The first half of the twelfth century saw several interesting historiographical works being written in Castile and Leon, but the second half of the century is often seen as being bare of such written historical testimony (except perhaps for the Historia Najerense, which is still of disputed date). And yet New Castile, in particular, has a wonderful historical repertory which only been exploited in part by general historians (with a few admirable exceptions such as Heath Dillard), as opposed to by legal specialists: the fueros, the local law codes which were granted to reconquered towns after the Christians had captured them from the Moslems and endeavoured to repopulate them. The genre of fueros existed already, since it has its roots in the Visigothic Forum Judicum (fuero juzgo), and fueros were also granted at this period to towns which were far north of the religious frontier, such as Aviles and Santander; but New Castile in the late twelfth century is the time and place of their special flowering. At this time they were issued in Latin; although one or two seem to be written in Ibero-Romance with a thin Latinate veneer, such as the 1189 Fuero de Valfermoso de las Monjas, the earliest fueros to be originally issued in written Romance form come from the following century. When Fernando III was confirming many of these fueros soon after his accession in 1217, the confirmations of Latin originals were still in Latin (the idea that the Fuero de Zorita de los Canes was translated at that time has recently been shown to be a misunderstanding); but even before his accession in 1252, the following king, Alfonso X (known later as "El Sabio") was collecting and having translated the existing fueros, with the result that his Fuero Real, promulgated in 1256, established explicitly that Romance documentation was legally acceptable. The translations, if they mention a date at all, usually mention the date of the Latin original, which is why some scholars (including, unfortunately, Colin Smith in the new Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 5) have been misled into thinking that the actual Romance versions were from the twelfth century; but they were almost certainly in Latin then, which is why James Powers is right to have translated this English version of the Forum Conche from the Latin rather than from the better-known Romance Fuero de Cuenca. The Latin text is not included; it was well edited by Rafael Urena y Smenjaud, and published by the Academia de la Historia in Madrid in 1935.
The town of Cuenca was founded by the Moslems, so had no pre- invasion Visigothic laws, and was captured in September 1177 by the Castilians, under Alfonso VIII. Powers gives excellent grounds for dating the fuero to between November 1189 and March 1193. Cuenca was right at the Eastern end of the Castilians' sphere of influence, and is, indeed, in Modern Aragon, but Powers establishes that there was probably no direct connection between this fuero and that of the nearby town of Teruel captured in the same period by the Aragonese. The Forum Conche was used as a textual model for several other fueros granted to reconquered towns soon afterwards, so it has special historical importance.
It is also extraordinarily long. The vast seven-volume law code produced (in Castilian) by the scholars at the court of Alfonso X a century later, generally known as the Siete Partidas, is sometimes described as more of an encyclopaedia of everyday life than a book of laws; the same description can be made of the long fueros such as this one, which in part provided a model for the subsequent Alfonsine scholars. In this English translation, the code fills 192 pages of fairly small print (pp.27-218). In comparison, Powers' Introduction is brief though illuminating, as in effect he can afford to leave the text to speak for itself. And it can.
The best way to summarize the contents and demonstrate their variety and intended inclusiveness is to list the titles of the 43 chapters of the fuero, which are: Concession of the Code and Outline of its Privileges; Statutes regarding property holdings; How grain fields should be guarded; Care of the vineyards; Demarcation of the orchards; Aggression with illegal weapons; Public land of the Council; Concerning mills; Marriages and wills; The right of succession of children and parents; No one should pay the pecuniary penalty of homicide for a man killed during sports; Insults to men and many other violent acts; No one should respond for counselling; The penalties for murder--the challenged; Surety bondsmen; The election of the iudex and the alcaldi; Concerning the manner in which each one obtains his rights; The citations; Bondsmen; Witnesses and accusers; Testimony of responsible intermediaries or of substitute alcaldi; Fighters of judicial combat; Debtors who flee from the city; Those who appeal to the court of the alcaldi on Friday; The manner of pleading and the witnesses; The festival days on which no one should be allowed to take sureties or cite to judgment; Those who appeal to the King; The collectors of money for the Council; Cases between Christians and Jews; The government of the military expedition; The emergency military muster; The code of purchase, of sale, and of collateral of real estate; The code of pledging and of sales; Dogs; The code of the hunters; The code of hired workers; The code of the herders; The loyalty of all wage earners; The code of the guards who watch the livestock; Those who find something should proclaim it, and the corroborators; The code of guests (and other matters); Craftsmen; The equalization of the parishes.
The sections often cover much more than the title implies. That on "Dogs", for example (no. 34), has only six of its fourteen sections concerning dogs, as the others refer to cats, hens, geese and doves, and in particular how to deal with those accused of killing the creatures. It can be seen that this fuero was not just the code for the urban centre but for a whole largely rural area, since many of the prescriptions concern matters such as vineyards, mills and huntsmen, and Powers suggests that its jurisdiction reached out as far as 25 kilometres from the actual town. We can see in astonishing detail how life was intended to be organized in such a newly- repopulated area, without our necessarily being able to see how far reality fitted these intentions. It is, of course, part of the legal mentality to envisage possibilities that might never materialize; what do we deduce from the following: "Although the laws above have settled that the harvest watchman, or the owner of the grain fields, should take sureties from those who cause any damage, nonetheless, it remains prohibited that either the harvest watchman or any other should leave someone naked" (3.12); that such actions happened regularly, occasionally or never?
To some extent Powers does a better job in his Introduction than the original lawyers did in organizing the instructions into a coherent whole; for example, there is no section on the role of bishops or even priests in the fuero, but Powers supplies one in the Introduction (p, 3). Some scattered references are made in the text to the Moslems who had lived there before, particularly in the initial chapter which allows Moslems and Jews to settle in the town as full citizens; Powers collects the references together, and has a good section in the Introduction on these minorities in Cuenca, although it is possible to suspect that in reality they were perhaps tolerated rather than "welcomed" (Powers' word). Moslem prisoners-of-war are also referred to, sometimes as "slaves", since Cuenca was at the time not far from the Moslem South and raiding parties in each direction were common. Since much of the property in the town had been seized from previous Moslem owners who had left, much care needed to be taken in the proper establishment of who owned what. The word alcalde (now Spanish for 'mayor') might be a bit misleading in this context: this official has an originally Arabic title, but by the twelfth century this had become a normal Romance word, presented in the Latin text as the non-Latin alcaldus (since the Latin was, as usual before c.1200, an essentially Ibero-Romance text with a Latinate orthographic and morphological veneer). Indeed, the two chapters with alcaldi in the title do not mention Moslems in the text. There was also a council officer referred to, in the English translation also, as the almutazaf (Medieval Spanish almotacen, a trading standards officer), who had such jobs as collecting the fines payable by those whose latrines caused an offensive smell (chapter XXIII, section 17), but we need not assume that he himself was Moslem. Jews have more status, even though "the Jews are the serfs of the king" (in XXIX. 33); there is a chancery official known as the albedi (another Arabic word in origin) who handled legal cases on behalf of the Jewish residents, and "if it is the iudex"--the Christian equivalent--"who does not do justice for a Jew, he should pay ten aurei to the albedi" (XXIX,7).
The exact quantity of such fines is usually specified--in this case, one aureus a day until the latrine is repaired--so there is much food for thought here for economic historians also. The aureus is the word used for the coin which elsewhere, not only in Toledo but also further north in Alfonso VIII's Castile, is known as a maravedi, subdividable into four menkales. Thus murderers were fined 500 aurei, and the 48 sections of that chapter (XIV) are mostly concerned with who should pay how much when several people are accused of murder; a fine and exile is the recommended penalty. Capital punishment is not prescribed for murder here, but on the other hand "if a woman is surprised with a Moor or a Jew, both should be burned alive" (XI, 48), and "the council should execute Moorish leaders in any way that pleases it" (XXXI,19; that is, the leader of a Moslem military expedition against the town). The proper conduct of raiding parties in the other direction are also considered at length, with the final section decreeing that "whoever robs the house of participants in the raiding party should pay two hundred aurei and depart as an enemy forever" (XXX, 66). Confusingly, other coinage is also specified: "whoever sets fire to another's haystack should pay five hundred solidi and double the damage caused" (XLI, 3). The relationship between a maravedi and the solidus (= twelve copper denarii) varies, and Powers has not been able to specify that here.
But the whole book is a mine of interesting information, which can be recommended to all historians of the twelfth century. As Powers indicates, "while students of these codes must take care in their assumptions regarding the literal application of the codes, the concept that they indicated a viable representation of civic life on the Hispanic frontier merits a certain amount of trust" (17); and in any event, this is good evidence of what influential people thought, even if not necessarily of what they did.