Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/846

 810 p F U E FUENTE DE CANTOS, a town of Spain in the pro- vince of Badajoz, and midway between the cities of Badajoz. and Seville. It has some trade in the produce of the sur rounding district, which is fertile ; and there are important copper mines in the vicinity. Almost its only manufacture is a coarse sort of frieze. Francisco Zurbaran, the painter, was born there in 1598. Population upwards of GOOO. FUENTE DEL MAESTRE, a town of Spain in the pro vince of Badajoz, about 25 miles S.S.W. of Merida. Its manufactures are insignificant, but it has some trade in corn, wine, oil, garbanzos, and other produce of the broad and fertile plain on which it is situated. Population, 5869. FUENTERRABIA, an ancient town and frontier fortress of Spain, in the province of Guipiizcoa and bishopric of Pamplona, 11 miles E.N.E. of San Sebastian and 2 miles from Irun. It stands on the slope of a hill on the west bank of the Bidassoa, and near the point where its estuary begins. At one time it possessed considerable strategic im portance, and it has frequently been taken and retaken in wars between France and Spain. The &quot; dolorous rout &quot; of Charlemagne, however, which has been associated by Milton with Fontarabia, is generally understood to have taken place not here but at Roncesvalles, which is nearly 40 miles distant. Unsuccessful attempts to seize Fuenterrabia were made by the French troops in 1476 and again in 1503. In a subsequent campaign (1521) these were more successful, but it was retaken in 1524. The prince of Conde sustained a severe repulse undar its walls in 1638, and it was on this occasion that the town received from Philip IV. the rank of city (muy noble, muy leal, y rnuy valerosa ciuclacl). After a severe siege it surrendered to the duke of Berwick in the English war of 1719 (18th June) ; and in 794 it again fell into the hands of the French, who so dis mantled it that it has never since been reckoned by the Spaniards among their fortified places. It was by the ford opposite Fuenterrabia that the duke of Wellington, on the 8th of October 1813, by &quot;one of the most daring exploits of military genius,&quot; successfully forced a passage into France in the face of an opposing army commanded by Soult. Severe fighting also took place here during the Carlist war in 1837. The town is now considerably dilapidated and decayed. Its inhabitants are employed chiefly in salmon and other fisheries. Population, 772. See Palafox, Sitio y Socorro de Fuente-raUa, Madrid, 1639. FUERO. The Castilian use of this Latin word (forum) in the sense of a right, privilege, or charter is most pro bably to be traced to the Roman conventus juridici, other wise known as jurisdiction es, or fora, which in Pliny s time were already numerous in the Iberian peninsula. In each of these provincial fora the Roman magistrate, as is well known, was accustomed to pay all possible deference to the previously established common law of the district ; and it was the privilege of every free subject to demand that he should be judged in accordance with the customs and usages of his proper forum. This was especially true in the case of the inhabitants of those towns which were in possession of the jus italicum. It is not, indeed, demonstrable, but there are many presumptions, besides some fragments of direct evidence, which make it more than probable, that the old administrative arrangements both of the provinces and of the towns, but especially of the latter, remained practi cally undisturbed at the period of the Gothic occupation of Spain. 1 The Theodosian Codex and the Breviariuin Alari- cianum alike seem to imply a continuance of the municipal system which had been] established by tho Romans ; nor does the later Lex Visigothorum, though avowedly designed in some points to supersede the Roman law, appear to have 1 The nature of the evidence may be gathered from Savigny, Gesch. a. Hum. Rcchts. See especially i. p. 154, 259 scq. contemplated any marked interference with the former fora, which were still to a large extent left to be regulated in the administration of justice by unwritten, immemorial, local custom. Little is known of the condition of the subject populations of the peninsula during the Arab occupation: but we are informed that the Christians were, sometimes at least, judged according to their own laws in separate tribu nals presided over by Christian judges ; 2 and the mere fact of the preservation of the name alcalde, an official whose functions corresponded so closely to those of the judex or defensor civitatis, is fitted to suggest that the old municipal fora, if much impaired, were not even then in all cases wholly destroyed. At all events when the word forum 3 begins to appear for the first time in documents of the 10th century in the sense of a liberty or privilege, it is generally implied that the thing so named is nothing new. The earliest extant written fuero is probably that which was granted to the province and town of Leon by Alphonso V. in 1020. It emanated from the king in a general council of the kingdom of Leon and Castile, and consisted of two separate parts ; in the first 19 chapters were contained a series of statutes which were to be valid for the kingdom at large, while the rest of the document was simply a muni cipal charter. 4 But in neither portion does it in any sense mark a new legislative departure, unless in so far as it marks the beginning of the era of written charters for towns. The &quot; fuero general &quot; does not profess to supersede the consuetudines antiquorum jurium or Chindaswint s codification of these in the Lex Visigo thorum ; the &quot;fuero municipal&quot; is really for tho most part but a resuscitation of usages formerly established, a recognition and definition of liberties and privileges that had long before been conceded or taken for granted. The right of the burgesses to self-government and self-taxation is acknowledged and confirmed, they, on the other hand, being held bound to a constitutional obedience and subjec tion to the sovereign, particularly to the payment of definite imperial taxes, and the rendering of a certain amount of military service (as the ancient municipia had been). Al most contemporaneous with this fuero of Leon was that granted to Najera (Naxera) by Sancho el Mayor of Navarre (ob. 1035), and confirmed, in 1076, by Alphonso VI. 5 Traces of others of perhaps even an earlier date are occa sionally to be met with. In the fuero of Cardena, for ex ample, granted by Ferdinand I. in 1039, reference is made to a previous forum Burgense (Burgos), which, however, has not been preserved, if, indeed, it ever had been reduced to writing at all. The phraseology of that of Sepulveda (1076) in like manner points back to an indefinitely remote antiquity. 6 Among the later fueros of the llth century, the most important are those of Jaca (1064) and of Logrono (1095). The former of these, which was dis tinguished by the unusual largeness of its concessions, and by the careful minuteness of its details, rapidly extended to many places in the neighbourhood, while the latter charter was given also to Miranda by Alphonso VI., and was further extended in 1181 by Sancho el Sabio of Navarre to Vitoria, thus constituting one of the earliest written fora of the &quot; Provincias Vascongadas.&quot; In the 2 Compare LenYbke. Schafer, Geschichte S}mniens,. 314; ii. 117. 3 Or rather forus. See Ducange, s. v. 4 Cap. xx. begins ; Constituimus etiam nt Legionensis civitas, qurc depopnlata fuit a Sarracenis in diebus patris mei Veremundi regis, repopulatur per hos foros subscriptos. 5 Mando et concede et confirmo ut ista civitas cum sua plebe et cum omnibus suis pertinentiis sub tali lege et sub tali foro maneat per sa&amp;gt; cula cuncta. Amen. Isti sunt fueros quoc habuerunt in Naxera in diebus Sanctii regis et Gartiani regis. 6 Ego Aldefonsus rex et uxor mea Agnes confirmamus ad Septem- publica suo foro quod habuit in tempore antique de avolo meo et in tempore comitum Ferrando Gonzalez et comite Garcia Ferdinandez et comite Donmo Santio.