How Quiroga's Reglas y Ordenanzas de Santa Fe survived: a will, a notebook without beginning or end in Legajo 69, and an editor who said they were never put into observance
Quiroga's ordinances are cited as the constitution the Santa Fe towns lived under. Their 1766 prologue says less: a draft found in a cathedral archive as a notebook without beginning or end, identified partly by marginal corrections its editor took for Quiroga's hand, written near the end of his life, never copied fair and - the editor's words - never put into observance. Two ordinances are marked missing, one of them the ordinance that fixed the six-hour day.
Why this wins its question: Quiroga's ordinances are quoted constantly - the six-hour day, the distribution by need, the rotating regimiento - and almost never with a word about how the text reached us. The answer is on two pages that sit immediately in front of the ordinances in their first printing, and it changes the weight of every quotation: a notebook without beginning or end, found in Legajo 69 of a cathedral chapter archive, identified in part by marginal corrections its editor recognised as Quiroga's hand, written near the end of his life, left in draft, never copied fair, and - the editor's own words - never put into observance as its author wished; with two ordinances marked missing, one of them the ordinance that enacted the six hours. No English-language account in reach states this, and the ones that quote the six-hour day hardest are the ones that state it least.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Quiroga's will ordered the ordinances kept, and the prologue quotes the clause. The prologue prefixed to the appendix gives clause twelve in direct speech: "Item declaro, y es mi voluntad, que se vean las Reglas, y Ordenanzas, que Yo tengo hechas en el Hospital de Santa Fe, ansi en el de Mexico, como en el de Michoacan, para que vistas se guarden, y cumplan como en ellas esta declarado, porque aquello es mi voluntad, y para aquel efecto las he hecho, y no se exceda cosa alguna; y el Dean, Cabildo de nuestra Santa Iglesia tengan cuenta, y razon como se guarden, y cumplan las dichas Ordenanzas." The testator therefore believed at his death that a text existed and that his cathedral chapter was to enforce it. This is the 1766 editor quoting a document he says he had; the will itself was not seen here.
The text was recovered from an archive, and the finder describes exactly what he found. The prologue records that its author long wanted to see so venerable a piece and that in the archive of the chapter house of his cathedral, in Legajo 69, he found "un quaderno sin principio, ni fin" which its contents easily identified. He gives his grounds: most of the ordinances refer to the hospitals and their institute, particularly the first, on the votive feasts, and the last of those printed, which he says expresses the most individual marks of its author; and the notebook carries in the margin "diferentes correcciones, y adiciones de la misma letra del Venerable Senor, que conozco bien". Every one of these grounds is the editor's own assertion. The notebook was not seen here, no other witness to it is cited, and the identification of the hand rests on the word of a man who was rector of the college Quiroga founded.
The same prologue states that the ordinances were a late draft that was never put into force, and this is the sentence that qualifies every use made of them. It records that the time in which Quiroga made them "fue casi el ultimo periodo de su vida, y por esta razon quedaron en borrador, sin averse podido sacar siquiera una copia en limpio, ni averse puesto en observancia, como lo deseaba su piadoso Author". On the editor's own account, then, the surviving text is a late codification left unexecuted rather than the charter under which the towns were founded, and it postdates their foundation by as much of Quiroga's life as separated the two. Nothing here settles whether the practices it describes were nevertheless the practices of the towns; the editor plainly thought they were, since he elsewhere reports the rectors' accounts as evidence of one of them, but that is an inference and it is his.
The printed text is incomplete on its own showing, and one of the gaps is the most quoted rule of all. At the foot of the ordinance on the orchards and plots the editor notes "Falta la Ordenanza en que se habla de ellos" - the ordinance that established them is not in the notebook. More consequentially, the ordinance on agriculture speaks of "las dichas horas" as of something already fixed, and the editor's note supplies what fixed it: "En las primeras Ordenanzas, que faltan se mandaba, que todos los dias trabajassen seis horas en comun para el cultivo de las tierras comunes, y destinadas a satisfacer las necesidades de los Pobres, e impedir, que los huviesse en el Hospital." The six-hour common day, which is what Santa Fe is chiefly remembered for, therefore appears in the surviving text as a back-reference and in the headings, while the ordinance that enacted it belonged to an earlier redaction the editor calls missing. What the surviving ordinance does say in its own voice is the conversion: the common hours "sale, y podra salir a dos, o tres dias de trabajo de sol a sol en la semana". Whether "que faltan" means missing from this notebook or lost altogether is not stated and is not decided here.
The ordinances were meant to bind two towns and not a system, and the prologue says why. It records that Quiroga did not wish to oblige the other hospitals, although they too were his work, because he looked on these with particularity, "como que el mismo avia fundado el Hospital, la Iglesia, y aun hasta el Pueblo, que antes no le havia", and that for these reasons he always held the patronato and could dispose of it for after his days. The claim commonly made for Santa Fe as a model for the hospitals of New Spain is therefore not a claim the founder's own text makes.
The 1766 editor states his editorial method, and it is more scrupulous than the devotional frame would suggest. He put notes to aid understanding and glossed obsolete words in the margin from the dictionary published by the Real Academia Espanola; he refused to touch certain turns and locutions proper to the style of the sixteenth century because to change them "seria adulterar el texto"; he modernised punctuation and orthography for readers unused to a period in which there was almost no punctuation and much variety in the letters; and although he judged the order of the ordinances wrong, related matters standing wholly apart, he kept the order of the original because he found nothing in it obliging a change, except for the last ordinance, for which the original itself supplied the warrant. A reader is thus told which layer is Quiroga's and which is the editor's, which is not a courtesy every eighteenth-century edition extends.
The edition had a purpose beyond preservation, and it is stated in the same prologue. The editor says he resolved to print the ordinances at the end of the life so as not to defraud the public of a work so respectable and edifying, and adds the wish that those for whom this illustrious man laboured so much, seeing them, may be moved to put them in practice, "si no todas, por lo menos algunas, que pueden ser acomodadas a las costumbres de este siglo". The printing is therefore a proposal as well as a document: a mid-eighteenth-century Michoacan cleric publishing a sixteenth-century labour and welfare code in the hope that parts of it would be revived. That motive is a reason to read the surrounding prose at a discount and is not by itself a reason to doubt the transcription, which the same prologue describes conservatively.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from the two prologue pages and two editorial footnotes of the Mexico 1766 imprint, opened as page scans on 2026-08-30; the notebook of Legajo 69 was not seen, the will was not seen, and no archive in Spain or Mexico is reachable from this container to test either. Nothing here establishes when the first ordinances were made or lost, whether the notebook still exists, whether the transcription is faithful, or what the towns actually did in any decade. It establishes only what the first printing says about its own copy-text - which is more than most citations of these ordinances acknowledge, and which cuts against the confident use of them as a description of how Santa Fe was run.