The Rimado at times recalls the freedom and variety of treatment of the arch-priest of Hita, though the Muse of Ayala is essentially more serious than that of Ruiz. Nor was Don Pedro content only with his verses and his Chronicle. He was also the author of a practical treatise on falconry, and the care and management of hawks; and his work, one of the most complete that has ever been published on the subject, was annotated by no less distinguished a successor than Beltran de la Cueva, Duke of Albuquerque.1

A statesman and a chronicler, a poet and a sportsman, a soldier and a politician, Pedro Lopez de Ayala is very far from being a mere court scribe; and, if he is best known to posterity by his admirable history of his own times, it must not be forgotten that he was one of the most admired and one of the most admirable among the Castilian gentlemen of his day.2

1 The best edition of El Libro de los Aves de Caça del Canciller, Pedro Lopez de Ayala, is that published in Madrid, 1869, with an introduction by Don Pascual de Gayangos. See also Casiri, Biblioteca Arab. Hist. Escurial., i., 231.

The noble and knightly pastime of falconry was introduced into Spain by the Arabs, having been in all probability adopted by their ancestors from their neighbours the Persians. Falconry is constantly referred to in the Shah Namah of Firdusi. The number of Arabic MSS. treating of falconry in the Escurial would abundantly suffice to prove the oriental origin of Spanish falconry, even if it were not that the vocabulary or technical language of the sport is so largely Arabic that any doubt upon the question is impossible. Cetreria, indeed, is from the Latin accipiter; but most of the special or technical words connected with Spanish falconry speak plainly of their Arab origin, such as: Azor, a hawk; Alcahaz, bird-cage; Alcaravan, a buzzard or marsh harrier; Alcotan, sparrow hawk; Alfaneque, Tunis hawk, white with brown spots; Bahari, gentle falcon; Sacre, lanner or hen harrier; Alcandara, perch for hawks; Alcatraz, water fowl; Alcadera, water fowl; Alcasubor, a kind of drum to startle water fowl. Many other similar words are given by Don Pascual de Gayangos in his edition (1869) of Ayala's work, above referred to.

2 The whole of vol. xix. of the Documentos Ineditos, 575 pp., is taken up with a biographical memoir and essay, concluded only in vol. xx., of Ayala, by Rafael de Floranes, to which the student is referred, not only for all that can be said or written about the old chronicler, but for a very interesting treatise upon the rise or restoration of polite letters in Christian Spain, a restoration in which Ayala no doubt played a very important part.

CHAPTER XXXII.

CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY.1

THE Feudal System, which has left so deep and lasting an impression upon social and political life in a great part of Europe, can hardly be said even to have existed in mediæval Spain. The magnates of Castile and Leon, ever warring against their Moslem rivals as a constant duty, and against their Christian neighbours as a no less constant pleasure, did not and could not remain in dignified seclusion in their baronial halls, ruling over their vassals, and administering their estates by undisputed law and custom, after the manner of the great lords of France and England. Engaged in a perpetual crusade against the Infidel on the frontier, the Spanish nobles lived rather in the field than in the castle, ever pushing forward the Christian possessions to the south. Soldiers rather than seigneurs for over five hundred years (711-1252), they had neither taste nor leisure for the development of their territorial, as distinguished from their military power. The castle was rather an opportune fortress than a permanent home. The plantation of forests, the great pride of a landed aristocracy, was almost unknown. The Spanish nobles learned all too little from their Arab neighbours. Yet as regards forestry, there was but little to be learned. Tree-planting is not an oriental virtue. It was a feudal aristocracy alone that in western Europe preserved the

1A very interesting account of the Cortes of Madrid (1390) is to be found in Geddes' Tracts, vol. i. (See also Danvila y Collado's Poder Civil en España, Histoire des Cortés d'Espagne, Sampère, and Historia de la Legislatura española, Antiquera. Cardenas Ensayo sobre la Historia de la propriedad territorial en España should also be consulted.-H.)

One hundred and twenty-four members or deputies attended, as the representatives of forty-eight cities or burghs. Two members seem to have been usually returned by each town, while Burgos and Salamanca each sent no less than eight, Leon five, Toledo and Soria each four, and some few cities only one. The lord sometimes possessed rights of independent jurisdiction, not only as under the feudal system, as incident to his own territorial authority, but by special grant from the crown, as in the case of municipal towns. Viardot, Essei, ii., 112.

forests from the ravages of woodmen and waste, of wandering shepherds and fitful cultivation. It was a feudal aristocracy alone that cared for existing timber, and planted trees in every direction, with a view to sport, to profit, and to personal dignity. A manor-house would be but a grange without its surrounding woods; a park would be but a field without its stately trees. And many a mere field in England possesses finer timber than is to be found in tens of leagues of the plain country of Castile. The Arab and the Moor in their best days were gallant warriors and honourable foes. But their social system admitted of nothing resembling a Christian landed aristocracy, nor a society of hereditary classes and orders of men. Under the Commander of the Faithful all good Moslems were socially equal. Official position, indeed, conferred temporary rank, but the Grand Vizier was as liable to the bowstring as the door-keeper of the palace, and a still humbler official might find himself Prime Minister or Commander-in-Chief. Hereditary rank was unknown. Family succession, as it is understood in the West, was rendered impossible, alike by the manners and customs of the people, and by the operation of the Mohammedan law; at this very day there is no such thing as a surname in the whole of Islam.

When Moor and Christian stood face to face, and strove for mastery in the south-west of Europe, it was not merely a contest between two religions, but between two social systems. The Moslem was a dweller in towns-a builder of palaces, a layer-out of gardens, a director of water-courses. The trees he planted were the olive and the pomegranate, the fig and the almond; orchards rather than forests grew round his dwellingplaces. His castles were designed only for war, as impregnable fortresses, and not as noble residences. And the Christian lords, if they did not embellish their cities, established their casas solariegas or family mansions by preference within the walls of a town, and disregarded the comfort and material beauty of their country seats,, which for long years were never safe from attack, and even from occupation by the Infidel.

For nearly four centuries after the victorious march of Taric and Musa there was a constant ebb and flow in the tide of conquest in mediæval Spain. What was Moorish territory to-day became Christian to-morrow; and when a knight from Leon or Castile had fixed his banner on the battlements of a conquered castle, some new wave from Andalusia or from Africa would sweep over the country and leave him without sod or stone.

In the middle of the tenth century the Christian frontiers had been pushed forward as far south as Simancas. Before the opening of the eleventh century the Moorish arms were carried northward to the Atlantic and the mountains of Biscay. But the tide of victory set strongly towards the south; and the territory conquered, or recovered as it was called, from year to year from the Arabs, was treated as waste land, and became the property, not of the king, but of the conquerors.

The power of the common soldier who himself acquired the land of the Infidel, and of the municipality who early enjoyed independent government, were also much greater than in any other part of Europe. The Moslems were either slaughtered, or found safety in flight. But the number of the exiles was not usually excessive. The Mozarabic or Christian population, who formed a large share of the commonalty of the Moslem empire, were ready no doubt to welcome their new and Christian masters; and while religious bitterness as yet lay dormant in Spain, not a few renegades were easily permitted to return to their ancient fold. Towns sprang up or increased in importance in the newly acquired territories, as they were colonised by Christians both old and new,1 and endowed with charters by successive kings, long before municipal privileges were known in England or France. The earliest instance is said to be in 1020, when Alfonso V., in the Cortes of Leon, established the privileges of that city.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the only hope for the future, whether as regards art or science or religion, or even humanity itself, lay in the steady growth of the towns.3 And it was in the number and growing importance of free municipalities that Spain was then, and had ever been, preeminently distinguished. Municipal institutions of what may be called the modern type, are of greater antiquity in Spain than in any other country in Europe-Italy, perhaps, excepted;

taint of Moslem or Jewish highly prized. "Yo Chris"and that is as good as

1 An old Christian was one who had no tinge nor blood in his ancestry. Such a lineage was rare and tiano viejo soy," says Sancho Panza in Don Quixote . if I were a count". This was in 1610. In 1210 the line of demarcation between the Moslem, the Mozarab and the Christian was very uncertain in any of the districts south of the Tagus. The Moslem and the Mozarab conversed in a kind of patois, known as Aljamia, a word said by Engelmann in his Glossaire to be derived from the Arabic a'jam = barbarous.

2 Hallam, Middle Ages, ii., 6; Marina, Ensayo, i., 180-182; Castelar, Estudios Historicos, 183.

Jessop, The Coming of the Friars, v.

and charters of privilege were common from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Communities were of four classes: Realengo, holding of the king; Abadengo, holding of some religious magnate; Solariego, holding of some nobleman; and Behetria, a tenure peculiar to Castile, by which the community, holding under some noble and ancient family, was entitled to choose the individual lord to whom, for the time being, the community should be subject; or, in some cases, to select an administrator or chief at their own absolute pleasure, without regard to family or foundation. Thus the Behetrias were little semi-independent republics within the kingdom, changing their lord-president, within defined limits, at their good pleasure. Yet such changes depended also largely upon the good pleasure of the lord, and were, in practice, not infrequently, accompanied by armed resistance and armed intervention. The superior nobility, moreover, were jealous of these Behetrias, and constantly sought to have them suppressed, that their territories might be added to the possessions of the nearest local magnate.1

Rich and influential, bound to a limited and honourable service, but ever ready to harry the Moslem, and to extend their individual or corporate property, the burgesses of Spain were free men, inferior only in rank, but not in personal dignity, to the nobles and knights with whom they stood shoulder to shoulder in the field of battle: and as such it was but natural that they should be independent, bold and haughty to an extent undreamed of by the timid shopkeepers of less favoured lands. Instead of a population of villeins, of artizans, and of tradesmen, the division of classes in town or country was not into noble and base-born, but into Cavalleros, or citizens who owned a war horse, and Pecheros, or those who fought on foot 2: and the difference at first was rather one of fortune than of birth. The towns as a rule were fortified. The townsmen were in all cases well trained in the use of arms for its defence. A large tract of country in the immediate neighbourhood belonged to them.

1 The celebrated Becerro de las Behetrias, a collection of the rights and privileges of every Castilian town that enjoyed the benefits of Behetria, was commenced by order of Alfonso XI. There is an interesting treatise on the Behetrias of Castile in vol. xx. of the Documentos Ineditos, pp. 406-475, with a number of lists of all the Behetrias, with other catalogues, and full extracts from various ordinances and decrees of councils. Amongst other curious facts, it seems that the Behetrias had their capital or political centre in the town of Santa Maria del Campo near Burgos, where the Juntas were held, with a chapter house and chancery where the archives were deposited, p. 407. The treatise is by D. Rafael Floranes and was written about 1790, and published in 1852.

2 Or literally those who offered their breasts to the foe.-H.