Book: Madrid, medieval territory

The council was the basic organ of the political and judicial organization of the town of Madrid and its villages under its jurisdiction, which reproduced the meetings on a smaller scale. The council meetings dealt with different aspects of the functioning of the city. The main officials were the councilors, who assumed various functions: ordinances and regulations of income or trades, surveillance of economic activities and the jurisdictional term, public works, control of trades and public order, organization of festivities, etc.

The weekly market was held since the middle of the XNUMXth century in different locations: Campo del Rey, Plaza del Arrabal and Plaza de San Salvador. It was celebrated on Thursdays and it was attended by villagers from the towns near Madrid, to exchange or sell their merchandise. A daily market was also held. The council controlled the supply of products and regulated prices, as well as the bidding system: an individual obtained a license to trade a material (meat, fish, oil) and was obliged to give a quantity of the product at a time determined.

The tanneries were facilities that housed dependencies where ponds and tubs followed one another that converted the hides of cattle into hides and sheepskin with the application of lime, urine, excrement and vegetable tannins. Leather was an enduring material. Its facilities were erected far from the population, outside the town walls or next to the banks of rivers and streams due to the bad odors that were generated in the transformation of raw materials. Tanneries played a key role in the development of the late medieval urban economy and the manufacturing sector during the Middle Ages.

Hunting was a recreational activity or paramilitary training typical of noble groups and courtiers, including monarchs. Hunting was ideal to ensure good health and generated joys and pleasures. In Madrid the monarchs spent long stays and practiced hunting on a regular basis in the late medieval centuries. The Castilian chronicler Enríquez del Castillo points out that King Enrique IV built “his own forest house, which was designed in El Pardo, a place of law and order, as well as for the dense mountains that surround it, as well as for the many animals that within the sytio estavan, which is two leagues from Madrid ”.

The celebration of the day of the body of the Lord dates from the miracle of the Mass in Bolsena, officiated by Pope Urban IV, in which blood flowed from the consecrated host. The festivity was recognized in the Council of Vienna in 1311. In it all the parishes had to celebrate processions that walked the consecrated host through the streets in order to be able to admire it and the representations honored and exalted the Eucharist. Until the end of the XNUMXth century there are no reliable data on the organization of the Corpus Christi festival in Madrid, although it is possible that it was celebrated as early as the XNUMXth century as in other Castilian cities. This festival remained as an institutional and economic paradigm in the centuries of the Modern Age.