Interesting particulars of the old Toledan gremios generally will be found in the municipal archives of this city, in the Ordenanzas para el buen régimen y gobierno de la muy noble, muy leal é imperial ciudad de Toledo (reprinted in 1858); in Martín Gamero's History of Toledo; and in the Count of Cedillo's scholarly monograph, Toledo in the Sixteenth Century.
[69] That is, the ponderous structure known as the Miguelete, which stands unfinished to this day.
[70] The Count of Torreánaz quotes an earlier instance, relative to another city, from the shoemakers' ordinances of Burgos, confirmed by the emperor Alfonso in a.d. 1270. These laws decreed, obviously with the purpose of limiting the number of apprentices, that every master-craftsman who engaged an apprentice was to pay two thousand maravedis “for the service of God and of the hospital.” Similar legislation, lasting many centuries, was in force elsewhere, for Larruga says that at Valladolid, although the city produced fourteen thousand hats yearly, most of the master-hatters had no apprentices in their workshops, and only one oficial.
[71] E.g., the silk-weavers (Statute of 1701). “Que ningun collegial de dit collegi puixa matricular francament mes de tres aprenents y si volgués tenirne mes, hatja de pagar á dit collegi deu lliures, moneda real de Valencia per cascú dels que excedirá de dit numero.”
[72] It is not often, for instance, that we meet with notices of Spanish craftsmen such as Miguel Jerónimo Monegro, a silversmith of Seville, who at his death, towards the middle of the sixteenth century, was in a position to bequeath the following money and effects: 15,000 maravedis to his servant, Catalina Mexia, 6000 maravedis to Juan Ortiz, “a boy that was in my house, that he may learn a trade,” 6000 maravedis yearly to his slavewomen, Juana and Luisa, and a black mule to his executor, Hernando de Morales.—Gestoso, Diccionario de Artífices Sevillanas, Vol. II., p. 256.
[73] This did not happen only at Valencia. The Cortes assembled at Valladolid in 1537 complained that it was “tolerable that costly stuffs should be worn by lords, gentlemen, and wealthy persons; but such is become our nation, that there is not an hidalgo, squire, merchant, or oficial of any trade, but wears rich clothing; wherefore many grow impoverished and lack the money to pay the alcabalas and the other taxes owing to His Majesty.”
Fernandez de Navarrete stated, in 1626, that “the wives of common mecánicos (i.e. craftsmen) furnish their dwellings more luxuriously than titled personages of the realm were wont to furnish theirs some few years ago,” and that hangings of taffeta or Spanish guadamecíes were now regarded with contempt, being replaced, even in the homes of the moderately well-to-do, by sumptuous fabrics of Florence and Milan, and by the costliest Brussels tapestry.—(Conservación de Monarquías, p. 246).
[74] Larruga, in Vol. XVIII. of his Memorias, inserts an account of the heavy debts incurred by the gremios of Valladolid, upon the celebration of various of their festivals.
[75] The treatment of distinguished craftsmen by the Spanish church was often sheerly villainous. A document, inserted by Zarco del Valle among his collection of Documentos Inéditos para la Historia de las Bellas Artes en España, p. 362, and in the handwriting of “Maestre” Domingo (see Vol. I., pp. [148], [149]), states that after making the choir-reja for Toledo cathedral, “so richly wrought, that in the elegance and rarity thereof it far surpasseth all that has been witnessed in our time, whether in his majesty's dominions or abroad,” and expending on it “all the money I had earned in my youth,” this eminent rejero found himself by now “owing a great quantity of maravedis, seeing that I am utterly without resources,” concluding by an appeal to the archbishop to “take heed how that I shall not perish through such poverty, and my wife and children in the hospital.”
In another document the same artificer complains that in producing the aforesaid reja, he had sacrificed “not only my labour, but my property to boot, having been compelled to sell my house and my inheritance to compensate me for my losses,” adding that the cathedral authorities had violated their engagement with him.