labradoras. The five labradores whose net income was 190 EFW or more were prosperous, able to hire help, live at ease, and save as well—buying bedclothes, copper and brass cooking utensils, embroidered woolen garments, and amassing coins and jewelry. The large filigreed gold and silver buttons and necklaces of the Salamanca charro are famous and in a pinch would be readily exchanged for money by a cambiador at a rural fair.^[45] The next four labradores, with net incomes of 105 to 140 EFW, if not wealthy, were comfortably off, and the remaining four, at 75 to 85 EFW, easily had enough for their needs. The remaining fifteen farmers were in the 20 to 30 EFW range, not enough by itself for the average family; they either were engaged in other activities as well—as senareros whose main activity was not agriculture or as jornaleros who also had wages—or were incomplete families. If the jornaleros did earn the 17 EFW with which the catastro credits them, they had enough for their households, between 3 and 4 in size., to live adequately. On the whole Ceres was kind, even generous, to the vecinos of La Mata who tilled the fields.

5

Many vecinos were not farmers, however. The district of La Armuña was one of the few in Castile that had a sizable number of muleteers, or arrieros, and La Mata, with twenty-three, had the highest proportion of arrieros among its vecinos of any town in La Armuña. Some specialized

[45] On the rural custom of putting savings into gold and silver jewelry and exchanging it for cash at rural fairs, see Fernández de Pinedo, "Actitudes del campesino," 377–78.

in the transport of local grain to nearby markets, Salamanca, Zamora, and other provincial centers,^[46] while others traveled regularly on a northern route to Vitoria and Bilbao, taking wheat and bringing salt and salt cod on the return journey.^[47] Among them they owned 18 mules and 152 donkeys, most of which they used in their trade.^[48] The makers of the catastro estimated that each arriero worked two hundred days per year and earned 1 real per day with each donkey and 2 with each mule.^[49] At this rate their total gross annual income would have been 37,600 reales, but the figure arrived at by the makers of the catastro was 33,200 reales (2,370 EFW), after allowing for animals declared not in service.^[50]

Against this income, the arrieros had to charge the expenses of feeding their animals and replacing those that died. They probably occupied the pastures available to the vecinos not being used by the farmers. This represented a cost of 31 EFW. Since the animals were on the road over half the year, they also had to pay for pastures where they went.^[51] These may have cost them another 75 EFW. In addition, they had to supply fodder, which they would buy since they had few crops of their own. They may have consumed a quarter of the fodder grown locally and bought an equal amount on their journeys. Barley and algarrobas were the local crops for feeding livestock; a quarter of the local production was 121 EFW (Table 7.4), so that the arrieros spent about 240 EFW for fodder. The total cost of feeding their animals was then some 345 EFW.

Owning three-quarters of the donkeys in the town, the arrieros raised those they needed to replace the ones that died, but they would have to buy a couple of mules a year from the farmers for about 550 reales.^[52] Their net gain on breeding donkeys was about twelve animals (because they used their animals for traffic, they would not have bred as many young as was possible), or 240 reales.^[53] Some arrieros, the catastro tells us, also traded in mules, and together they had about 800 reales a year income from this activity. Their net balance from raising and dealing in livestock was about 500 reales, or about 35 EFW.

[46] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 32.

[47] Cabo Alonso, "La Armuña," 126–27. For salt, see Klein, Mesta, 23.

[48] La Mata, maest. segl., shows this many owned by arrieros. La Mata, resp. gen. Q 32, says 136 donkeys and 8 mules used for transport.

[49] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 32.

[50] AHN, Hac., libro 7476, letra F, f. 108.

[51] The oxen of the Cabaña Real de Carreteros (Royal Association of Carters) had the privilege of grazing free on pastures along highways, but this did not extend to muleteers (Ringrose, Transportation, 104).

[52] A young male mule was worth 200 reales, a young female mule 350 reales (La Mata, resp. gen. Q 14).

[53] See Appendix K.

Adding income from traffic and livestock and subtracting the cost of feed, the balance of the arrieros was 2,060 EFW. They had their costs of doing business, but these can be considered part of their cost of living, like tools in the case of the farmers.

The number of animals each arriero owned was a measure of his relative income, with one mule bringing in the equivalent of two donkeys. The arriero with the most animals owned two mules and eleven donkeys (but he declared only ten donkeys in use), the man with the fewest had four donkeys (but said he worked with only three). Calculating an annual income equivalent to 12.5 EFW for each donkey and 25 EFW for each mule declared in service, one obtains the net income of the individual arrieros shown in Table 7.12, between 37.5 and 175 EFW per household.

The average size of the families of the arrieros was 3.5 virtually the same as those of the jornaleros. Forty-two EFW would supply each family adequately. All but one of the arrieros earned at least this much, and this man did not declare one of his donkeys in service and thus may have understated his income. Although as a group they were not so well-off as the labradores, the top third could live comfortably and have money to save.

Fewer men were engaged in services and crafts. The most respectable was the "surgeon-bloodletter," whose annual income was seven hun-

dred reales (50 EFW).^[54] Less distinguished but better off was the tavernkeeper, who also acted as farrier. In the role of tavernero he made three hundred reales from the sale of wine and one hundred reales from groceries, while as herrador he was judged to earn three reales a day, say six hundred a year.^[55] His income was 65 EFW. There was also a schoolmaster, but the catastro fails to record his income. The two artisans were a linen weaver, assigned three reales a day for 100 days work per year, and a shoemaker, at two reales a day for 120 days.^[56] These convert to only 21 and 17 EFW, not enough to live on (they had three and four members in their families, respectively), so that these two men must have been among the senareros, who farmed part-time. The linen weaver acted as town record keeper (fiel de fechos) and received eighty reales for the job.^[57] Crafts were obviously a marginal occupation in La Mata. Indeed one labrador was also a tailor, but no income is recorded from this activity;^[58] while one man, evidently the son of an arriero, acted as a blacksmith (herrero ). He was paid in wheat for shoeing the oxen—twenty-two celemines (1 5/6 fanegas) for each ox—and earned 45 EFW this way. The cost of renting the smithy from the town council, 6 EFW, and of buying coal, 19 fanegas paid in kind, rendered his net income 20 EFW, a marginal sum.^[59]

Farming and transport were the major activities of the town, and those engaged in them were the better-off members of the community. Except for one person, that is. Among the wealthiest men in the town was the priest, don Juan Matute. Part of his wealth was personal, patrimonial as it was called; for he owned six arable plots and a house and barn, more than Juan Rincón, the richest layman. In addition he received the income from his benefice. Fifty-five plots that measured 117 fanegas belonged to it. Most probably don Juan did not farm himself but collected the rent from both his own fields and those of the benefice, at an average rent of 0.8 fanega of wheat per fanega of land a total of 102 fanegas of wheat.^[60] The property of the benefice was exempt from tithes, so that the horros went to him, 36 fanegas (Table 7.3). Finally, as beneficiado he received one-third of the partible tithes and two-thirds of

[54] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 32.

[55] Ibid. QQ 29, 33; AHN, Hac., libro 7476, letra F, f. 108.

[56] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 33, and AHN, Hac., libro 7476, letra F, f. 108.

[57] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 32, and AHN, Hac., libro 7476, letra F, f. 108.

[58] La Mata, maest. segl., f. 61r.

[59] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 33, and libro personal de legos. The name recorded is Felipe Pablos; no vecino has this name. Francisco Pablos was an arriero; we do not have the first name of the twenty-four-year-old son of Geróonimo Pablos, the poorest arriero.

[60] La Mata, maest. ecles., ff. 8–41.

the first fruits,^[61] and these amounted to 131 and 18 EFW (Table 7.3). His gross income was then 287 EFW. Out of this he had to pay one-third of the expenses of collecting and storing the tithes, including the salary of the cillero (tithe collector)—in 1800 these were 300 reales—rent of the granary, and incidental expenses including refreshments (refrescos ) distributed on the day the tithes were paid. The benefice's share of these expenses in 1800 was 142 reales.^[62] At current prices this was about 3.3 EFW,^[63] but probably salaries and rents had risen more slowly than prices, so that the cost was perhaps 6 EFW in 1753. Don Juan's net income was then about 280 EFW, at the level of the top labradores, but he most likely had additional undeclared income in the form of compensation for conducting individual services—baptisms, weddings, burials—that one cannot calculate. He lived with a boy servant aged sixteen and a girl servant and a nine-year-old nephew, whom he was probably rearing to become a priest, as was a common obligation of Spanish rural curates in the eighteenth century.^[64] No doubt he was expected to perform acts of charity, but the regular expenses of the church were cared for by the fabric and. various endowments. His economic standing supplemented his religious curacy to make him the leading figure in the town, a position symbolized by the appellation "don," to which he alone of the villagers was entitled.

This occupation-by-occupation survey shows the relative position of the different vecinos and points up those who were most wealthy. It can be tabulated in schematic form in a "socioeconomic pyramid" (Table 7.13 and Figure 7.3). Its calculation is based, however, only on income that can be identified in the catastro and tithe rolls. Within the town many payments were made and goods exchanged of which there is no record. Someone, the catastro does not say who, earned three fanegas of wheat and forty-four reales as sacristan;^[65] someone else was cillero (keeper of the tithes) and earned perhaps 15 EFW for his services. Poorer vecinos performed services for the richer ones, children did tasks for their neighbors, the town council paid men to perform the public work of the community, and gifts changed hands. The church gave charity and spent money that ended in the pockets of vecinos. Widows were not

[61] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 15.

[62] Archivo Parroquial, La Mata, tazmía (1800).

[63] In 1800 the average price of a fanega of wheat in Salamanca was 43 reales, based on thirty-six weekly returns in the Correo mercantil.

[64] La Mata, personal de eclesiásticos. On rural priests rearing their nephews, see Richard Herr, "Comentario," 276.

[65] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 25.

Figure 7.3.
La Mata, Socioeconomic Pyramid, 1753
Note: This is a bar graph based on Table 7.13, with an indication
of dispersion. It is not a set of frequency distributions.

destitute, although no income can be assigned them. To complete the economic picture of the town and judge its overall well-being, one may look at it as a single unit rather than as a collection of discrete households and consider it in relation to the outside world.

6

The income of the town as a separate economic unit came from its agricultural production and the value added to goods and services it sold

outside. The net harvest after deduction for seed was 3,606 EFW, the gross income from livestock 353 EFW (Table 7.8). The arrieros brought in most of the income from outside. While they transported some of the local harvests and brought in goods, most of their services were rendered to others. It seems reasonable to attribute 75 percent of their gross income from haulage (2,370 EFW) to outside sources: 1,780 EFW. If three-quarters of their income from trading mules also came from outside, this was another 43 EFW. It is possible that the linen weaver and the shoemaker sold some goods outside the town, but their incomes were so small that they hardly added to the total.

Against these incomes one must charge the payments made outside the town. These included rent on the fields owned by nonresidents, on pastures in adjoining despoblados, and on pastures used by the arrieros while on the road, as well as the cost of the fodder they bought while traveling, all of which have already been calculated. It was likely that vecinos of La Mata and its church owned as much land in neighboring towns as vecinos and churches of those villages owned in La Mata, so that rent received from nearby farmers would offset the rent paid for land in neighboring towns (about 23 EFW). This amount can be subtracted from the rent paid outsiders (575 EFW; Table 7.8), while none of the rent paid to local churches will be charged against the town.

A good proportion of the payments to the church also left the town. Two-ninths of the partible tithes of Castile had been granted to the king by the pope in the thirteenth century. Known as the tercias reales, the grant was extended to all Spain and made permanent in 1487.^[66] In La Mata and other places around Salamanca, these now went to the University of Salamanca by royal cession (87 EFW, Table 7.3). In addition another third of the partible tithes (131 EFW) belonged to the prestamo, a form of ecclesiastical perpetual right, whose current holder was a member of the faculty (maestre de escuela ) of the university.^[67] These beneficiaries had to pay their share of the cost of collection and storage of the tithes, and this expense remained in the town economy. The holder of the prestamo was also entitled to one-third of the first fruits (9 EFW), while, as described earlier, various institutions received horros in lieu of tithes on the crops of their fields, the tithes of the cuarto dezmero went directly to the cathedral, and the Voto de Santiago to the archbishop of Santiago de Compostela through his local agent. After the local benefice took its third of the partible tithes, the local fabric received the remain-

[66] Desdevises, L'Espagne 2 : 369.

[67] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 15.

ing ninth.^[68] Besides the tithes of the villagers of La Mata, its church also received those of the neighboring despoblado of Narros, which was an anexo of the parish. These totaled 97 EFW^[69] and had the same destination as the partible of La Mata: five-ninths left the town. A good part of the ninth paid the fabric as well as the rent of the fields belonging to the parish church (exclusive of those of the benefice) must have been spent outside the community for supplies for the church and religious services, perhaps 25 percent (28 EFW).

Finally the village as a civil unit met specific annual impositions. Fifteen fanegas of wheat went to the city of Salamanca as La Mata's obligation under a foro perpetuo, a form of feudal dues.^[70] The village also paid one fanega of wheat to the convent of Calced Trinitarians of Salamanca, "they do not know for what reason."^[71] Then there were royal taxes, thirty reales (2 EFW) for the servicio ordinario y extraordinario y su quince al millar (a direct levy consented to by the Cortes of Castile under the Habsburg kings, for which most towns had since compounded at a fixed annual payment [encabezamiento]) and five hundred reales (36 EFW) for sisas, an excise tax on certain consumer goods that had also been compounded for and that the tavernkeeper now paid for the town.^[72] The payments made by the town council could be met by the rent on its buildings and fields.

From this information one can strike a balance for the net annual income of the community of La Mata, as done in Table 7.14. The figure is 4,683 EFW.

To convert the net town income into a per capita income, one must determine the population of La Mata at the time of the catastro. The libros personales list the members of each family, with the ages of the males. One can estimate the ages of the females by their marital status and the age of their fathers, brothers, husbands, or sons. In this fashion one finds a total population of 225 divided into age groups as shown in Table 7.15 and Figure 7.4.

To check the accuracy of this table, one can compare it to the census of 1786, using both the return of La Mata and of the medium sized towns of the Armuña region, shown in Table 7.16. The demographic structures in 1786 suggest that the catastro failed to record a number of young females and perhaps also some males under seven. To correct

[68] Ibid.

[69] AHPS, Catastro, Narros de Valdunciel, libro 2559, resp. gen. Q 16.

[70] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 23.

[71] Ibid. Q 26.

[72] Ibid. Q 29.

Table 7.15. Population of La Mata, 1753 Males Females Agesa Number b Percent Agesc Number Percent 0–6 16 7.1       7–15 30 13.3 50 22.2 16–24 24 10.7     25–39 25 11.1       40–49 13 5.8 57 25.3 50 and over 10 4.4     Total 118 52.4   107 47.5 SOURCE . La Mata, personal de legos and de eclesiásticos. NOTE . An apparent underregistration of females suggests a correct total population of 243 to 260. See text. a The age groups used in the census of 1786 are given here for ease of comparison. b Males whose ages are not given are assigned as follows: three sons are placed in group 0–6; the priest is placed in group 50 and over; ten other males are placed in the most likely group. c An attempt to place the females in more specific age groups gives rise to so many doubtful cases that the resulting figures are open to excessive error.

Figure 7.4.
La Mata, Population Structure, 1753
Note: Since there is no limit to the top age groups, a span
of seventeen years for males is used for convenience only.

these omissions, I shall consider the catastro complete for males over sixteen and females over twenty-five. In the table for Armuña in 1786, these groups represent 53.1 percent of the population. In the catastro of La Mata, these groups total 129 persons; and if these are 53.1 percent of the total, the total is 243, or 18 more than the catastro recorded. The same operation using the 1786 structure of La Mata yields a figure of 260 for the 1753 population. It appears probable that the catastro did underenumerate young people, and we can use 243 as a minimum population in 1753 and 260 as a maximum.

Dividing the net town income from Table 7.14 (4,683 EFW) by these estimates, one obtains a per capita income of between 18.0 and 19.3 EFW per year. This was half again more than the 12 EFW per capita that I have estimated provided an adequate subsistence for the rural Spanish population.

In addition, the censuses reveal an indirect source of income that the catastro could not record. A population beehive of the town in 1786 shows a remarkable shortage of females between seven and fifteen (Fig-

Figure 7.5.
La Mata, Population Structure, 1786
NOTE : Since there is no limit to the top age group, a
span of seventeen years is used for convenience only.

ure 7.5).^[73] There were forty boys and only sixteen girls in this age group. Even allowing for underenumeration, one can be reasonably sure that there was a shortage of unmarried girls in 1786, and this phenomenon was probably already present in 1753. In all likelihood their absence is evidence of a practice of sending girls to serve in the city, with the intention of returning to marry when they reached the proper age.^[74] Meanwhile they represented fewer mouths to feed, and their labor, unlike that of their brothers, was not needed in the fields or on the road.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, La Mata was a prosperous town of some sixty families. All thirteen labradores, all but one of the twenty-four arrieros, and the priest, altogether two-thirds of the households, had incomes that allowed them to live with ease. Of these at least

[73] For the data of the 1786 census of La Mata, see Appendix N, Table N.6.

[74] See Scott and Tilly, "Women's Work," for an analysis of this widespread practice in the nineteenth century.

nine labradores, eight arrieros, and the priest earned twice or more what their families needed for an adequate standard of living. The tavernkeeper and surgeon-bloodletter turned a fair penny, and only the large size of their households kept their per capita income from being among the higher levels. Most of the other families, headed by artisans, jornaleros, herders, and widows, no doubt supplemented their direct income by tilling a small plot as a senarero or doing odd jobs for others or for the church or the town council. The town profited from a dual economy based on agriculture and muleteering. The income of the arrieros represented about 6.5 EFW per capita. Had these men been engaged in agriculture, even if in so doing they had increased the harvests through more intensive cultivation, the per capita income would have declined to close to the adequate mean. Their activity made possible the flourishing economy of the town in the face of the small extent of land per vecino.

This little community would have warmed the hearts of the Madrid reformers. It is true that its vecinos did not live on separate, enclosed homesteads or own their own land as the reformers propounded, but they had fairly stable, assured leases, which allowed them to make a comfortable living and produce a healthy excess for the market. They could keep six fanegas of wheat for each person in the community and all the other grains and pulses from the harvest and still leave two thousand fanegas of wheat to export, as rent, as tithes, or for their own account. Fewer than four hundred such communities, one hundred thousand people in all, could supply all the wheat Madrid needed. Campomanes recommended that rural communities introduce domestic manufactures that would use local raw materials and give remunerative occupations to the women and children.^[75] Although we do not know what the women and children did in their homes, La Mata had no active artisan sector, but the arrieros did provide a mixed economy and were responsible for the substantial margin of well-being of the community as a whole. If all arid Spain had been like La Mata, agricultural reform would never have become the dominant domestic issue of the last decades of its old regime.

For their well-being, the people of La Mata paid with the timeless labor of rural folk. The labradores, their jornaleros, and their sons hitched their oxen to their plows and worked their tiny scattered plots in the cold winds of the winter and early spring; later they bowed under the parching July sun to harvest the ripe wheat with their sickles and

[75] Rodríguez de Campomanes, Industria popular.

rode their heavy threshing boards behind their oxen round and round the town threshing floor, the eras, to separate the grain from the chaff—a task in which wives and children could join—loaded their carts or animals in August with the wheat they owed their landlords in Salamanca and in the fall cared for their newborn lambs and slaughtered their pigs. The arrieros heaved the bags of grain on their mules and donkeys after the harvest, heading for the main regional markets or setting out on the long journey north to Burgos and Bilbao, walking beside their beasts in all kinds of weather, unloading in the evening and loading again in the morning the goods that provided their livelihood. They returned in time for Christmas but set out again as soon as the roads were passable, getting home once more for the June fairs. Following the local custom, the arrieros of La Mata traveled together for security and company. They helped each other and needed few additional hands, and their sons stayed to work for other vecinos until they were ready to set up in their fathers' trade. Then they would join the group to learn the routes and the best pastures and watering holes.^[76] Meanwhile the wives kept the hearths alive, prepared the thick bread soup of breakfast and supper, washed and mended the clothes, and in the fall made the farinato sausages of pork and crumbs.^[77] The daughters of the poorer families spent their adolescence serving in the city, and the widowed grandmothers took care of the children too young to work.

Religious holidays solemnized the revolution of the seasons that marked the life of La Mata. The town council's budget provided 110 reales for a preacher in Lent, possibly a friar from Salamanca, and another 60 reales for the parish curate to say extraordinary masses on other occasions.^[78] The parish had four confraternities that supported special services out of the income provided by the lands they owned. They were dedicated to Corpus Christi (ten weeks after Easter), Saint Michael (29 September), Our Lady of the Rosary (7 October), and All Souls (2 November).^[79] These were all occasions for pageantry, but they could not compare with the town fair of 26 June, the feast of San Pelayo, patron of the parish.^[80] Then the grain fields were almost ripe, and

[76] On the lives of the arrieros, Cabo Alonso, "La Armuña," 127–29. The author's source is evidently the community memory, for he is a native of La Mata.

[77] On the soup and farinato sausages, Cabo Alonso, "Antecedentes históricos," 81–82.

[78] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 25.

[79] Cofradías del Santísimo, de San Miguel, de Nuestra Señora del Rosario, and de Animas, La Mata, maest. ecles., ff. 64–77.

[80] The parish was named San Pelayo Magno, according to the census return of 1786.

the farmers knew if the harvest would be plentiful. The muleteers had returned from their spring trip with wares to hawk—iron tools and copper and brass pots and pans from Basque forges, perhaps woolens from northern Europe. Vecinos of nearby towns brought livestock to trade. Solemn mass and the inevitable procession sanctified the occasion, a symbiosis of religion, business, and festivity.^[81] Different but equally central to the year's course was the day in August when the vecinos who harvested grain paid their tithes "to God our Lord," as the catastro says, and the earthly vicars who received them for Him provided refreshments for the parishioners.^[82] To judge from the tithe rolls of the end of the century, the farmers followed an accepted custom in delivering their holy dues. The larger tithers held back, letting those with smaller harvests settle their accounts with the cillero. As the day advanced one or two labradores would come forward among the senareros. Then as the procedure neared the end, the wealthy farmers produced their large contributions, until all had paid except a few who farmed on the side and now closed the accounts with their pittances. On these occasions Francisco Rodríguez, the tavernkeeper, must have dispersed a good share of the 800 reales' worth of wine he imported each year.^[83] Religion dominated the public life of the community, and the figure who embodied religion for the people was don Juan Matute, the priest. More than anyone else, he was the hinge figure of the community, their procurator before the outside world, earthly as well as heavenly. The vecinos were conscious of course of the economic differences arising from their varied occupations and incomes—the labradores and arrieros must have had their little rivalries, and they preferred to marry their children to children of their fellows—but except for don Juan, they were socially homogeneous, a close community ruled by tradition and the demands of the seasons.

7

Perhaps the condition of La Mata was too favorable to endure. Within a generation its well-being was shaken, victim of the fecundity of its vecinos and its attraction for outsiders. The evidence for its demographic development comes from the five known censuses of La Mata made be-

[81] Cabo Alonso, "La Armuña," 127.

[82] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 15. This expense is listed in the tithe records (1800) and passim.

[83] La Mata, resp. gen. Q 29.

fore the nineteenth century. All but the last one, of 1786, count only the vecinos, but we can also use our estimate of the total population in 1753. Since the census of 1786 includes the population of the neighboring despoblado of Narros de Valdunciel with that of La Mata, one does well to look at the two places together.

The censuses tell a tale of demographic decline and recovery (Table 7.17). In the sixteenth century Narros was a going village of perhaps fifty people. It virtually disappeared in the next century. The vecindario of 1712 records only one vecino, and there was still only one at the time of the catastro, the warden of the fields (guarda de panes ), who lived with his wife and one son.^[84] La Mata was a bigger community and declined as well in size, although the figure of fifteen vecinos in 1712 is assuredly too low. An analysis of that vecindario indicates that it underenumerated the population throughout the province. In 1729 twenty-two farmers paid tithes, and the number of vecinos would have been greater.^[85] The catastro count of vecinòs in 1753 and the census of total population in 1786 are reasonably trustworthy. The town grew throughout the century. In the thirty-three years between 1753 and 1786, the total population and the number of vecinos of the two towns grew about 39 percent.

The marriage pattern reveals the main cause for this growth. In 1753 only one man over twenty-four besides the priest was single, a criado (servant) aged thirty. Yet only one of the twenty males between sixteen and twenty-four was married, an arriero aged twenty. In 1786 two men over twenty-four besides the priest were single, but twenty-one of the forty-four males between sixteen and twenty-four were married.^[86] The average age at marriage for men had declined from about twenty-five to between twenty and twenty-one. One suspects that the decision to marry younger was an effect of the favorable economic situation at midcentury, and it meant that the town in 1786 could be expected to have a higher birthrate than a generation earlier. Because no one owned all the plots he tilled and the calling of muleteer was not closed, there were no economic "niches" that had to become empty before one could marry.

But the prosperity of the town did more than encourage early marriage; it drew outsiders to the town like a magnet. Migration is hard to document historically, but here we are helped by the various listings of the inhabitants. The tithe rolls of the end of the century record the

[84] AHPS, Catastro, Narros de Valdunciel.

[85] Cabo Alonso, "La Armuña," 114.

[86] See Appendix N, Table N. 6, for the census returns of 1786.

names of all vecinos who raised crops. Of fifty-two tithers in 1799, seventeen (one-third) had surnames (apellidos ) that did not figure among those of the vecinos of 1753. Nine of them paid small amounts and were senareros, perhaps farm laborers recently come in search of work and settled in the community. But six were substantial labradores, in the top quarter of the tithe roll. These figures do not mean that a third of the population had come in from elsewhere. Antonio, Bernardo, and Joseph Prior, respectively the sixth, tenth, and eleventh labradores, could all be sons of a worker who arrived in the 1760s and married well. Yet the appearance of eleven different surnames in a couple of generations is clear evidence of a generous infusion of new blood into the community.

The number of men engaged in the major economic sectors, agriculture and transportation, rose faster than the population as a whole, by 120 and 70 percent respectively (Table 7.18). On the other hand, the census of 1786 lists no artisans, where there had been two in 1753. Both of them, as we saw, had miserable incomes and had to farm part-time. Was someone keeping the crafts alive in 1786, but listed as a jornalero because he worked in the fields too? Or were the crafts abandoned as unproductive? The answer is probably yes to both questions. The scene

with which this book begins shows a linen weaver present in 1800. On the other hand, when we study the next town, Villaverde, we shall see that there, too, the number of artisans was declining. At the end of the century La Mata was becoming divided more than ever into two distinct economies.

With so many more people farming, one would expect their more labor-intensive economy to result in greater income from the land, even if the marginal product of labor declined. Yet they do not appear to have achieved this growth. One can follow the evolution of the harvests in the tithe records. Table 7.19 compares the tithes collected over three periods centering on 1750, 1772, and 1798. It reveals a clear trend toward a smaller proportion of the harvest in grains and a greater one in pulses. Rye, barley, and oats, never very important, virtually disappeared, and wheat, the crop for which La Armuña is famous, declined from 81 to 72 percent of the value of the harvest. Garbanzos rose from 4 to 21 percent of the harvest, and the farmers experimented with vetch (arvejas; the vecinos called them both hervejas and alberjas ), a fodder crop, and peas. They were evidently trying to rotate their crops, using fast-growing pulses like garbanzos, peas, and vetch, which could be planted in January, permitting a half year of fallow after the previous wheat harvest.^[87] The makers of the catastro complained bitterly over the practice of planting garbanzos, algarrobas, and barley in what should have been the year of rest, accusing the practice of reducing the wheat harvest.^[88] The farmers, on the other hand, with increasing labor available, may have been responding rationally to the market. If one evaluates the harvest at the end of the century in EFW using the prices of midcentury, the total value of the yield did not rise. On the other hand, if garbanzos were a superior good and rising faster in price than wheat, as some evidence suggests, then the switch to them brought a net gain (Appendix H). Also, with agricultural prices rising somewhat more than nonagricultural prices after 1760 (Table 7.20), the terms of trade were moving in favor of the rural sector, making the harvest more valuable against outside purchases. The gain would not have been great, however, and it will not vitiate my analysis to assume a harvest of constant value.

The peasants did not try a rotation different from the año y vez, although it has been argued that a triennial rotation was possible in this region, with a year of spring grains or legumes, part of which would

[87] See Cabo Alonso, "La Armuña," 368–69.

[88] La Mata, resp. gen. QQ 4, 11.

serve as fodder, inserted between the winter wheat and the fallow year. The rotation was not unknown, but the peasants were under pressure to produce wheat, both to meet the terms of their leases and because it was more marketable than barley or rye. Although a three-year rotation was more productive, it would reduce wheat production by 33 percent, a choice they could not afford.^[89]

By 1800 the number of farmers had doubled since midcentury. They had to compete for leases, and the effect was that the number of plots per farmer was halved, with a corresponding decline of income per head. Moreover, the farmers had to struggle to keep the rents down. The 1770s saw a series of good harvests (see Table 7.19), and landlords used the occasion to increase the rents, which remained at the new level until the end of the century.^[90]

The proceeds from farming could not keep abreast of the growth in population. Other solutions had to be found, and they involved a search for income from outside the town. In the 1780s opportunity came from the despoblado of Narros de Valdunciel, bordering on La Mata to the northwest. Eighty-five percent of its area belonged to the monastery Nuestra Señora del Jesús of the Sisters of Saint Bernard, whom we have already met as one of the owners of land in La Mata.^[91] The rest belonged in small lots to other institutions in Salamanca and to vecinos and churches of nearby towns. Although its area was one and a half times that of La Mata, we have seen that in 1753 its sole permanent inhabitants were the warden of the fields and his small family. The monastery rented its entire share of Narros to eight vecinos of Carbajosa de Armuña, which bordered it on the opposite side from La Mata. The lease called for 300 fanegas of wheat, 75 of barley, 2 7/12 of garbanzos, and a cart of straw annually for the arable, and 825 reales for the grazing rights.^[92] By 1769 the town council of La Mata was subleasing onequarter of Narros from its tenants, paying 100 fanegas of wheat.^[93] In 1777 the town council of Carbajosa took over the lease, but in 1780 La Mata joined it in the contract. By now the rent had risen to 450 fanegas of wheat, 100 of barley, 3 of garbanzos, eleven chickens, a cart of straw, and 2,000 reales, an increase of about 50 percent since the catastro, no doubt

[89] García Fernández, "Champs ouverts," 699–701.

[90] See above, Chapter 7, section 2.

[91] AHPS, Catastro, Narros de Valdunciel. The monastery owned 1,344 fanegas out of a total of 1,584. Technically Narros was an alquería, or grange, but the difference from a despoblado was not very clear.

[92] AHN, Clero, libro 10668, f. 113.

[93] Archivo Parroquial, La Mata, tazmía, f. 1.

reflecting an increase in harvests and herds. Two keepers and their families now lived on the estate. How the town councils exploited their lease is not known; they probably sublet the contract to several of their labradores. Here was one way for La Mata's farmers to fight their declining income: by breaking new ground in the despoblados around them.

The joint lease lasted nine years. In the 1780s the royal government pushed the colonization of the despoblados of Salamanca province, following its settlement policy in Andalusia and Extremadura.^[94] With royal urging, the nuns agreed to repopulate Narros, and they turned to La Mata and Carbajosa for colonists. In 1789 twelve vecinos of La Mata and three of Carbajosa moved with their families, animals, and tools to the depopulated village. In a low hollow, hardly more than a kilometer from La Mata but hidden by a slight knoll, where only the houses of the wardens had stood, nineteen more were being built for the "new settlers of Narros." An agreement had been reached the previous fall in time for the settlers to benefit from the winter pasture, and a notarized contract confirmed it in April 1789. The fifteen farmers leased the lugar of Narros on the same terms as the contract of 1780, with the substitution of a 90-to-100-pound heifer for the eleven chickens, and two reales for each house as a permanent quitrent (foro perpetuo).^[95]

To undertake such a venture, the settlers had to be enterprising, respectable men. Among them was Antonio González, alcalde of La Mata in 1786.^[96] Most of them were heads of families in the prime of life: in 1798 nine of the twelve emigrants from La Mata still appeared on the tithe rolls, but by 1808 only four were alive.^[97] Under their care, the community took root and prospered. They raised sheep as well as grain and cattle; in 1802 they paid the nuns forty sheep in lieu of the two thousand reales for the pastures. By 1826 Narros had sixteen vecinos and a population of sixty,^[98] and it is still there today.

In this way La Mata disposed of one-seventh of its vecinos and over a quarter of the men engaged in agriculture, easing the economic threat to its farming population. Muleteering offered another source of additional outside income. The number of arrieros rose 70 percent between 1753 and 1786 (Table 7.18). Available evidence indicates that in the second half of the century the price of muleteers' haulage rose at about the

[94] See Chapter 18, section 4.

[95] AHN, Clero, libro 10668, f. 121v.

[96] He is identified in the census return.

[97] The tazmía of La Mata includes the tithe returns of Narros, its anexo.

[98] Table 7.17.

same rate as the general price level.^[99] If each of the arrieros of La Mata continued to operate with as many animals as before—animals, unlike fields, could be multiplied—their average real per capita income remained the same, with a resulting gain for the community as a whole. I assumed that 75 percent of their gross income in 1753 came from outside the town. Since local harvests had not increased, almost all their new business would have been external. In 1753 their net income from haulage was 2,070 EFW. Now, the additional arrieros would have increased this amount about 70 percent, or 1,450 EFW, of which perhaps 1,300 EFW (90 percent) was additional income for the town from outside. This amount was 28 percent of the net town income of midcentury (Table 7.14), and it went far toward balancing the population growth of 39 percent over this period. The per capita income was still 17.5 EFW in 1786, and the emigration of twelve vecinos or about forty-five people three years later meant that it rose to almost 20 EFW.

Thus La Mata solved the demographic threat to its economic standing. In 1790 the vecinos felt wealthy enough to construct the handsome espadaña that decorates the parish church, a sculptured prolongation upward of the facade that serves as a belfry, rivaling in elegance the square church towers of their neighbors. But a change had taken place in the social structure. Whereas before the labradores had been the dominant class in the town economically, now the arrieros were their match, if not their superiors.

8

Such was the situation in La Mata when the king decreed the disentail of the properties of charitable and other religious endowments in September 1798. Since religious institutions owned 78 percent of the land in the town, a good half of this subject to sale, his decree opened the possibility for a radical change in the structure of local property and indirectly of the society.

Sales began in La Mata at the end of 1799. The first consisted of seven arable plots in the town and three in neighboring San Cristobal de la Cuesta that belonged to a memoria in a parish church of Salamanca.^[100] The second was of six plots in La Mata and two in Narros, property of a memoria in the cathedral of Salamanca.^[101] Both lots were bought by don

[99] Ringrose, Transportation, 81–86, esp. 84.

[100] AHPS, Contaduría, libro 850, ff. 455r, 477r–478r.

[101] Ibid., ff. 478r–479r.

Joseph María Cano Mucientes, military commander of the province of Burgos^[102] and a knight (caballero ) of the Order of Carlos III, a resident of Madrid. He also made the third purchase, first of 1800, larger than the others, seventeen arable plots and three meadows in La Mata plus assorted lands in Valdunciel and Narros, property of another memoria in the cathedral.^[103] The fourth sale went to a member of the faculty of the University of Salamanca, don Antonio Reyrruard, four plots in La Mata and two in Narros that belonged to a third memoria of the cathedral;^[104] and the fifth, a plot in La Mata sold along with others in Narros and other nearby towns that belonged to a capellanía in the town of Negrilla, went to a priest whose parish was in Aldeadávila de la Rivera, on the Portuguese frontier.^[105] After the first six months of disentail, La Mata faced the prospect of exchanging one set of outside landlords for another.

By the summer of 1800, the vecinos became aware that they must compete with the wealthy men of the cities if they were not to lose the opportunity the king had given them. Several took up the challenge. In July Pedro González of La Mata obtained a large arable field belonging to a capellania of Salamanca, paying 2,330 reales.^[106] A month later Antonio Alonso López, one of the wealthier labradores, bought a block of lands in La Mata, Narros, Valdunciel, and Carbajosa de Armuña for 12,200 reales.^[107] Thereafter other vecinos entered the bidding and frequently won the auction. Of thirteen sales of land in La Mata in 1800, five went to its vecinos and two to those of nearby towns.^[108]

To see how the vecinos defended themselves we can follow one of their purchases in the notarial records.^[109] In October 1800 the commissioner of the Amortization Fund selected for sale the properties located in the towns of La Mata, Narros, and Negrilla de Palencia belonging to the Cofraía de Animas of the parish church of San Juan de Jerusalén of Salamanca. Two assessors were chosen, a labrador of Monterrubio and another of the Puerta de Zamora, a suburb of Salamanca, who spent three days evaluating the lands. Three plots totaling 4.25 fanegas in

[102] Sargento mayor del Regimiento Provincial de Burgos.

[103] Ibid., libro 851, ff. 145r–146r.

[104] Ibid., f. 146r–v.

[105] Ibid., ff. 146v–147r.

[106] Ibid., f. 148r–v.

[107] Ibid., ff. 149r–v, 114r, 296r.

[108] Ibid., ff. 148v–152r; libro 852, ff. 92r–94v. The last sales were recorded in 1801 but the money was paid in 1800. See AHPM, López Fando, C1346, C2752. Two sales recorded in Madrid but not in the Salamanca contaduría are C1347 and C1348.

[109] AHPS, Sección Notarial, libro 3844, ff. 23r–45v. The sale is in AHPS, Contaduría, libro 852, ff. 92v–93r.

Negrilla they agreed were worth 2,925 reales, and seven plots in La Mata and Narros measuring 9 fanegas, 6,305 reales. Four days after they submitted their report, on 16 October 1800, a notary of Salamanca, don Carlos María Pérez Albarez de Rueda, made a bid on all the lands, offering 9,400 reales payable in vales reales, only a few reales above the total assessment. The alcalde mayor of Salamanca city, the competent royal authority, declared his bid in order and set the date for the auction as 19 November, allowing thirty days for public announcements. Notices were posted in Salamanca, Palencia de Negrilla, and La Mata, the last on the main church door, beneath the espadaña. Every day for thirty days the public crier of Salamanca proclaimed the description of the lands, the amount bid, and the date of the auction. Within ten days, two vecinos of La Mata, Santiago Cabo and Juan Hernández, appeared at the office of the notary in charge of the sale and made a second bid: 9,233 reales in vales reales for the 9 fanegas in La Mata and Narros. In effect they requested that the properties be divided in two lots, and to obtain their request they offered almost as much for those in their vicinity as Pérez Albarez had for all the lands. Cabo signed the document, Hernández merely scribbled some swirls, "since he does not know how to sign," as the notary delicately put it. Their bid was declared satisfactory, and the public crier henceforth proclaimed it in his announcement.

On 19 November the public auction, in the entrance hall of the royal jail of Salamanca, opened at eleven o'clock in the morning. The crier announced the pending bid and invited whoever wished to raise it. Many people attended, including Juan Hernández acting for himself and his partner, but try as he might, the crier could raise no response. When he paused, the alcalde mayor ordered him to keep on, and unexpectedly Hernández, who was illiterate and perhaps confused by the strange event and the imposing setting, broke the silence to raise his own bid by two hundred reales. His was the only voice from the public. Finally the alcalde mayor closed the session and awarded the fields to Hernández and Cabo.

According to practice at public auctions, however, this was not the end. The closing bid was published in Salamanca and La Mata, and prospective buyers were given forty days to raise it by 25 percent (la mejora de la cuarta parte ) and thereby reopen the bidding. Again the announcement on the church door in La Mata had the desired effect, for on 26 November two different vecinos, Francisco and Marcos González, went to the notary's office in Salamanca and offered 11,808 reales for the

9 fanegas, also in vales, barely more than the required raise. A new date for the auction, 7 December (a Sunday), and new announcements. The act took place in the accustomed manner, and again, despite the coaxing of the public crier, no one raised the bid. This time the decision was final, and the two Gonzálezes received the lands. On the next day they paid the money to the commissioner of the royal fund, and the alcalde mayor signed the necessary papers.

On 11 December the notary went in person to La Mata to deliver the lands. The symbolic act of transfer to the new owners before the assembled residents of the village is the opening scene of this book. The final act took place two weeks later. The two Gonzálezes and Juan Hernández, the active partner in the earlier bid, journeyed to the notary's office to have the deed drawn up. The two buyers ceded three of the fields to Hernández and divided the other four between them. Santiago Cabo, the other early bidder from La Mata, had lost out, but the vecinos had defeated the notary of Salamanca who first bid on the land and had raised the price even further in their competition with each other. The confraternity received from the king an obligation for almost double the assessed value of its fields.

After 1800 the amount of land put up to auction declined. In 1801 there were six sales, in 1802 three, in 1803 two, and in 1804 one. Vecinos of La Mata made eight of these twelve purchases and vecinos of neighboring towns two others. Outsiders seemed to lose interest when faced with a serious local challenge. Residents of Salamanca made only two purchases involving five plots.^[110]

These sales exhausted the lands specified in the instructions of January 1799, which stated that properties of hospitals, asylums, and similar institutions not be touched until all others had been sold. On 30 September 1805 a circular ordered the disposal of the properties of these institutions.^[111] Amorg them was the largest landowner in La Mata, the General Hospital of Salamanca, which held sixty-eight arable plots and one meadow, evaluated by the catastro at 15 percent of all the property in the town. They went on sale early in 1806 in twenty different sets. This time the vecinos were prepared. Sixteen of them, including a man called don Josef de la Iglesia, and his wife, doña María Antonia de Rivas, banded together to bid for the lands. They obtained nineteen of the sets, the twentieth going to a member of the university, don Josef

[110] These twelve sales are in AHPS, Contaduría, libro 852, ff. 94v–98r; libro 853, ff. 37r–40r; libro 854, ff. 65r–66r; libro 855, f. 75r.

[111] Circular, 30 Sept. 1805, AHN, Hac., libro 8057, no. 6716.

Pando.^[112] Two other sales, lands of the orphanage of Salamanca, closed out the year and the disentail in La Mata under Carlos IV. They went to a vecino.^[113]

Most of the properties that changed hands already belonged to religious endowments in 1753 and can be identified in the catastro: 204 arable plots, eight meadows, and a house. Others not identified in the catastro as religious holdings were presumably acquired by the church between 1753 and 1798. Altogether 222 plots were sold, 40 percent of the 551 plots listed in the catastro; of the total property value, 42 percent was sold. Taking place in eight years in a town where virtually no land had been put on the market in centuries, the disentail constituted a massive revolution in the ownership of property.

After a bad start, the people of La Mata had rallied to exploit the opportunity. They obtained 116 of the 222 grain plots, and in addition vecinos of nearby towns obtained 24 plots. Most of the rest went to residents of Salamanca. Table 7.21 and Figure 7.6 reveal what these exchanges did to the property structure of the town. There are two major features to the changes. On the one hand, local ownership rose sharply, from about 10 percent to 35 percent, mostly in gains by the vecinos, who had eight times as much property as at midcentury; ownership located in Salamanca declined from 63 to 41 percent. On the other hand, ecclesiastical institutions lost half their holdings; their share fell from 78 to 39 percent. Where previously ecclesiastical landlords dominated the town, there were now three fairly equal forces present, religious institutions, nonresident individuals (some of them clergymen), and the vecinos of La Mata and neighboring towns. La Mata ceased to be in the absolute grip of the nearby city.

If La Mata was a typical example of the effects of the disentail of Carlos IV, the royal ministers had every reason to congratulate themselves on their achievement. They had provided property to industrious farmers while raising money for the urgencies of the crown. Their success depended, however, on local conditions. Although in recent decades the economic status of La Mata's farmers had been under threat, they had maintained a level of income that permitted them to live adequately and save. Some muleteers also had earnings beyond their needs. Until 1798 the vecinos had little opportunity to invest their savings in ways that would increase their income. The purchase of land had been virtually

[112] AHPS, Contaduría, libro 856, ff. 117r–124r.

[113] Ibid., ff. 124r–125r.

out of the question, since four-fifths of the land in La Mata was in religious entail. Not entirely fortuitously, the royal decree came when farmers were able to take advantage of it.

For the town as a whole, the greatest benefit was to be freed from part of the rent it paid to outside owners. Vecinos bought 220 fanegas of arable land; 196 of this had belonged to outside religious institutions.

They also bought at least thirteen plots measuring 26 fanegas in Narros and other nearby villages, all of which had belonged to institutions in Salamanca.^[114] Meanwhile residents of Salamanca had bought 14 fanegas of land in La Mata belonging to churches of La Mata and nearby towns. The net gain for the town economy was rent from 208 fanegas of land.

[114] Ibid., libro 851, ff. 114, 296r; libro 852, ff. 92v–93r; libro 853, f. 48r–v; libro 856, f. 131v.

Under the decree of 15 September 1803, the new outside owners were free to raise the rent, but we have seen that the monasteries were unable to do so without the tenants falling behind, so that it is doubtful that the new owners could squeeze much more out of the tenants. At the rate of 0.8 fanega of wheat per fanega of land that was the usual rent, the land transfers netted the town economy about 167 EFW more per year. In 1753 vecinos paid outside owners 575 EFW; this would now be about 410 EFW, and the net income from agriculture would rise from 3,132 to 3,299 EFW (Table 7.14). The overall benefit was to raise the town income from agriculture about 5 percent. The farmers as a group benefited more because they were also freed from the rent paid to local churches on 25 fanegas of land, about 22 fanegas of wheat. Their net income rose from about 2,682 (Table 7.8) to about 2,871 EFW, an increase of 7 percent.

9

Had other conditions remained stable, this increase would have meant a distinct improvement in the position of the farmers. But their number did not stop growing. From Table 7.17 we know that the population of La Mata was about 333 in 1786, with about 80 vecinos (allowing for 2 vecinos and 8 people in Narros). The next date for which we have population figures is 1826. La Mata then reported 107 vecinos and 482 people. The growth between these dates was not consistent, however. The 12 families that emigrated to Narros in 1789 took perhaps 48 people. In 1803 and 1804 the harvests were very poor in Salamanca province, as in most of Spain, and the ensuing famine brought on an epidemic that carried away a large number of people.^[115] One would have to study the parish registers of baptisms and burials to get a full sense of the demographic impact on La Mata, but the tithe records provide convincing evidence (Table 7.22). The number of people on the rolls fell about 20 percent from 1802 to 1805. This loss did not represent an elimination of marginal farmers, for the number who paid first fruits declined more, about 23 percent. La Mata must have lost a fifth of its adults in the epidemic and at least as many children.

[115] In La Mata the wheat tithes in these years were 158 and 160 fanegas. In the previous three years they averaged 317, in the following three, 270. The records of the convent of La Concepción of Salamanca, speaking in 1804 of the death of two tenants in Tardáquila, just north of La Mata, mention "la epidemia que hubo en los lugares" (AHN, Clero, libro 10854, ff. 41r–44v). See Peset and Carvalho, "Hambre y enfermedad," esp. Appendix E. The authors do not believe there was a major increase in mortality, but the evidence here is different.

If one assumes that the growth rate was constant for the rest of the period (there was another famine during the Napoleonic war, but its effect can be discounted here), then we can approximate the population and the number of men in agriculture at different dates as in Table 7.23.

We have seen that the total net income from agriculture did not rise much, if at all, after the middle of the eighteenth century, and that the income of the farmers increased about 7 percent as a result of the disen-

Figure 7.7.
La Mata, Index of Per Capita Income of Men in Agriculture ( base = 1753 )
Note: N  = number of men engaged in agriculture (from Tables 7.1 and 7.23).

tail. This information makes it possible to plot the evolution of the average per capita income in EFW of the men in agriculture (not to be confused with the per capita income of the town as a whole). Figure 7.7 shows that the major factor affecting the income of the farmers was their number. The rush into agriculture after 1753 rapidly brought down the individual income until the vecinos turned to farming land outside the town, first by renting part of Narros in 1780 and then by sending emigrants to it in 1789. Even so, the index of per capita income

of men in agriculture, with the base 100 in 1753, stood at only 62 by 1789. The decline continued until two factors combined between 1798 and 1808 to bring the level of income back to that of 1789: the disentail and the epidemic. Of the two, the epidemic had the greater effect. Without disentail, it would have raised the index from 53 in 1798 to 58 in 1808. Without the epidemic, disentail would not have prevented the income of farmers from continuing to decline. The income of the town as a unit held up much better, because the large sector engaged in haulage would continue to increase its contribution. One can suppose that some of this income filtered over to the families of farmers through services rendered, so that they were not so badly off as the graph suggests.

What the graph does reveal, however, is the weakness of property redistribution as a means of social reform in a period of demographic expansion. One could hardly find a place where the effects could have been more favorable to local residents, both because of the large amount of property sold and because they managed to acquire over half of it. Even if all the land disentailed had gone to the vecinos, 366 fanegas, their rent would have been reduced 293 fanegas of wheat, and their income would have risen 11 percent. Indeed, if all the land and pastures except the land of the town council had been turned over to the vecinos, representing rent of 733 EFW (Table 7.8), their total net income would have risen about 27 percent, bringing the index for 1808 up to 74, still well below the level of 1753.

Ending rent payments was not, however, the only benefit conceived by the planners in Madrid. They counted on private ownership to increase the harvests, but given contemporary technology this was unlikely. The labradores continued to experiment modestly with crop variations. Garbanzos, which had risen to 21 percent of the value of the harvest in 1797–99, fell back to 7 percent in 1805–9, only to rise again to 17 percent in 1815–19. At the latter date peas had appeared, after being sown in small amounts at the turn of the century, and were now 6 percent of the crop. But the value of the harvests in EFW changed little. In 1807–8, both good years, the average of the tithes recorded by the cillero was almost exactly the same as in 1801–2, also good years. In 1815–19 tithes averaged 91 percent of this amount, and all of these figures indicate harvests below the record years of 1770–74. Until farming technology changed, which hardly occurred before the twentieth century, only extensive breaking of new ground in nearby despoblados (so long as they were available), massive emigration, or turning to other oc-

cupations like muleteering could maintain the standard of living of the farming sector.^[116]

10

If disentail brought only marginal benefit to those in agriculture as a group, perhaps it changed more radically the condition of the persons who actually acquired land. Thirty-five people bought property in La Mata, twenty-two of them vecinos. Table 7.24 shows the residence of each buyer and what percentage of the total value of the town's land (as assessed at the time of the catastro) each bought. They are listed in descending order of the value of their purchases.

The table reveals a fairly clear pattern. Of the top four, each of whom bought considerably more than the others in the list, only one was a vecino, the others being urban residents, from Salamanca and Madrid. The middle ranks, from fifth through twenty-sixth, were made up almost entirely of vecinos of La Mata, with a scattering from bordering towns. The first of the latter, Blas Rodríguez, was one of the original emigrants to Narros in 1789. Of the remaining nine buyers, seven lived outside La Mata (although three in neighboring towns). The very narrow range of the purchases made by vecinos is striking; nineteen of the twenty-three each bought between two and seven plots, the largest purchaser of these acquiring less than double the land value of the smallest. It is true that this similarity is exaggerated by assigning equal shares to the sixteen who banded together in 1806 to get the lands of the General Hospital, but I do not know how they divided these lands among themselves. Outside this range are only Francisco González, who bought twenty-three plots, valued at more than twice the amount of any other vecino's purchases; two men, who bought very little; and Joseph Prior, who bought no lands in the término but together with Ignacio Alonso bought two plots in Castellanos de Villiguera to the west. Who were these vecinos?

The records of the sales do not tell their occupations. We can, however, learn much from the tithe register. It reveals how large their harvests were and how these compared to those of other vecinos, both before and after their purchases. Table 7.25 shows the average harvest of each individual who bought land and the rank of his harvest among the

[116] See Cabo Alonso, "La Armuña," 373 and 382, on the limited possibilities for increased agricultural output in the nineteenth century.

tithers, for four separate two-year periods (since a two-year cycle was needed to till all the fields of each individual) from 1799 to 1808, omitting 1803–4, the years of famine. Not all buyers paid tithes, and others paid only in some years. Those who disappeared from the rolls probably died, and those who were added probably appeared when they set up separate households or began farming. Finally, the table indicates the years in which the buyer made his purchases, in order that one may observe any immediate effect of his purchases on his harvests or rank among tithers.

The census of 1786 reported twenty-seven labradores. Considering the emigration to Narros in 1789 and the intervening growth, there must have been between twenty-five and thirty labradores in 1799. If this is the case, then all but two of the nine top vecino buyers, those ranked third through fifteenth, were labradores, for they were among the top twenty-six tithers in 1799–1800. All of these men made purchases in the first years of the disentail, and five of them also participated in the joint purchase of the properties of the General Hospital in 1806. The economic potential of the seven who were labradores can be judged from their harvests. Net income from harvests after deduction of seed, tithes, and rent was about 58 percent of gross harvests (see Table 7.8). Four of these men had gross annual harvests in 1799–1800 of between 129 and 180 EFW, net between 75 and 105 (Table 7.25). In the two excellent years following, their net harvests were about two-thirds greater. Their position in the socioeconomic pyramid would correspond to the top levels (4 and 5) (compare Tables 7.10 and 7.13). If they had families of five and their needs were covered by 60 EFW, as I have proposed, they had available to save the equivalent of between 40 to 90 EFW per year. If they saved half this amount, one can calculate how many years it would have taken them to accumulate the amount of their purchases,^[117] and in most cases the calculation shows that a few years would suffice. Pedro González, who spent 2,330 reales in 1800 and 11,410 reales in 1806, could save about 1,700 reales per year and needed only two years' savings on hand before the sales started. Ignacio Alonso, who spent 10,030 reales in 1802, could have covered this amount with ten years' savings; but in fact if he had put all his surplus of 1801 and 1802 aside in the hope of buying land, this would have covered his purchase. Of the four, only Antonio Alonso López would have had difficulty in financing his successful bids out of savings. It would have taken

[117] Using 40 reales as the price of a fanega of wheat (see above, n. 63).

him twenty years to accumulate the 15,450 reales he spent inside and outside La Mata. But if, as was likely, he paid in vales reales (the record does not say), which were being discounted over 50 percent, he could have saved the necessary money much faster. It is less easy to understand how the other three labradores in this top group made their purchases, since all sales were paid for on the spot and there is no record of any loan or mortgage taken out by the buyers. Nevertheless, it is clear that agriculture was the main source of livelihood of the larger local buyers and very likely also the main source of their capital.

Below these nine local buyers are eleven people who had shares in the properties of the General Hospital but otherwise bought nothing. Six of these eleven also drew their income from agriculture. The next three were marginal farmers, who did not farm every year or harvested only small amounts. Their main occupation lay elsewhere, most likely in haulage. Finally, there are two people in this group who never appeared on the tithe rolls, don Josef de la Iglesia and doña María Antonia de Arrivas, "his wife." The records of the sales of the properties of the General Hospital always name them first among the sixteen buyers. Who were they? The title don indicates an hidalgo, or at least a recognized notable.^[118] The catastro and the census of 1786 show no hidalgo in the town. The priest of La Mata, who signed the tithe rolls during the decade of the sales, was don Francisco Ignacio Arribas. Were doña María Antonio and don Josef his sister and brother-in-law, who decided to move to the town, buy land, and live off their income? This seems a likely explanation, and it suggests that their shares of the General Hospital's lands were larger than the others. Their case and those of the other nonfarmers among the buyers indicates that even if the economic position of labradores had declined, land was an attractive investment for people who did not regularly farm. Husbandry still had more prestige in La Mata than muleteering.

The cases of Francisco González and Francisco de la Cruz, first and fourth among La Mata buyers, support this conclusion. De la Cruz was not a farmer in 1799–1800 and only a marginal one thereafter, despite buying three plots in 1802 and sharing in the properties of the General Hospital. Very likely he was an arriero who invested in land but did not make agriculture his main occupation. The case of Francisco González sets him apart from the other vecinos, for he was the only one to rank among the top buyers. He bought nine plots in 1800, eleven plots and a

[118] For the meaning of the appellation "don," see below, Chapter 15, section 4.

meadow in 1801, and three plots in 1802, yet he was not farming in 1799–1800. We saw him take possession of his first fields, which he obtained by outbidding local and Salamanca residents. In 1801 he was twentieth on the tithe roll; in 1802, after three years of buying land, he was fifth.^[119] He disappeared from the tithe list after 1803. Did he replace the former first tither (casa excusada) or fourth tither (cuarto dezmero), neither of whose tithes are recorded in the rolls, or did he die? I believe the latter. The name Ana Hernández appeared for the first time in 1804 near the top of the list. She may have been the former first or fourth tither, but more likely she was González's widow. In 1805–6 she was sixth, in 1807–8 third. This appears to have been a household that rose from nothing to obtain the third largest harvest in town. One can guess that González was a wealthy arriero who was inspired by the sales to engage in agriculture.

His case illustrates the importance of the arrieros to the well-being of La Mata. The town defended itself successfully against outside buyers because of its dual economy. The leading labradores had the savings that they and their forebears had set aside for half a century or more. But the agricultural sector did not account for all the town's gains. The muleteers also were amassing capital, and some put it into land when they had the opportunity.

Their judgment was sound, for on the whole those who bought land rose economically. We can follow the development in the second part of Table 7.25. Francisco González is only the most obvious case. Vicente Alonso had the sixth largest harvests in 1799–1800; he was just below the first tither in 1807–8. Antonio Alonso López was tenth at the beginning, fifth at the end; Marcos González rose from twenty-fourth to seventh. Not all were so successful; Pedro González fell from second to sixth; Ignacio Alonso from fifth to eighth. But compare the fate of Agustín de Dios, who was number three in 1799–1800. Since 1787 he and Juan López had rented jointly the lands of the Discalced Franciscan Nuns.^[120] Agustín did not buy lands; in 1807–8 he had fallen to number eleven. Bernardo Prior, who was number six in 1799–1800, bought no lands and dropped to number 19 in 1807–8.

It would be wrong to conclude that the increase in a buyer's harvests came just from the lands he bought. In most cases the buyers tilled more fields than those they acquired, as one can tell by comparing their har-

[119] The rank 12 assigned him in Table 7.24 for these years is a result of averaging the two years.

[120] AHN, Clero, libro 10854, f. 24.

vests with the areas they purchased. The account book of the monastery Nuestra Señora del Jesús shows that one of them, Pedro González, second among the buyers, and another man rented its fields in La Mata from 1789 to 1808. González's half share of the crop would have been about 60 fanegas of wheat per year.^[121] The plots he bought would have produced only about 46. After 1800 his total harvest averaged over 250. Francisco González, who had never farmed before, bought 30 fanegas of land, which would have produced about 105 fanegas of wheat per year.^[122] In 1802 he paid tithes on 262 fanegas of wheat, plus other crops. The plots he bought accounted for less than half of his harvest. The next three buyers who were labradores could produce only between one sixth and one-quarter of their harvests on the lands they purchased.

One can conceive of an explanation for the changing relative size of the vecinos' harvests that has little to do with the disentail. A. V. Chayanov, in his classic studies of the economy of rural Russia before the Revolution, described how the peasant exploitation expanded and contracted as the family proceeded through its life cycle. For a newly married couple the farm was limited to what the peasant could till himself, but as his sons reached an age where they could work, he extended his farm by renting new fields. The exploitation would increase in size until all children reached adulthood, then decrease as the sons left to form their own families.^[123] One should consider whether the rise and decline in the harvests of the individual vecinos of La Mata responded to some similar life cycle.

Such an explanation has a certain appealing simplicity, but the knowledge we have developed leads one to reject it as the primary cause. First of all, the monastic account books of the eighteenth century cited at the beginning of this chapter^[124] show very little change in renters. Leases were inherited by widows and children, and only tenants who fell seriously in arrears appeared in danger of losing their leases. The free market in rented farms that Chayanov observed in Russia was not present in La Mata. Besides, an increase in the harvests of an individual regularly followed his purchase of disentailed land. In other words, purchases of land were being made when the life-cycle model predicts that sons had not yet reached working age. Yet this is precisely when the peasant, a

[121] The weighted average crop of wheat land according to description in the catastro was 3.0 fanegas of wheat per year per fanega of land (Table 7.2). This must be raised 17 percent to 3.5, because harvests were greater than the catastro predicted.

[122] AHN, Clero, libro 10668, f. 100.

[123] Chayanov, "Nature of Peasant Economy."

[124] Above, n. 16.

struggling young father of hungry children, would be least likely to have savings. According to the life-cycle model one would expect purchases to occur when the family work force was largest and the per capita income therefore greatest, or shortly afterwards. Purchases would be followed by a decline in harvests as adult children left. The relationship between purchases and harvests observed in La Mata thus flies in the face of the life-cycle explanation.

By 1808 all the first nine tithers except the casa excusada and the cuarto dezmero were labradores who had bought land, and perhaps one could identify these as buyers too if one had their names. Furthermore, the share of those at the top was greater than before the disentail. In 1799–1800 the largest tither on the rolls (number two after the casa excusada) paid 7.0 percent of the tithes collected; in 1807–8 the person in this position paid 9.2 percent. The top seven tithers listed in 1799–1800 had 42 percent of the total; in 1807–8, when all of them were people who had bought land, their share was 48 percent. This fact adds further support to the belief that the purchase of properties was a direct cause for an increase in harvests, even one that was greater than the additional return provided by the lands bought.

Disentail benefited ambitious men in more ways than offering land to buy. Every time a vecino purchased a plot to farm himself, he took it out of the supply available to rent and forcibly depressed the remainder of the local farmers. Furthermore, the royal legislation permitted outside buyers to change the conditions of tenure or to rent to new tenants. Although leases had been traditionally renewed rather automatically, new absentee owners would be looking for the best lessee, and a successful farmer would be their first choice. Buying land gave a farmer a reputation that helped him acquire leases held by other vecinos. One cannot explain the meteoric rise of Francisco González in any other way, or the more modest gains of others who also rose in rank. Whereas disentail could only mitigate the decline in per capita income of the farming sector caused by demographic growth, it permitted the more enterprising men to rise within the economic hierarchy of the town. Population growth in the second half of the eighteenth century had reduced the disparities in farmers' income. Disentail reversed this trend and produced a somewhat more stratified society.

11

The war against Napoleon put an end to this period of disentail and struck the town harshly. French armies engaged in Portugal passed

through the province of Salamanca and lived off it, and the campaign of 1812 brought heavy fighting to the region. In November 1812 French troops sacked La Mata.^[125] Between 1810 and 1813, the tithe records show harvests scarcely half the size of ordinary years, and monasteries settled for much less rent than their leases called for.

Peace brought back normal conditions and harvests recovered. For the rest of the century the history of La Mata revolved around the forces we have observed. The number of men engaged in transportation increased until midcentury. In 1850 there were fifty-one muleteers and five carters (carromateros ), and ten years later sixty-two muleteers and thirty-eight carters. Thereafter, the appearance of the railroad led to a steady decline of haulage as an economic resource; in 1900 only two arrieros were left in La Mata. Meanwhile the vecinos benefited from the successive waves of disentail. By the turn of the twentieth century, they owned 71 percent of the land in the town, and the renting of fields from nonresidents had almost disappeared as a practice, as outside owners sold off their plots in search of investments with more growth potential. Harvests per hectare rose slowly, but not enough to offset the disappearance of transportation as a source of income. In 1863 the number of vecinos reached 165, its highest point ever.

After 1900 the discovery of a simple chemical process to keep lentils from spoiling before reaching market brought a revolution in crops, and the introduction of artificial fertilizers reduced the need for fallow.^[126] Thereafter, the end of haulage and the new farming technology gave the town a very different economy from the one studied here. The half century between the catastro of la Ensenada and the end of desamortización of Carlos IV thus appears as the early stage of a cycle that lasted through the nineteenth century, during which this rural community remained dependent on early modern technology in both agriculture and transportation. Disentail operated as one factor in economic change, along with population pressure and evolution in the means of transportation.

[125] Cabo Alonso, "La Armuña," 387 n. 122.

[126] Ibid., 374–411.