Hospicio y Hospital Real de Huérfanos, Expósitos y Desamparados of Oviedo, 1752
A royal poorhouse for orphans, foundlings and the destitute begun at Oviedo in 1752, whose printed ordinances carry a first-person argument for it by the minister who promoted it. The case is demographic rather than devotional — he estimates that ninety of every hundred foundlings die, and counts the survivors as future subjects and marriages — and the same pages record that those who did not enter voluntarily after the public proclamation "serian llevados con apremio".
Why this wins its question: The Oviedo hospice appears in English, when it appears at all, as a date in a list of Bourbon poorhouses, and the Spanish literature that treats it sits behind repository hosts this corpus cannot reach. This object works from the 1752 printed ordinances themselves and quotes the argument its promoter put in front of the king: the three ills he named, the ninety-in-a-hundred foundling estimate offered as his own, the hundred marriages a year he expected from gathering the orphans in, the scriptural case for compelling the able-bodied, and the admission that the pregon and the threat of apremio had not extinguished begging. The achievement and its coercive machinery are quoted from the same volume rather than argued from opposite sides of a debate.
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 title page reads "ORDENANZAS APROBADAS POR S. M. PARA EL REGIMEN, Y GOVIERNO DEL HOSPICIO, Y HOSPITAL REAL DE HUERFANOS, EXPOSITOS, Y DESAMPARADOS, QUE DE SU ORDEN, Y BAXO SU PATRONATO, Y PROTECCION SE HA EMPEZADO A ERIGIR EN LA CIUDAD DE OVIEDO CAPITAL DEL PRINCIPADO DE ASTURIAS", with "UNA NARRACION HISTORIAL DEL origen, progresos, y estado actual de dicho Hospicio", dedicated to Fernando VI "POR MANO DEL EXCELENTISSIMO SEÑOR MARQUES DE LA ENSENADA" — that is, through the secretary of state for war, marine, the Indies and the treasury, whose offices are printed in full on the dedication leaf.
The narrative is written in the first person by a royal minister who states his own qualification for writing it — "EL CARACTER DE Ministro publico, a que me ha elevado la clemencia del Rey" — and who says he applied his reading of political books to "tres dolencias" of the monarchy: "la mendicidad fingida", "la falta de disciplina en la verdadera", and "la despoblacion, que se puede reputar como efecto de las dos, que le preceden". The house is presented as the remedy for all three at once.
The central figure in the case is a mortality estimate. The writer names as the fifth ill "el de la mendicidad, en que incluyo el abandono hasta aora vergonzosamente practicado, de los Huerfanos, y Expositos", and adds "Me atrevo a decir, que de los cien Expositos, que salen a luz, peligran los noventa" — lost either to the haste of a furtive exposure made "sin los resguardos que merece la vida de un racional" or to "la inhumanidad de una esquiva crianza". It is his own estimate, offered as such, not a count of registers, which is why the confidence is held below the tier.
The ten survivors are then counted as a loss too, in terms that show what the institution was for: they come to be "mas que alivio, carga de la republica, porque empieza su grosera educacion por el oficio de pedir limosna", they fall in with unruly company, "y ultimamente se precipitan a la vida delinquente de robar". Rescue and public order are argued together on one page.
The reasoning is populationist. Marriage is called the one remedy for depopulation "dictado por Dios, y por la naturaleza", the writer records having said that gathering in the orphans and foundlings could produce "en solo este Principado cien matrimonios al año", and he judges he was moderate in saying so. He places the plan in a line of Spanish administrative thinking by invoking the precautions established by the Junta de reformacion and the reflections of Diego de Saavedra Fajardo on the device "Ex fascibus fasces".
The coercion is on the record in the document's own words. It recites that the house had its beginning on the first day of the year after a public pregon calling on those who were truly poor to withdraw into it voluntarily, "con apercivimiento de que no lo haciendo, serian llevados con apremio"; and it admits the measure failed of its purpose, since "este saludable remedio no alcanza a extinguir el pernicioso vicio de la holgazaneria", able-bodied men still begging furtively and boys "resistiendose a tomar oficio por estar bien hallados con la vida delinquente de la ociosidad".
Behind the compulsion is an explicit doctrine of obligatory labour, argued from scripture rather than from police. A feigned poor man, the narrative says, is nothing but "un contrabandista contra la ley promulgada en la sentencia eterna, y primera del mundo, de que todo viviente vincule su alimento en el afan, y en el sudor", and it stacks Job, David, Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiastes and Paul to Timothy behind the point, the last cited as condemning "a la privacion de alimentos al que no trabaja".
The Oviedo house is presented as one of a set, and the funding named is ecclesiastical rather than fiscal: the writer cites Geronimo de Uztariz's Theorica y practica de comercio for Cardinal Astorga, archbishop of Toledo, having sustained the Hospicio of Madrid with "copiosas continuas limosnas" and with the soundness of his directions, and records that the archbishop of Zaragoza had assigned the Casa de Misericordia there fifty caices of wheat a month, worth fifty doblones in ordinary years and three hundred pesos in the years then current.
The purpose written into the royal order is maintenance and instruction together: the king commanded a hospice erected "en que sean alimentados, e instruidos los Pobres de esta Ciudad, y Principado" — the Principality of Asturias, not the city alone — and the ordinances that follow were approved by the crown for its government under royal patronage and protection.