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lordship and he retired into a closet, where his lordship opened his reasons for desiring that visit, making no scruple of acknowledging the uneasiness he was under, and conjure ing his visitor frankly to discover his reasons for acquitting the prisoner. The jury man returned for answer that he had sufficient reasons to justify his conduct, and that he was beither afraid nor ashamed to reveal them, but as he had hitherto locked them up in his own breast, and was under no compulsion to disclose them, he expected his lordship would engage upon his honour to keep what he was about to unfold as secret as he himself had done; which his lordship having promised to do, the juryman then proceeded to give his lordship the following account: “ That the deceased being tytheman of the parish where he (the juryman) lived, he had the morning of his decease, been in his (the juryman's) grounds amongst his corn, and had done him great injustice, by taking more than his due, and acting otherwise in a most arbitrary manner. That when he complained of this treatment, he had not only been abused with scurrilous language, but that the deceased had likewise struck at him several times with his fork, and had actually wounded him in two places, the scars of which wounds he then shewed his lordship-that the deceased seeming bent on mischief, and he (the juryman) having no weapon to defend himself, had no other way to preserve his own life, but by closing in with the deceased, and wrenching the fork out of his hands, which having effected, the deceased attempted to recover the fork, and in the scuffle received the two wounds, which had occasioned his death-that he was inespressibly concerned at the accident, and especially when the prisoner was taken up on suspicion of the murder-that the former assizes being but just over, he was unwilling to surrender himself, and to confess the matter, because his farm and affairs would have been ruined by his lying in a gaol so long --that he was sure to have been acquitted on his trial, for that he had consulted the ablest lawyers upon the case, who had all agreed, that as the deceased had been the aggressor, he would only be guilty of man-slaughter at the must--that it was true he had suffered greatly in his own mind on the prisoner's account, but being well assured that imprisonment would be of less ill consequence to the prisoner than to himself, he had suffered the law to take its course that in order to render the prisoner's confinement as easy to him as pos. sible, he had given him every kind of assistance, and had wholly supported his family ever since--that in order to get him cleared of the charge laid against him, he could think of no other expedient than that of procuring himself to be summoned on the jury, and set at the head of them, which with great labour and expence he had accomplished, having all along determined in his own breast, rather to die himself than to suffer any harm to be done to the prisoner.

His lordship expressed great satisfaction at this account, and after thanking him for it, and making this further stipulation, that in case his lordship should happen to survive him, he might then be at liberty to relate this story, that it might be delivered down to posterity, the conference

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The juryman lived fifteen years afterwards; the judge inquired after him every year, and happening to survive him, delivered the above relation,

1763, Nov.

XXXVI. On the Sheep Walks in Spain.

The following letter relates principally to the Sheep and Sheep Walks of Spain; it contains, however, many other very curious particulars relating to the face of the country and its product and contents, the revenues of the king, the character of the ecclesiastics, and the economy of a pastoral life.

I am, Sir, &c.

A Letter from a Gentleman in Spain to Mr. Peter Collinson,

a

F. R. S.

SIR, There are two kinds of Sheep in Spain. The coarsewooled sheep which remain all their lives in their native country, and are housed every night in winter; and the fine wooled-sheep, which are all their lives in the open air, which travel every summer from the cool mountains of the northern parts of Spain, to feed all the winter on the southern warm plains of Andalusia, Mancha, and Estramadura. From computations made with the utmost accuracy, it has appeared, that there are five millions of fine-wooled sheep in Spain, and that the wool and flesh of a flock of ten thousand sheep produced yearly about twenty-four reals a head, which we will suppose to be nearly the value of twelve

English sixpences; of these but one goes elear a-head to the owner yearly, three sixpences a-head go yearly to the king, and the other eight go to the expences of pasture, tythes, shepherds, dogs, salt, shearing, &c.

Thus the annual product of the five millions of sheep amounts to thirty-seven millions and a half of sixpences, a little more or less, of which there are about three millions and a half for the owners; above fifteen millions enter into the treasury, and seven millions and a half go to the benefit of the public. Hence it is the kings of Spain call these flocks in their ordinances, the precious jewel of the crown.

Formerly this jewel was really set in the crown, a succession of many kings were lords of all the flocks; hence that great number of ordinances, penal laws, privileges, and im, munities which issued forth in different reigns for the preservation and special government of the sheep. Hence a royal council was formed under the title of the council of the grand royal flock, which exists to this day, though the king has not a single sheep. Various exigencies of state, in different reigns, alienated by degrees the whole grand flock from the crown, together with all its privileges, which were collected and published in the year 1731, under the title of the Laws of the Royal Flock; a volume in large folio of above 500 pages.

The wars and wants of Philip the First's reign forced that king to sell 40,000 sheep to the Marquis of Iturbieta, which was the last flock of the crown.

Ten thousand sheep compose a flock, which is divided into ten tribes. One man has the conduct of all. He must be the owner of 4 or 500 sheep, strong, active, vigilant, intelligent in pasture, in the weather, and in the diseases of sheep. He has absolute dominion over fifty shepherds and fifty dogs, five of each to a tribe. He chooses them, he chastises them, or discharges them at will; he is the prepositus or chief shepherd of the whole flock. You may judge of his importance by his salary, he has 40l. a year and a horse, whereas the first shepherd of a tribe has but 40s. a year, the second 34s. the third 25s. the fourth 15s. and a boy 10s, a year. All their allowance is two pounds of bread a day each. They may keep a few goats and sheep in the flock, but the wool is for the master; they have only the lambs and the flesh. The chief shepherd gives them 3s. in April, and 3s. in October, by way of regale for the road; and these are all the sweets these miserable wretches enjoy. Exposed every day in the year to all weathers, and every night to lie in a hut. Thus fare and thus live, generally to old age, 25,000 men who clothe kings in scarlet and bishops in purple ; for that is the number computed to keep the fine-wooled sheep of Spain, with the same number of dogs of the large mastiffkind, who are allowed two pounds of bread a-piece a day. I often saw these flocks in the summer sheep walks of the hills and vales of Leon, Old Castile, Cuenca, and Arragon. I saw them in their winter plains of Mancha, Estramadura, and Andalusia. I often met them in their peregrination from the one to the other. I saw and I saw again. One eye is worth a hundred ears, I inquired, I observed, and even made experiments. All this was done when I happily got acquainted with a good plain old Friar, who had a consummate knowledge of all the mechanical, low, minute circumstances and economy of a flock. He told me that he was the son of a shepherd, that he had followed fifteen long years the tribe of sheep his father led, that at twenty-five years of age he begged an old primer, that at thirty he could read, that at thirty-six he had learned Latin enough to read mass and the breviary, that he was ordained by Don Juan Navarro, Lord Bishop of Albarrazin, who, as it is known even to a proverb in Spain, has ordained thousands, declaring these forty years in a loud voice, That a priest is the most precious boon which a bishop cun bestow, in the name of God, to mankind, even though he was as unlearned as an apostle. That thus ordained he entered into the order of St. Francis, that he had never meddled in their affairs these twenty-four years past, but only said mass, confessed, instructed; and gave an eye to about 500 wethers which grazed on the neighbouring downs for the use of the convent; that he had read the Bible, the Lives of the Saints, and the Lives of the Popes, with no other view in the world but to find out all that was said about shepherds; that good Abel was the first shepherd, that all the Patriarchs were shepherds, that the meek shepherd Moses was chosen to deliver the people of God out of bondage, that Saul in seeking his father's flocks, found a kingdom; that David went out from his flock to slay the Philistian giant; that 14,000 sheep was the chief reward Job received for his invincible patience; that Isidro, the protecting Saint of Madrid, was not, as it is vulgarly believed, an husbandman like wicked Cain, but that he was really a keeper of sheep; that the great Pope Sixtus Quintuswas verily and truly a shepherd, and not a swine-herd; that, for his part, he had forsaken his sheep to become a shepherd of men, He had all these things by heart, just as he had all the minute circumstances of the sheep he had followed, and this letter would have been imperfect, hau I not met him.

VOL. 111.

The five millions of sheep pass the summer in the cool mountains and bills above named. Before we begin their itineraries to their winter walks, let us see how a few flocks live in a couple of cantons, which I will choose to serve as examples for all the rest. One is the Montana, the other is Molina Arragon. I select these two for these reasons, because I passed two summers in one, and a summer in the other. One is the most northern part of Spain, and at the greatest distance from the winter walks; the other is towards the east, and the shortest journey the sheep have to make. One is the highest, and the other the lowest, summer walk in Spain, and because one is full of aromatic plants, and the other has none.

At the extremity of Old Castile, there is a territory called the Montana. It is divided into two parts. The low Montana is that chain of mountains which bounds the Cantabrian sea. The city of Santander is its chief port, from whence you ascend southerly, twelve long leagues, a succession of high, craggy mountains, to the town of Reynosa, in the upper Montana, which ascent stretches three leagues more, and then you always descend about fourteen leagues to the city of Burgos, capital of Old Castile. Reynosa is in the centre of an open plain, surrounded by a ridge of high mountains, at the feet of which are low hills of pasture-land: the source of the great river Ebro is an hour's walk to the west of Reynosa. All the spring rain, and snow-waters of the mountains to the north of Reynosa, run into the bay of Biscay. The waters of the southern chain are collected in the river Pisuerga, which, running into the river Douro, are carried to the Atlantic Ocean at Oporto, and all the water that falls into the plains of Reynosa runs with the Ebro, into the Mediterranean, seven leagues below the city of Tortosa. Hence we see that the adjacent parts of Reynosa, divide the water of three seas, which lie north, east, and west. Eight leagues square of this upper Montana, is the highest land of Spain; the mountains rise in the atmosphere to the line of congelation. I see snow from my window this 4th of August that I am writing this. Some years ago there used to fall so much snow, that the people were forced to dig lanes through it to go to church in winter; but there has fallen little snow since the Lisbon earthquake, and some years none at all. It certainly changed the climates of many parts of Spain. No man living saw, nor heard his father say he saw, snow fall in or about Sevilie, till the year 1756, which extraordinary appearance struck a dread into some convents; they rung the bells to prayers, and made processions to appease the

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