The arancel for innkeepers: a price tariff for the road from Mexico City to Veracruz
A schedule of maximum prices for every inn on the road between Mexico City and the port of Veracruz, issued by the governor of New Spain together with the justices and aldermen of the city. It prices tortillas, wine by the league, hens, rabbits, quail, pork, venison, maize, a bed and an egg; it orders the pigs kept away from the guests' animals; it gives a third of every fine to whoever denounces the breach; and it has to be nailed up at each inn door where anybody can read it.
Why this wins its question: Price regulation in the early Indies is normally discussed, if at all, through the eighteenth-century reglamentos, and the everyday economic law of the first Spanish generation in America is left as an abstraction. This is the document itself: a maximum-price schedule for the inns on the Mexico–Veracruz road, priced in tomines and grains of gold, opening with the price of a pound of tortillas and ending with the order to nail the tariff where every traveller can read it. It shows what a defensive account would not bother to notice and a hostile one would not expect — that the produce of the country is the first article of the tariff, that the freight cost of the interior is written into the price of wine, that a third of every fine goes to the man who reports the innkeeper, and that the enforcement mechanism is the literacy of the guest. The costs and the doubts are on the record too: the print is undated, the editor's price commentary and his claim that the lodging rate survived to 1844 are his own and uncited, and they are separated from the document and given lower confidence rather than folded in.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The document is printed under the heading "ORDENANZAS INÉDITAS. Ó ARANCEL PARA LOS VENTEROS", noted as taken from the same archive and the same legajo as the 1524 and 1525 ordinances. Its opening line names two authorities jointly: these are the ordinances and conditions that the governor of New Spain "é los muy nobles señores Justicias é Regidores de esta ciudad de Temixtitan" command to be kept by the persons who keep inns and mesones on the road from the city to the Villa Rica — the road down to the port that later carried every fleet to Spain.
The first article prices bread and attaches a quality condition to the price: innkeepers may take no more than one tomín for each pound of maize bread made into tortillas, "que sea limpio, é bien cocido" — clean and well cooked. The staple of the country, not of Castile, is the article the tariff opens with.
Wine is priced by distance from the coast, which is a freight rule written as a price rule: half a peso de oro the azumbre where the inn stands ten leagues from the villa of Vera Cruz, a ducado — stated to be six tomines — at twenty leagues, a peso de oro at thirty, and four reales more the azumbre for every further ten leagues beyond the first ten, at which the base rate is set.
The rest of the table distinguishes the produce of the country from the produce of Castile and charges more for the latter: a hen of the land, one ducado of gold; a hen of Castile, a peso and a half of gold; a chicken of Castile, one ducado; a rabbit, four tomines; a quail, two tomines; a pound of fresh pork cooked for the guest, two tomines; a pound of the same salted, four tomines, with the note that these are libretas of sixteen ounces each; fresh venison, two tomines the libreta, and salted, four reales; maize, two tomines the celemín.
Lodging and eggs are capped at the bottom of the scale: two tomines a person for the bed if he brings a horse and one tomín if he comes on foot; and for an egg no more than half a real de oro, which the tariff itself glosses as three grains. The smallest transaction on the road has a legal maximum, expressed in a unit small enough to police it.
Two articles regulate the house rather than the bill. Innkeepers are not to keep pigs or hens anywhere the animals of their guests can wander among them while those guests are lodging; and the inns are to have good mangers, clean, and joined in such a way that the maize cannot fall out of them. The traveller's mount is protected as carefully as the traveller.
Enforcement rests on publicity and on the informer. Every breach costs a hundred pesos de oro, divided in thirds: to the royal treasury, to the public works of the town and council in whose district the inn stands, and "para el denunciador que lo acusare, é denunciare" — to whoever accuses and denounces. And the tariff is to be kept at the door of every inn, "en parte que se pueda bien leer no poniéndolo á lugar ninguno escondido sino públicamente, á donde todos lo pueda ver é leer". It closes "Por mandado de los dichos señores Justicias é Regidores.—Manuel Calvo, escribano público é del consejo."
The print carries no date, no place and no year in its heading, unlike the two sets of ordinances between which it stands, and this object asserts none. What can be said is what the editor states: it comes from the same private archive and the same legajo as the ordinances of 1524 and of 1525, and he prints it between them.
The editor draws two conclusions from the tariff in his own text. The first is about prices: on his reading they were exorbitant, a hen being worth twelve reales while a turkey cost half that, a chicken six reales and an egg half a real, and the rise the want of transport caused in everything can be seen in the higher price put on wine for each ten leagues of greater distance from the coast. The second is institutional: the arancel was published not by the governor's authority alone but by him together with "los muy nobles señores justicias é regidores de esta ciudad de Temixtitan", which he explains by the legislative powers the town council of Mexico then exercised, even in matters not peculiar to the city. Both are the judgements of an interested and, by his own statement, largely uncited writer.
One line of continuity is worth recording with its source named, since it is the editor's own observation and cannot be checked here: writing in 1844 he says that of all these dispositions the payment for lodging remained in force in his own day, at two reales the room, "lo mismo que Cortés fijó" — the same the governor had fixed. Three centuries of a price ceiling is a strong claim from a writer who supplies no reference for it, and the confidence here is low accordingly.