Marriage Dowries in Lanzarote at the Beginning of the Reign of Charles II

MARRIAGE DOWRIES IN LANZAROTE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE REIGN OF CHARLES II Rousseau said that the chains of marriage are so heavy that sometimes it is necessary for them to be carried by more than two, an ingenious and practical way of reducing in just fifteen words what the institution of marriage meant in the Ancien Régime, certainly more a matter for all the inhabitants of the family nucleus on both sides than for the two contracting parties. The endowment charter is an incredibly rich document in information, and thanks to which we can analytically approach the economic, social and cultural sectors of the time. The material goods that the couple will use in daily life will be the vestiges, the material remains that will bring us a little closer to that set of factors and, ultimately, will take us to the island home scene of those days. However, our study takes on extra importance when it is inserted in an inexplicable and sadly understudied period for the Canary archipelago, such as the reign of the last Austria (1666-1700). It seems as if the opacity of Charles II's work, the twilight of the Empire that his predecessors built, had also been transferred to the interest among researchers in dusting off and interrogating the documents he bequeathed to us. This incredible abandonment is even more accentuated for the island of Lanzarote, perhaps because the periphery in which it is inserted detracts from its attractiveness, perhaps because it is somewhat displaced by the brilliance that the two central islands gave off in terms of information, or perhaps because the study of an island of lordship is considered of lesser importance. What is certain is that the last third of the sixteenth century on the island of Conejera was crucial for the subsequent historical development of the island, the beginning of a slow decline that culminated in the first years of the following century with the eruption of Timanfaya. For all these reasons we have focused our research on the central period of the reign of the Bewitched, between 1675 and 1683, nine years that will bring us a little closer to the day-to-day life of the men and mainly the women of an insular, peripheral territory ruled by a lordly regime without a visible head and, in addition, frequently absent, so he delegated to seconds and thirds. We start from a rather desolate base, since after the invasion of Xabán Arráez in 1618 Lanzarote was stripped of approximately 900 inhabitants, of which 200 would return at first and some more in dribs and drabs, in the following decades, (Anaya Hernández, 1982). The island is prostrate in desperate poverty, without arms with which to carry out the harvests, with which production drops sharply and the profits generated are used to pay ransoms. The recovery was slow and punctuated by ups and downs (1626-1632 and 1648-1652) until the 1970s. In 1976 we had approximately 3,500 inhabitants (Sánchez Herrero, 1975, p. 49). Throughout these nine years of studies we consulted five different scribes: Marcial Rodríguez Saavedra, Luis Cristóbal de Castro, Pedro Lorenzo Hernández, Francisco Betancourt and Juan Agustín de Figueroa, from which 63 dowry deeds were extracted. We are aware that this will not mean the totality of marriage unions at this time and in this place, since poverty was sometimes so great that it was avoided to visit the notary and pay his fees, being enough among the less fortunate with the word and the contribution of only a few farm tools to establish marriage among their children. We must also consider that on an island where terrestrial communications were still quite rudimentary, the distance of some valleys and villages from the notary house will be equally decisive in avoiding the need to put marriage conditions on paper. With regard to the latter, we would add that sometimes it is the sons-in-law themselves who, years after contracting the relationship, most of the time, are beset by economic problems, request to put such conditions in writing. Therefore, we will try to get closer, so that although we do not manage to encompass the entire social spectrum of the last third of the seventeenth century, we do at least rescue from oblivion some conclusions that concern more than half of the population. Breaking down the dowries by amount, as explained in Table 1, we see that the largest percentage of them are included in the scale of R$ 1,000 to R$ 2,000, but followed very closely by the successive intervals until we reach R$ 5,000, which confirms the similarity of status that we talked about earlier. The dowries that exceed this amount, in addition to being a minority, have the particularity of being the only ones in which the donors specify their professions, related to the military (ensigns and captains) or religious (priests), which further reinforces our hypothesis that the vast majority of the grantors of the dowry charter are small or medium-sized landowners. to which they dedicate themselves and from which they sustain themselves. But before continuing, it should not be forgotten that, above all, the dowry is a union of patrimony whose regulation has its roots in the medieval Partida de Alfonso X. and that throughout the Modern Age it will be polished until it acquires the tints of being a kind of material insurance for that new family cell that began with it. At the same time, it was an endorsement of the sacrament of matrimony. In this way, the sacred and the material-profane were indissolubly united. The woman, as you must be imagining by now in the Communication, was a mere passive subject of all that machinery. Educated far from the man and locked up in the house, from which she hardly left to go to mass or attend some event of collective or religious celebration, she waited for the moment when, through the mediation of her parents, or some close relative, she would be presented with a suitor who would give her a word of marriage. The daughter had to accept these moral norms, because it was a path to Marriage, at which point she would leave the paternal guardianship and pass to that of her husband. It was, therefore, a strategy that made it possible for women to survive. The requirement of being gifted greatly reduced the number of women who could marry and so at this same time, in other Castilian territories such as the Valencian region there were brotherhoods, which granted as a grace among the most disadvantaged dowries for this purpose, as a work of charity (Beneyto, 1993, p. 49). Of course, things were even more complicated in the land of Conejera, where the succession of bad harvests and disastrous weather years caused a double setback: on the one hand, the impossibility of comfortably endowing the daughter and, on the other, the emigration of the male component. The outlook, certainly, must have been bleak, pending for the young marriageable women the economic and social situation and waiting for better times to come. It was so important to marry that the entire family contributed to the dowry, as shown in Table 2. Both parents were the ones who mostly provided the daughter (39.68%), but in an environment in which subsistence crises were so repeated, it was not surprising that often both had already died at the time of dowrying, a place occupied by their other sons (14.28%), who made extreme efforts for their sister to collect a few hundred reais and leave the family home and form another autonomous economic cell. This last circumstance was not always fulfilled due to the shortness of which we spoke a few paragraphs ago. Travellers who passed through the island even years later narrate the desperation of these young women to "hunt" for a husband, using evil arts such as alleging false promises of marriage (Glas, 1976, p. 67). In these cases, the Church always sided with the plaintiff, despite the fact that the Synods of Cámara and Murga in 1631 had already warned about the exaggerated turn that the Events were taking. Others even resorted to the magical and supernatural with the help of Sorceresses, who existed on the island in relatively high numbers compared to the total population, most of whom were of Berber origin (Fajardo Spínola, 1992, p. 459). The eagerness to find the chosen man led on several occasions for the cause to end up being investigated by the Holy Office, although for lack of space we will not touch on this subject here and now. A reflection of all this can be seen in the place of origin of the bride and groom, among whom the percentage occupied by those living in Tenerife (9.52%) is surprising, which we will find basically in the years in which the harvest has been good, and in which therefore the contacts between Lanzarote and Tenerife increased through the shipment of wheat and barley to that island to alleviate its deficit. The same was true of those living in La Palma (4.76%). It was a breath of fresh air for the small environment of the rabbit hutch woman and a relief from inbreeding, which had to be practiced quite often. Precisely this circumstance was the counterpoint in barren years, in which, in addition to lowering the number of dowries in general, marriages were made between young men of the same town, and sometimes indicating that they had previously been disposed of by the Pope. These are the years in which we believe there must have been many marriages carried out without leaving a notarial record of it, the word suffices in hard times. In most of them, endogamy must have been incurred, as the surnames indicate, but due to the cost and the length of time involved in the dispensation, they were carried out anyway, somewhat outside the established and the "politically correct". But how was the dowry letter composed? Making a first major division, we will structure its content into six large groups: • Clothing • Seed and animals • Furniture, household goods • Sumptuary goods • Slaves • Land, houses, use of water. In turn, these groups are subdivided, which provides us with a considerable wealth of data, which due to lack of space we will have to synthesize as much as possible, placing more emphasis on those groupings of information that we consider to be most relevant. But before breaking down this content, we don't want to leave behind one last revealing fact of how related getting married was to the rhythms of an eminently agricultural society. Table 4 shows that there is a peak in dowry deeds in the months between August and November. It may be written in those months when it has been harvested and you have more or less some prospects with regard to the forecast of the amount of cereal that is going to be harvested. That is to say, we believe that the wedding, the ceremony itself, was not carried out (always speaking in general terms), in those autumn and winter months, but was waited for the arrival of summer once the harvest had been harvested to take place. In this way, it was made to coincide with festivities such as San Juan or Corpus Christi. This generated pomp and circumstance on the island and the congregation of many people, which favored the precepts of Trentino that spoke of strict compliance with previous warnings and vigil, or in other words, giving propaganda to the marriage to avoid possible incurring in bigamy (Moreno Florido, 1988). This hypothesis is not so misguided if we consult other authors from nearby latitudes. In Tenerife, for example, it is precisely during the months of October and November that the nuptials are contracted, once the harvest has ended, so that the deed is carried out in the preceding months, just the opposite of the case in the case of the grain of which Tenerife is deficient in good years (Hernández González, 1997). It is curious how in the less favored peasant families, that is, in the dowries of lower amounts, the content appears inflated and described in detail, in an eagerness, we think, to make it more attractive, as if a greater "engobe" and therefore also a greater "prey" were sought, if we may use that metaphor. They are dominated by kitchen utensils, furniture and used clothes, passed down from generation to generation, and yes, what is spent more money is providing them with some animals and a small seed to carve out an autonomous future, never better said. Family solidarity is palpable in these documents, in which male siblings donate up to 1/13 or 1/9 of part of a cistern or a house to the marriageable young woman, in order to make the final result more attractive. As we raise the final amount of the letter, we also increase the social importance of donors. In this group we find the donation of real estate that suffers very little or no partition, the increase of sumptuary objects such as jewelry or silver in household utensils and greater variety in furniture and clothing. In addition, there is more richness in the materials in which they are built. All this contributes to establishing a status and therefore to being another factor of eminent social differentiation. Unlike other authors, who document it for other islands (Arbelo García, 1990), we do not find the delivery of public offices in any case and the delivery of cash on rare occasions, and always associated with the largest letters. Nor are books, works of art, weapons or carriages, so frequent at the time in areas such as Andalusia (Aguado de los Reyes, 1997, p. 411). But going into a more exhaustive analysis of each of the groups, it would be convenient to warn that the lack of space prevents us from expanding as we would like with each of them, so we will emphasize those that are more novel or that provide more relevant and decisive data. Furniture is one of the most essential elements in the dowry chart, and although the number of them is small, the truth is that it appears in most of them, even in the smallest ones. Once the couple starts a new journey away from the family nucleus, the presence of furniture becomes a necessary element for the new home. However, the difference is not in the quantitative, but in the qualitative, and that is why in the larger dowry letters we will obviously find specimens of better material and workmanship and with more ornamental load. Wood is the material in which they will be made, a serious problem for the island of Conejera since the tree mass is practically non-existent in its territory, it had to resort irremediably to importing it. The place of origin of this wood will be in most cases Tenerife, as indicated in detail by the scribes themselves. The object was probably already manufactured by artisans from Tenerife, and their creations were among the objects most demanded by the import lines of Lanzarote and Majoreros, a fruitful traffic that has been known since the 1500s and that contributed to the gradual undermining of the number of trees on the peaked island, despite the fact that the cabildo tried to stop it with successive ordinances. at times contradictorily infringed by himself to satisfy his debts and commitments (Rodríguez Mesa, 2000). The artisans will make use of the trees that grow in the humid areas, such as wild olive, mocan, barbuzano, til, aceviño, viñátigo, willow, heather, cedar, pine, chestnut and broom. They believed that they should be felled in a "round waning" as this would prevent the wood from cracking and bleeding sap. In addition, once felled, they had to be placed in the shade so that they would acquire more hardness (Murcia Suárez, 2000) Stool It usually appears quite a lot, and curiously in even numbers, two, four or six. It is one of the most primitive forms of seating furniture, in fact, the very word that designates it is an archaism in itself lexically speaking, preserved at least as far as we know on the island of Conejera and Gran Canaria. Most of the time he doesn't specify his material, and when he does he says it's made of stick, his price hovering around 12-15 reais. The finish had to be quite rustic, because you don't go into decorative details as with other elements. This sparsity is broken in exceptional varieties, such as the "spring stools", the material of which we do not know, but which are accounted for in ducats and not in reais, unlike the rest of the goods. In addition, they are listed in number six and in one of the wealthiest dowries, which made them a rarity. Although it does not specify, its origin could well be Tenerife, since the deceased parents of that particular spouse lived in La Laguna, as it is explained to us. It is the oldest type of table known in the Islands, with antecedents in the demountable buffets of the Late Middle Ages. It consists of a board supported on trapezoidal legs formed by cutout planks. The material from which they are made does not appear in the dowries consulted, although in the immediately preceding periods it is specified that pine is the preferred one. On several occasions it appears together with his after-dinner table, complementing each other, and the value of both was approximately 40 reales. As it appears in most of the dowries, even in the smallest ones, we believe that it became indispensable in domestic furniture, probably with a multipurpose function within the house. Interestingly, like the stools, we find them in even numbers, but they will not appear with the frequency of those, which suggests that they did not play such a fundamental role in domestic furniture. In addition, their presence is attested in dowries whose total value is above 2000-2500 reais. In addition, it is detailed that "they are to sit", despite the fact that this function is understood. They come from the island or from Tenerife; In the first case, they are made of wood and their value does not exceed 6 reales, but in the second it is pine that is the material used, and their value can already rise to 12 reales. Of all the furniture that we find in the dotal cards, it is the least frequent, which leads us to think that it is perhaps the most dispensable of all, an impression that corroborates the fact that it appears in the letters of greater value. The desk would play a more domestic and functional role, while the table would perhaps acquire the purpose of ornamentation by itself or to hold some object of adornment, religious images, etc. In addition, their common size had to be larger than that of the law firm, as attested by the fact that in some letters it is specified as somewhat unusual that some of them are "small" in size. At the time consulted, unfortunately, we do not have detailed information about the type of wood with which they were made and its origin, but in letters from later years we are informed about it, with barbuzano being the most coveted, due to the beautiful dark color that it acquired with the aging of the wood and its quality and hardness. which made it impregnable to the "carruncho", the Portuguese word that received the woodworm on the island (Pérez Vidal, 1944). This only confirms our initial suspicions of the consideration of most of the tables that arrive in Lanzarote as luxury furniture. That distinguished and noble touch was completed by details such as the turning of the legs, which could shoot up prices to 100 reales. The most abundant, however, must have been made of some other more common wood, which explains why the average price is between 20 and 30 reales. The boxes are another of the essential elements in the dotal cards, to the point of finding them in 79% of them. Apparently, its origin is to be found in the coffers brought by the colonists during the Conquest of the islands, and which were imitated here by making them mainly with tea and chestnut. In the period investigated, we have not found any made of this second wood, but we have found til or linden (Ocotea Foetens), one of the largest trees found in the Canary Islands' forests. Its wood was yellowish-green, soft to the touch but long-lasting, which made it optimal for this type of furniture (Sánchez Pinto, 2000). The price of such a box was valued at 100 reales, competing with those that came from the Indies. Pine or pine trees, as they call them, were nevertheless made of pine or pine trees. From this tree, the white or "sapwood" wood of inferior quality to the tea, which was reddish, heavy and practically incorruptible, was used for the boxes. We know this for sure because it is the scribes themselves who make this difference, in addition to quoting different values depending on whether it is one or another quality of pine. The price of these pine specimens varied according to size, making a brief distinction between large and small. Only on rare occasions are the scribes more precise, indicating the approximate quarters they measured. Nor does it seem common that they had a very sophisticated means of enclosure, because when they have it they specify it (with a date), which makes its price more expensive. In addition to the type of material and size, the price varied according to a third factor such as the origin of the boxes. Almost all of them were imported, like the vast majority of furniture, as there was no tree mass on the island that would allow them to make their own raw materials. There are three origins cited. From the Indies came the most expensive ones, valued between 100 and 200 reales and made of cedar. In this century they are still not as frequent compared to the next, but it is quite significant that these objects appear in the dowries partially or totally related to the island of Tenerife. This tells us of an Indian return to the pointed island or of a commercial traffic between it and the American continent with a marked illegal accent. Madeira is another of the places of origin, although the material is not specified, although they must have had a very particular workmanship that made them highly esteemed among the people of Lanzarote. In addition, its price was more affordable than the previous ones (between 40 and 80 reais). It was probably the form of payment for the generous wheat trade that was carried out with that other Atlantic archipelago, once the crisis of the decades immediately after 1640 had been overcome. Finally, the pine boxes from Tenerife, cheaper than the other two, but just as numerous as those from Madeira. Its presence on the island also responds to the form of payment for the export of rabbit hutch grain, especially the period under study, which had some years of excellent harvests. The use of the boxes was to contain clothes, food or other types of belongings, but they could also serve as tables or seats. In none of the writings consulted do we know the wood in which they are made, but we do indicate the colors that they acquired, black and red, which can give us clues. Not in the period studied, but in the years immediately following we do find them small and decorated, and we are also told that they have drawers, which suggests more of a semi-decorative use. The tools are repeated in all the letters in spite of the differences in the final amount they reach, and will differ in the number and if not in the materials. Plates and bowls for gofio are the most rudimentary tools, made the most common with a price that does not reach the real one, while a little more sophisticated are the pewter ones according to the 3 or 4 reales more they cost. They will always appear in the number of six or twelve, forming a tableware or semi-tableware respectively. A final material is tin, which is more considerate than the previous ones and whose price was calculated according to its weight, measured in pounds. In addition, it appears independent of crockery and always in small numbers, just like cups, also made of this material, but unlike the previous tools, it appears linked to larger dowries. The copper boiler is also very common, despite the fact that its price could be around 50 reales (the equivalent of the cost of a bushel at the time), although, yes, perhaps precisely for that reason it was considered an object of value and was transmitted from mothers to daughters, since in most cases it is indicated that they are used. Cutlery is conspicuous by its absence, and those that appear do so in materials such as silver (spoons and forks) and are indicated to be small in size in the most notorious letters, then we would have to consider them as sumptuary objects. Grills, candles and lamps were also revealed as cheap and therefore in widespread use for the cuisine of the time. The same thing happens with wooden bowls or kneading bowls, as we are specified, always, curiously, in green. The carving and the jug often form a set whose value ranged between 5 and 8 reales, and which are sometimes accompanied by "styling" basins, highly valued on an island where water was often a problem of state. It would be impossible to go on as much as we would like, because there is still a lot of data that this rich notarial document can provide us, and we are left with the distaste of leaving the wording perhaps a little lame, but suffice it by way of conclusion, to stay with some premises of interest. One of them, the main one, is to realize that despite the fact that marriage was a sacrament according to the laws of God, on earth its fulfillment in a peripheral, insular area hit hard by the designs of fate, became rather the things of the devil. The woman was a mere passive subject of an eminently commercial deal that was carried out with her person, and which entailed the union of two estates and the inauguration of a new family nucleus. Hence, singleness, in a woman's life aimed at procreation, was perceived as an evil that had to be remedied immediately at any price, at which point family solidarity came into play. In the meantime, his life went from home to the confessional, limiting himself to seeing Life, as Carmen Martín Gaite would say, from the window.