Las Siete Partidas — a thirteenth-century Castilian code still cited in 1820 Louisiana
The law book compiled at the court of Alfonso X from 23 June 1256, which Castile never let go: pushed to last place in the order of authorities in 1348 and kept there for five centuries, taught as derecho patrio in the universities, carried to the Indies as the residual law behind every American code, and translated into English at the expense of the state of Louisiana in 1820 because its courts still had to apply it — slave law and all.
Why this wins its question: The Siete Partidas are usually introduced as a monument of medieval Castilian culture and then dropped in the thirteenth century. This object joins the two ends from documents actually opened: the Real Academia de la Historia's 1807 prologue for the composition date read out of the code's own preamble, for the Ordenamiento de Alcalá rule that fixed the Partidas in last and subsidiary place from 1348 to the Novísima Recopilación, for the cédula that nonetheless made them a teaching text, and for the bad Montalvo printings of 1491 that tormented lawyers for three centuries — and then the 1820 New Orleans translation, commissioned by act of the Louisiana legislature of 3 March 1819, for proof that the code was still being applied in an American courtroom, including the title on the marriage of slaves that the translators printed as law in force.
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 date of composition is fixed by the code's own prologue, and the Real Academia de la Historia's editors say so with some irritation in 1807: earlier writers produced "tan gran variedad de dictámenes" about it when they need not have turned many leaves. Alfonso X states that the Partidas were begun when four years and twenty-three days of his reign had passed, on the eve of the feast of St John the Baptist; since he came to the throne on 1 June 1252, work began on 23 June 1256.
Its authority was real but deliberately residual. The law of the Ordenamiento de Alcalá of 1348 that ranked the kingdom's law collections was inserted by the Catholic Monarchs into the first of the laws of Toro and reinserted in edition after edition of the Recopilación, "dándose siempre á las Partidas el postrer lugar, y puede decirse que subsidiario entre las demas colecciones de nuestras leyes". The Partidas were what a judge reached for when nothing above them answered — which, in a legal order made of piecemeal statutes, was often.
Last place did not mean neglect in teaching. The 1807 editors record that the royal cédula prefixed to the just-published Novísima Recopilación ordered that the study of derecho patrio in the universities be made through that Recopilación and the leyes de Partida — so the code ranked last as authority was one of the two texts through which Spanish lawyers were to be trained.
The printed text was bad for three centuries and everyone knew it. Two Seville editions of 1491, prepared in his last years by Alonso Díaz de Montalvo, came out "muy poco correctas", and their faults were copied into the reprints made at Burgos, Venice and Lyon; the 1807 editors say the defects of the current impressions "exercitaban y aun atormentaban demasiado los ingenios de los abogados y los jueces". The Academy's collated edition of 1807 is the answer to that complaint, which is why this object cites its prologue and not its reconstructed medieval text as evidence of anything medieval.
The code's American afterlife is documented from the other side of the Gulf. In 1820 L. Moreau Lislet and Henry Carleton published at New Orleans an English translation of the Partidas undertaken "under the patronage of the legislature of Louisiana, which passed a law on the 3d of March, 1819, authorising it to be executed at the expense of the state". A state of the United States paid to have a thirteenth-century Castilian code put into English because its own courts had to apply it.
The translators describe the Partidas as "the most complete" of the codes containing the laws of Spain, alongside the Fuero Juzgo, Fuero Viejo and Fuero Real, the laws regulating court practice, the royal Ordinances and those of Alcalá, the laws of Toro, the Recopilación de Castilla and the Recopilación de las Indias — and undertake to notice the authority ascribed to each "in Spain, and the countries under her dominions". Their running cross-references through the volume cite the Recopilación de las Indias alongside the Castilian collections, which is the American hierarchy of law as a working Louisiana lawyer of 1820 understood it.
What they translated is a careful measure of what survived. They printed "all that portion of Las Siete Partidas, which is considered as having the force of law in Louisiana", omitting entirely the parts relating to the Catholic faith and to criminal matters as repealed, and giving everything not expressly repealed by the legislature or repugnant to the constitutions of the United States and of the state, "leaving to the proper tribunals to determine whether they are in force or not". The translators refused to decide the question their own title asserts.
The cost of that survival is on the same shelf and should be stated in the same breath. Partida fourth, title V, is "Of the marriage of slaves", and the 1820 volume prints it as living Louisiana law: law 1 holds that the church has long consented that slaves should intermarry, that a slave may marry a free woman and the marriage hold good if she knew he was a slave, and the following laws settle whether a slave owes obedience first to his master or to his wife. The translators note that "there is no title in the Roman laws under this head". The same medieval code that gave enslaved people a recognised marriage was, in 1820, the working slave law of a slaveholding American state — the protection and the machinery are the same text.