Las hermandades vascas en el marco de la Santa Hermandad como instrumento de control de delitos e impartición de penas

Abstract

When introducing the study of the control of crime and punishment in the territories of Álava, Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, some assumptions need to be stated. First, from their foundation to their suppression, the legal institutions in these territories are linked, not to the Holy Hermandad of the Catholic Monarchs (because the Basque Hermandad is previous to the 15th century), but as steady legal institutions. Second, the jurisdiction field and the courts that run them (just like in other Hispanic and Christianity territories) are many because law during the Old Regime was not territorial but personal and thus, there are several jurisdiction fields and their corresponding courts, to which an ecclesiastical, university, military, merchant or bourgeois subject of the monarchs could have recourse. Third, throughout the development of the legal institutions of the Basque territories, there are two possible historiography procedures. 1) Analyze the legal stages of the First and Second Instances through a dynamic and diachronic development and even consider the last one an appeal or a plea. 2) The second procedure is complementary to the previous one and it describes those courts that are common in their structural organization in the three Basque Provinces and therefore, they are similar to other Courts in other territories in Castile. I am referring to the Courts of law corresponding to guilds and brotherhoods, to the ecclesiastical court, the frontier courts leaded by a mayor and Courts of forging. In this introduction, it's worth mentioning the fact that in the Old Regime and within the "foral" stage, both in medieval and modern centuries, in the three Basque Provinces there is a multiplicity of special jurisdictions that bind together and overlap in society