Common Lands and Jurisdiction at the Border (Gipuzkoa and Navarra, 17th and 18th centuries)
Camilla de Freitas Macedo
Since the Middle Ages, the concepts of property and jurisdiction had developed an unparalleled complexity, creating a mosaic of overlapping domains and authorities within the same territories. Beginning in the sixteenth century, new economic pressures – such as population growth, shifting markets, and the exploitation of new resources – alongside political developments like Atlantic expansion and continental imperial rivalries, led to a proliferation of new political bodies vested with jurisdictional power.
From a legal-historical perspective, this expansion challenged the effectiveness of traditional legal categories designed to delimit power, as they now had to be applied to vastly broader and more diverse territorial contexts. Consequently, from the seventeenth century onward, jurisdictional bodies multiplied both within the Iberian Peninsula and overseas. In non-European territories, the Iberian Crowns frequently sought to assimilate indigenous lands by formally recognizing the jurisdiction of local communities.
This new jurisdictional pattern, both in colonial and European settings, generated a novel language for disputes over common lands. In the Basque region, municipalities benefited from the Crown’s policy of selling jurisdictional rights. Given its strategic position on the border with the recently conquered Kingdom of Navarre and with France, even very small hamlets could acquire these jurisdictional privileges, thereby securing their loyalty to the Crown amidst continental imperial disputes. As municipalities and their representatives gained jurisdiction, they increasingly attempted to apply a proprietary logic to these lands. The main consequence was the intensification of disputes amongst territories, and the strengthening of the role of the Crown and its institutions as mediator of those conflicts. Despite the importance of this process, the historiography focusing on common lands in the Basque region has been mainly interested in the process of its privatisation, which began in the late 18th century and lasted until the late 19th century, under the most frequently voiced justification of unproductiveness of common lands. However, much less work has been done on the disputes over the commons during the centuries marked by municipalisation (specially 16th and 17th). This project investigates how the process of municipalization could have reshaped the legal status of common lands in the Basque region. Its analysis will be based primarily on lawsuits between jurisdictional bodies and the discursive strategies they employed before the Juntas Provinciales de Guipúzcoa.
Image: Curso del Rio Bidasoa comprendido entre Fuenterrabía y Behobia, 1609, Archivo General de Simancas (Spain)
