The Real Tribunal de la Acordada of New Spain
A road and street police court for northern New Spain, whose name records the moment its sentences stopped being reviewed. The crown's 1787 compilation prints the file: the 1710 restoration of the Santa Hermandad under the Sala del Crimen, the 1719 exemption from reporting to it, the ranks of criminal it was told to exterminate, the flogging it carried out, and the road service the villages paid for it. A directory of 1797 adds the staff, a salaried defence counsel among them.
Why this wins its question: The Acordada is usually met in English in one of two shapes: a line in a survey calling it a rural constabulary that hanged bandits without trial, or a footnote in a book about something else. Neither quotes the regulation, and the regulation is in print and full view. This entry goes to the crown's own 1787 compilation of the autos acordados of the Audiencia of Mexico and prints articles XI to XXI as they stand: the 1710 restoration under the Sala del Crimen, the 1719 Acuerdo that took away the duty to report sentences before executing them and gave the court its name, the three governorships and the roads, the list of criminals to be exterminated with the compilation's own footnote explaining what a macuteno was, the flogging through the accustomed streets, the two thousand ducados fined on any justice who refused help, the complaint that goes back to the same tribunal, the writ that overrides the Marquesado del Valle, and the men and horses the villages had to find with the burden rotated between Spanish and Indian residents. It then sets against that the government's own directory for 1797, which lists the tribunal's three assessors, two procurators and a salaried Defensor by name and address, and says exactly how far a directory can be pressed. The result is neither the constabulary of the survey nor a defence of it: it is the file, with the cost and the counterweight on the same page.
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 court's name is a record of the review it lost, and the compilation that governed it says so. Article XI of the autos acordados abstracted by the oidor Eusebio Bentura Belena reads: "El ano de 1710 se restablecio en este Reyno la jurisdiccion, uso y exercicio de la antigua Santa Hermandad, con arreglo a las Leyes y practica de Castilla, creandose para exercerla un Alcalde Provincial con subordinacion a la Real Sala del Crimen de Mexico, a la que debia dar cuenta con las Causas antes de executar sus sentencias." A royal cedula of 21 December 1715 let the viceroys widen his faculties, and the marques de Valero then exempted him from that duty "con Acuerdo de la Real Audiencia, de dar cuenta con sus sentencias a la Real Sala, con cuyo motivo se dio a dicho Juzgado el nombre de Acordada desde el ano de 1719", approved by royal cedula of 22 May 1722, its first judge Don Miguel Velazquez. The tribunal was named after the Acuerdo that released it from reporting its sentences before carrying them out.
Its reach was three governorships and the open country between them. The same article records that by royal cedula of 26 November 1747 the office of "Alcalde Provincial y Juez de la Acordada de las Gobernaciones de esta Nueva Espana, Nueva Galicia y Nueva Vizcaya" also took in "el de Guarda mayor de caminos, y ultimamente el Juzgado Privativo de Bebidas prohibidas". Article XV, confirming the cedulas of 15 September 1744, 16 September 1745 and 15 September 1771, states the faculty in full: to patrol "por si, por sus Tenientes, Comisarios y dependientes de dia y de noche, en poblado, despoblado y caminos de las tres Gobernaciones de la Nueva Espana, Nueva Galicia y Nueva Vizcaya con inhibicion de qualquiera otro Tribunal". One judge, with deputies and commissioners of his own appointing, held criminal jurisdiction over the roads of a territory larger than Spain, and every other court was inhibited from it.
What it was for is printed in the vocabulary of the streets rather than of the law schools. Article XIII, on the cedula of 26 August 1736 and the royal order of 26 August 1756, has the judge "continue rondando de dia y de noche en esta Capital, aprehendiendo y dedicandose al exterminio de los foragidos, macutenos, ladrones domesticos, ganzueros, capeadores, heridores, matadores, facinerosos y turbadores de la quietud publica" — and the printed footnote on the same page glosses one of those words for readers who would not know it: "Macutenos, se llaman asi los que en la calle hurtan o arrebatan alguna cosa a los que van pasando." The target was ordinary predatory crime, snatch-thieves and highway robbers, not sedition or heresy.
The punishment is on the same pages as the powers, stated without embarrassment. Article XIV gives the judge cognisance of "el delito simple de portacion de armas prohibidas, su fabrica y expendio, executando la pena de azotes por las calles acostumbradas en los casos que se halla impuesta." Carrying a prohibited weapon was tried by this court and punished by flogging through streets the compilation calls accustomed. Any account of the Acordada that prints its jurisdiction and omits this sentence is not quoting the document it claims to be quoting.
The crown protected the tribunal against the rest of the judiciary, and the one remedy it offered against the tribunal ran back to the tribunal itself. By the royal order of 10 April 1783, article XVI, the viceroy is to sustain the judge's jurisdiction "sin permitir que Tribunal ni Ministro alguno le embarace o perturbe el libre exercicio de sus funciones". By the circular of 23 March 1782, article XVIII, the ordinary justices must supply his lieutenants, commissioners and dependants with whatever help they ask, "pena de dos mil ducados de Castilla y privacion de oficio". And by the circular of 20 April 1784, article XIX, those justices must treat the same men with consideration, "bien entendido que quando qualquiera persona tuviese fundada quexa de alguno de ellos podra ocurrir en forma a dicho Tribunal con el seguro de que inmediatamente se le administrara Justicia con la mayor imparcial actividad." A complaint against a commissioner of the Acordada was to be heard by the Acordada. That is a real channel and it is also its own limit, and both belong in the record.
Its writ ran into private jurisdiction as well as royal. Article XX, on the royal cedula of 13 April 1785, orders that "en todo el Marquesado del Valle exerza el Juzgado de la Acordada la jurisdiccion y facultades con que lo hace en los Pueblos y territorios realengos de estas Provincias", and that the Marquesado's own justices comply with its commissioners at once "sin necesidad de ocurrir al Gobernador del Estado a tomar el Cumplase". The seigneurial estate granted to the heirs of Cortes was not exempt from the king's rural police, and the estate's governor was cut out of the sequence that would have let him delay it.
Somebody had to carry the prisoners, and the compilation says who and on what terms. Article XXI, from the bando of 20 July 1766, requires that for "la conduccion de los Reos que vienen de fuera para el Juzgado de la Acordada de esta Capital, todas las Justicias del Reyno faciliten respectivamente los auxilios de gente y cabalgaduras que necesiten, baxo la pena de doscientos pesos, alternandose los vecinos Espanoles y los que llaman de razon con los Indios." The cost of the tribunal's reach was a labour and transport levy on the villages it passed through; and the printed rule is that the levy rotate between Spanish and gente de razon residents and Indian ones rather than falling on the Indians alone. Both halves of that sentence are the crown's own, and neither is worth much without the other.
Ten years after the compilation, the annual directory of Mexico City shows what the tribunal actually consisted of, and the list contains something the usual account of it does not lead one to expect. Under the heading "REAL TRIBUNAL DE LA ACORDADA" the Calendario manual y guia de forasteros for 1797 names a Juez Privativo, "el Sr. D. Manuel de Santa Maria y Escobedo, en su Juzgado" — the same man whose royal title of 31 October 1781 Belena's margin records ten years earlier — then an Asesor and a second, an Asesor interino, a "Defensor, Lic. D. Francisco Guerra y Vega de Manzanares, puente del Carmen", an escribano of the tribunal for business outside the capital, an escribano for Mexico, and two procuradores. Immediately below, the "JUZGADO DE BEBIDAS PROHIBIDAS" is listed under the same judge and the same two assessors, confirming from a second document the union of offices that article XI describes. A court whose reputation is summary justice carried on its establishment three letrados as assessors, two procurators and a salaried defence counsel. A directory records posts and not what the holders did, which is why this entry claims no more than that the posts existed and were filled.
What these two witnesses cannot supply should be said plainly. Neither gives a single case, a count of arrests, a sentence pronounced, an execution carried out, a term of imprisonment, or one word from anybody the tribunal took up. Belena is an oidor of the Audiencia abstracting the acuerdos of the bench he sat on; the guia is an annual directory printed by the government's own printer. The standing charge against the Acordada in the historical literature — that it tried summarily, without the safeguards of the ordinary criminal process, and executed before any review — is not answered by anything read here, and its first element is exactly what article XI records as the origin of the court's name. The defence counsel of 1797 and the complaint channel of 1784 are real and are on the record; they are not a refutation, and this entry does not offer them as one.