Commoners Census 1528

Cover of the publication

Work which is a summary transcription and prepared from documents which comprised file 768 of the General of the Simancas General Archive. This covers the review that Emperor Charles I ordered be carried out on commoners registries, that is, the residents obliged to pay taxes to His Majesty. This established a village by village examination of the number of commoners and the amount they paid will be recalculated to take into account their number and the wealth of each place and to ensure equal distribution of royalties or the contributions from each village.

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  • Format:  Print
  • Publication date: 10-04-08
  • Price (including VAT):  Each volume priced separately

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The National Statistics Institute has for some time been publishing works of a statistical nature from periods in the past for the purpose of being of use to historical research and enabling knowledge of these important creations, of which this country was among the pioneers. An example of this is the Crown of Castille Census of year 1591, re-published by the INE in 1985, which entails the transcription of the only complete population for Castilla carried out in the 16th century. In its Introduction it is considered the first of the western Censuses to merit this name, and which may be considered a national monument of Spanish Statistics.

But this was neither the first nor the only Crown of Castille Census compiled over the course of that century, since we have at our disposal at least seven other Censuses or Municipal Registers, albeit partial ones, among which the one currently being published is of note: Servant Census. It was conducted during the reign of Charles I, it refers to the year 1528, which constitutes a benchmark in the carrying out of large-scale statistics in Europe and a reference point for the start of these works on a grand scale.

The emperor Charles I decided that the servant registers should be revised, that is, those of inhabitants obliged to provide Services to his Majesty, these being taxes approved by the Court, from which the Nobility and the Church were exempt. Therefore he ordered two Intendencia (Geographical areas which were the equivalent of modern-day provinces) commissioners to travel around the villages, checking the number of servants, making a note of the amount that they paid, determining how much they should pay and reporting on the wealth of each place in order to equitably set the royalties or contribution to be made by each village. Compilation took almost eight years, but the data refer to payments made in the years 1527 and 1528. In the year, 1541 a new One-off service was established, which required that the Census be revised. The whole of this data is to be found together in the register kept on the Simancas Archive con la signature with Signature General no. 768.

The work now being published is a revised and sorted transcription of this register, with summaries of reports and comments, as well as some of the compiled data, among which of note is the identification of the villages appearing therein and their current name. Dealing with the content and at the time it was carried out, this work was entitled Servant Census. Carlos I 1528.

CENSUS Corona with exception País Vasco, system FISCAL own, and three last service Corona: Kingdom of Granada (1492), Islas Canarias and Kingdom of Navarra (1512).