El control de los patrimonios monásticos en la Galicia moderna

From the twelfth century on significant numbers of Benedictine and Bernardian monasteries in the region of Galicia owned great dominions that were ceded under foral arrangements to peasants. These land colonizers implemented strategies of undermining direct dominion thanks to the fragmentation, dispersion and extension of the land, along with the fact that the right to cultivate land could pass to relatives or neighbours. Moreover, the intense changes affecting the agricultural land structure in the Modern Age forced the religious orders to continually seek to control these farm lands and to clarify the obligations of the tenants. Ultimately it was not the amount of land or the surface measurements that mattered for estimating the properties, but rather the land production or rents. Mainly using the abundant documentation in the splendid Cistercian archives, this paper examines the various mechanisms that the monasteries employed in each period to seek to control their lands and rents. First were the attempts to define the delimitation of the lands (apeos). Next came efforts to transform foral land tenancy into leased land arrangements. Finally, in the last part of the Ancien Regime, prorating was used. Given the rather inefficient outcome of the delimitation of land and the failed attempts to end the foral arrangements, a cursory reading would suggest that the Galician monasteries were not very successful in their efforts. Yet their accounting indicates that they actually managed to collect almost the entire amount of their rents at the time of the disentailment and exclaustration of church lands, which is more than can be said of other religious communities throughout the Iberian Peninsula.