A contribution to the study of a manorial right in the medieval lands of Alcobaça: the montado dos porcos

Abstract

Among the manorial rights collected by the monastery of Alcobaça were those that could be gathered upon the fruition of the uncultivated lands, particularly the forests, given the range of the potential that such areas had and could offer. Among those rights, one of the most important was the payment of the montado, which in Alcobaça impended only upon the pasture of pigs in the manor woods during the period known as montanheira, between September and January. Omitted in the primitive charters granted by the monastery to its villages, this tax was developed just by the middle of the fourteenth century, giving rise to a long conflict with the local communities, only solved by the new charters of the sixteenth century.