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If we consider childhood as an apprenticeship, a time during which the individual learned those lessons necessary for adult life within the villages, then marriage was the point at which one became a full member of the community. Most adults in Baguena and Burbaguena were married, and remarriage was expected for widows and, even more, for widowers. David Herlihy's remark about the young widowers of Florence in the 1400s, that they "promptly remarried," is applicable to the Jiloca valley in the 1600s as well. 1 Rarely did a full year pass before a widower in the Jiloca valley, particularly one with children, remarried. But remarriage was more than a way to ensure the care of one's children. Marriage, rather than single life, was the expected state for adults in Baguena and Burbaguena, whether old Christian or new Christian. | 1 |
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Defining Marriage | |
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From the church's perspective, marriage was a sacrament, with its attendant rituals. The first of these involved the reading of the banns. Several weeks to a month afterward, the marriage was solemnized, usually—but not always—within the church. Both the reading of the banns and the marriage ceremony itself were typically recorded in the parish registers. 2 | |
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Beyond the church's definition of marriage as a sacrament, marriage was also a legal state. Three elements were included in this legal definition of marriage: the words of promise recited before the priest and other witnesses, carnal knowledge, and the continued sharing of residence. As the documents of the time put it, a married couple ate at the same table and shared the same bed. 3 | |
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Financial Arrangements | |
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Marriage was, in addition, a business arrangement—an agreement to share not only the same table and the same bed, but also the other property that was given to the couple at the time of their marriage. In Aragon, it was customary to list this property in a written marriage contract, recorded by a notary. While these contracts clearly are related in some fashion to earlier written promises of property transfer, made at the time of betrothal, 4 the property and funds promised in the marriage contracts are more than dowries. In the Jiloca valley in the sixteenth century, the marriage contract had evolved into an agreement in which the parents of both bride and groom promised money or other goods directly to the married couple. Most examples of family donations at the time of marriage are one-sided, acting as an inducement to marriage or as a bride-price; within the Jiloca valley, however, the value of goods donated by each family was equal in case after case. This type of property re-organization at the time of marriage has been called "bi-lateral" or "diverging." 5 The purpose of these gifts was clearly to assist the married pair in establishing a new economic, as well as social, unit within the existing community. Both the bride and groom's families shared the responsibility of endowing the couple, and it was often stated explicitly within the marriage contract that the donations were designed to help the couple in setting up a household. | |
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Arrangements might be as simple as the contract relating to the marriage of Domingo Monio and Juana Royo, to which each side brought 3,000 sueldos, 6 or as straightforward as Pasqual Monio's contract with Agueda Armillos, which expressed the wish that "all and whatever goods and furnishings and property he possesses will be theirs jointly," 7 but typically marriage contracts listed houses, land, and even wheat 8 as the commodities offered to the couple. Looking at a typical contract may help us to understand how such arrangements were made. | 5 |
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At the marriage of Miguel Vela and Ysabel Rubio, for example, Vela's parents donated a vineyard, half of a property they owned to the north of Baguena, a second vineyard, just planted, and two other parcels of farm land, as well as 300 sueldos. Ysabel Gil, the bride's mother, for her part contributed a vineyard in the same region as the Velas' and two garden plots on the outskirts of the village. 9 | |
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At this point, the Gil contribution failed to equal the Velas'. But we must include, in our calculations, the fact that Ysabel signed a document in which she explicitly renounced her rights of inheritance as a widow. Such a concession was one way to balance unequal property contributions. Ana Buriel, the miller's daughter in Baguena, signed a similar promise to forgo her rights as a widow. Her parents, Francisco Buriel and Maria Gascon, had donated 1,100 sueldos when she married Jayme Monterde of Anento, but Jayme's father, Juan, had offered 1,500 sueldos. | |
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It is clear that the renunciation of the rights of widowhood was used as a way to balance a lower contribution from the bride's side; when the bride's family was able to equal, or better, the donations of the groom's family, the signed agreement did not include a renunciation of the widow's right to inherit. For example, Gracia Ferrer's parents donated 9,000 sueldos, a portion of a house and corral, and several parcels of farm land to the marriage; her new husband, one of two children of a widow, brought only 4,000 sueldos and a garden, recently planted. The couple did execute a property agreement, or carta de hermandad, but it did not include a renunciation of Gracia's rights as a widow. 10 | |
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The rights of a widow could be substantial, and might be spelled out in the contract explicitly, as they were when Catherina Hernandez of Daroca married Miguel Navarro of Calamocha. Catherina was well provided for should Navarro die: | |
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Funds were given by both families with the implicit understanding that there was, or would be, a valid marriage, and a valid marriage, at this time, was one that produced children. This wish for a productive marriage may have been implicit in the statement made by Apolonia Lopez, the widow of Geronimo Gil de Bernabe; Lopez began her list of goods allotted to her daughter Catalina's marriage by wishing in general that God be served. 12 In other cases, however, the requirements of the contracting parties were much more specific. When Domingo Sebastian and Catalina de Miedes of Castejon married, the gift of a pair of oxen and a farm valued at 1,400 sueldos was made conditional upon the couple producing offspring. 13 The notarial protocols for the city of Teruel in the same time period yield a similar document for an area far south of the Jiloca valley. There, in the marriage of the notary Pedro Garcia and Beatriz Mesquita, the Garcia family offered 20,000 sueldos, specifying that 10,000 was for the house and the other 10,000 was to be paid only after Beatriz had children. 14 | |
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Property agreements, which we have mentioned previously in relation to marriage contracts, were actually documents in their own right. In these agreements, usually executed around the time of the marriage, the couple agree to hold all property and possessions in common while both are alive. A couple without any other sort of marriage contract might enter into such a property agreement, as did, for example, Bartolome Lopez the saddle maker and his wife Orosia Paracio. 15 But these agreements could also be used to equalize a disparity in the property arrangements of the marriage contract, because as part of the agreement, a wife could explicitly renounce her right to property upon her husband's death - her rights of widowhood. We have encountered this renunciation previously, in the marriage arrangements of Ysabel Rubio and Ana Buriel. | |
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Explicit contracts executed before a notary, whether full marriage contracts or simply letter contracts, were not a necessary part of a valid marriage. In many cases, no marriage contract or agreement can be found for couples in Baguena or Burbaguena, and I was unable to locate a single example of a new Christian marriage contract in the notarial protocols I examined. It is reasonable to assume that such agreements became explicit legal documents where there was a great deal of money and/or property involved; it is not unreasonable to assume that, for those of middling means, a formal agreement executed by a notary was not common, whether those couples were old or new Christians. Of course, this would imply that the "newly converted" couples of Burbaguena, and the lone new Christian pair found in Baguena's parish register in the 1590s, were not among the region's wealthiest citizens—something that the record of funds borrowed within the villages tends to confirm. 16 | |
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The financial burden associated with marriage and marriage agreements fell most often upon the parents or legal guardians, 17 but on occasion (perhaps after a father's death) a woman could rely upon brotherly support. Young Miguel de Fuentes, a carpenter by trade, but more a youth than an adult, gave his sister Juana and her future husband 1,000 sueldos, 18 and Pedro Gil de Bernabe, a notary, explicitly required in his will that his son, Geronimo, make a payment of 6,000 sueldos to Geronimo's sister, Ysabel, at the time of her marriage. 19 The fact that financial obligations associated with marriage could be assigned to siblings is a strong indication that marriage choices were part of a family strategy, and not just an individual decision. This was as true for male children as for female, as we learned earlier with the case of Juan Royo, who was disinherited because he thought he could marry whomever he wished. | |
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Marriage and the Outside World | |
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Since the choice of a marriage partner was a family decision as well as an individual one, the pattern we observe in marriages in the late sixteenth century in Baguena and Burbaguena is all the more significant. As the seventeenth century approached, both villages opened to the outside world in terms of marriage choices. No longer was the pool of potential marriage partners limited to those within the villages; now, villagers married not only those from neighboring villages—an option that was exercised throughout the century—but, increasingly, they selected spouses who came from as far away as Cuenca or Huesca, or even Castile (still a foreign country to the Aragonese) or France. | 15 |
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In Baguena, during the period 1571-1575, of the thirteen marriages recorded, only one was to an outsider, a man from nearby Val de Campo. Thirty years later, the number of recorded marriages for a five-year time period (1601-1605) had risen dramatically, to 54; of this number, fourteen were to outsiders. Every fourth marriage in the village was to someone not from Baguena. And while the villages and towns nearby, including Burbaguena, accounted for the majority of these outsiders, some husbands had come from as far north as Huesca, and as far south as Albarracin. Two spouses were from outside Aragon: one came from the "kingdom of Castile" to marry his bride, and the other was native to the principality of Vianne. | |
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Burbaguena had a larger population than Baguena, and there were considerably more marriages recorded there than in Baguena for the years 1571-1575: the parish register yields 56 marriages for this period. Approximately one in every four of these marriages was to an outsider and, while many of these outside marriages were to those from the immediate region—Luco, San Martin, Daroca—one bridegroom came from Saragossa, and one bride from Cuenca. In the early 1570s, while Baguena's marriages were still predominantly among villagers, Burbaguena had already begun a pattern of "outside" marriages, with some outsiders coming from a significant distance. By the early 1600s, the number of recorded marriages in Burbaguena had increased very little—63 for the period 1601-1605—but prospective spouses within the village were casting their nets even wider. There were four natives of France marrying brides from this little village, including one from Armagnac. Cuenca is represented again, as are the dioceses of Valladolid and Albarracin. | |
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If we had examined Baguena alone, we might be tempted to conclude that the outward move in the early 1600s was linked to population growth, since, when population was relatively low and marriages were few, there seemed to be little inclination to marry outside the village. But data from Burbaguena shows that the tendency to choose a marriage partner from outside the village was not necessarily linked to population growth. What we do see, in both villages, is a trend that incorporated ever more distant parts of the world into the intimate life of each village. | |
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It is clear that outside marriage partners did, for the most part, remain within the villages after marriage. If, for example, we consider those couples with at least one "outsider" married within Burbaguena during 1601-1603, only seven of the seventeen couples failed to register a birth in Burbaguena by 1606. (See Table 3.) Of these seven, two couples were "double outsiders"—that is, neither husband nor wife was from Burbaguena. For the remaining five, it is the husband, in each case, who was the outsider, and we may presume that he took his bride home. For those who remained, in some cases, the baptismal records, read carefully, indicate what role the outsider made for himself within his adopted village. Domingo Locano of France, the father of Catalina and Diego, is referred to as a "surgeon"; Jacobo Laurengui, who married Maria Alcayde, had become "Jacques the baker" in the parish records by the time of his daughter Juana's baptism. Perhaps the best proof that outsiders stayed within the community is the case of Francisco Diaz, a stranger "from the Indies"—that is, someone who had returned from New Spain. Diaz married Maria Perivanes in Burbaguena in 1574. In 1601, Diaz married again, this time to a 60--year-old widow within the village. The priest estimated Diaz' age at the time of this marriage to be over 100. 20 | |
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Old and New Christians | |
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If new Christians were an integral part of the community in which they lived, at least in this part of Aragon, surely the most telling proof would be a pattern of intermarriage between old Christians and Moriscos. | 20 |
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We know that intermarriage between Muslims and Christians was part of the history of medieval Spain. Law codes from the period made provisions for such unions. Did this intermarriage continue through the sixteenth century? It is a question that is difficult to answer for the Jiloca valley. There are no marriage contracts within the notarial protocols that include a new Christian spouse, and parish records are not very helpful. In part, this is because—for whatever reason—the parish priests in Burbaguena did not often indicate whether parties to a marriage were old or new Christians. Indeed, from 1540 through 1620 only nine recorded marriages included spouses identified as "newly converted." 21 One of these marriages took place in 1563, when the 40-year conversion moratorium was expiring in Aragon, and the notation became common in the birth register; four more cluster in the late 1570s and early 1580s, and the remaining four are in the early 1590s. In contrast, the register of deaths specified whether the deceased was Morisco from its inception in 1538 forward, and apparently identified each Morisco as such; the register of births begins to identify Morisco parents in the early 1560s, near the expiration of the moratorium on required conversion granted to Aragon's Muslim population. Since Burbaguena's Morisco population confessed en masse in 1538 before the Inquisition, it is reasonable to assume that the designator "newly converted" does not mean that there were practicing Muslims resident in Burbaguena until the 1560s. The appearance of this label in the 1560s birth and marriage registers tells us more about what was happening outside the village than what was happening within it. | |
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We could assume that the lack of identification of Morisco spouses is a good indicator that intermarriage took place frequently enough that it was not worth commenting upon, but to do so would be to distort the information that the marriage lists do yield. It seems to have been far more common for new Christians to marry other new Christians, and for old Christians to marry other old Christians, than for mixed marriages to have taken place in Burbaguena. This is not to say that there were no mixed marriages at all. But those that did occur—for example, the marriage of Juan Roldan and Elizabeth Navarro, in May of 1553 22 —were more the exception than the rule. | |
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In general, throughout the sixteenth century, both old and new Christians within Baguena and Burbaguena tended to marry other villagers, sometimes within the proscribed degrees of consanguinity. Between 1545 and 1564, ten marriages—approximately four percent of all marriages for the twenty-year period—required dispensations from the authorities because the bride and groom were related. Significantly, only three of these marriages involved new Christians. One of the arguments made about Moriscos in the sixteenth century is that, following North African patterns, they tended to marry close relatives. 23 In the Jiloca valley, marrying a close relative may have been a result of factors other than one's Moorish heritage. Indeed, the one marriage in which the bride and groom were most closely related, to the second degree of consanguinity, was an old Christian-old Christian marriage. 24 | |
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In fact, the "newly converted" from the Jiloca valley married new Christians from other locations throughout the century. Albarracin and Daroca, both of which contained morerias, were particularly popular sources for spouses. 25 Does this imply that, as the Inquisition feared at the time, there was a sort of Morisco network throughout Aragon, capable of revolt or subversion? Probably not. Marriages between the new Christians of Burbaguena and residents of what the Inquisition came to call "Morisco locations" seem to follow a pattern of relationships similar to that seen among old Christians. In 1574, for example, the new Christian Miguel de Cuellar of Daroca married Maria de Agreda. They required a dispensation, being related to the third degree. In 1583, Domingo de Cuellar, also of Daroca, married another Maria de Agreda of Burbaguena. 26 No children are recorded in the Burbaguena register for either Cuellar family after the marriage ceremonies, so we may presume that each Maria returned with her husband to Daroca (and, in fact, this is confirmed in the records from 1610, when Luis de Cuellar of Daroca, Miguel's son, 27 returned to Burbaguena to wed Maria Villanueva). The likelihood is that Luis knew his wife-to-be because his mother's immediate family was from Burbaguena, and so he had family members within the village. In fact, in the 1580s, the Villanueva family lived next door to two of the Agreda families. 28 Even where a bride left the village to return to her husband's town, the bonds of community appear to have continued. It is worth remarking, too, that we know about the Cuellar, Agreda, and Villanueva family marriages because each was recorded in the parish register by the old Christian pastor of Burbaguena, and we know that the Villanuevas and Agredas were neighbors because of documents of sale and other business agreements found in the notarial protocols. It is difficult, then, to perceive the new Christians of Burbaguena as a group that chose to isolate itself from the larger life of the village; on the contrary, they participated openly in its religious and economic activity. 29 | |
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Marriage and the Community | |
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Marriage in the Jiloca valley in the sixteenth century had economic and social dimensions, as well as a religious one. The documents that explicitly concern the economics of marriage tell us that bride and groom were expected to contribute equally to the marriage, and the quick acceptance of "outsider" spouses within the community, as well as the continuing links to family and community among those who left to marry, are good evidence that the community was cohesive. The marriage ceremony itself pointed to this sense of community: then, as now, marriage was a public event, and the words of the ceremony, fixed by the Council of Trent in the mid-1500s, called upon the whole community to welcome the couple. In the parish registers of Baguena and Burbaguena, parish priests dutifully recorded not only the names of the official witnesses at the wedding, but also the names of the other guests. In the 1580s in Burbaguena, this pattern of weddings being open to the community was briefly broken. Dr. Oro requested that he be allowed to hold his a marriage ceremony within his home, instead of within the parish church. Not to be outdone, the other physician in the community, Dr. Romeo, sought and obtained ecclesiastical permission to hold his daughter's wedding in his own home that year. The following year, just one other request for a "private" wedding was honored: that of Inez de Heredia's father. This was a trend that was short-lived, lasting only six months. From 1584 on, the communities of Baguena and Burbaguena returned to marrying their children in the parish church, and welcoming the couple into the larger community with the ceremony. In Baguena and Burbaguena, the bride and groom were thus welcomed, whether they were old Christians or new, bakers from France or strangers returning from New Spain. | 25 |
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In Baguena and Burbaguena, marriage was a ceremony that reaffirmed community bonds and, at the same time, reached out to the larger world, but it was a ceremony that held little interest for outside authorities. Neither the archbishop in Saragossa nor the Aragonese Inquisition showed particular interest in marriages within the villages. 30 They were interested, however, in the rituals and practices surrounding death, a topic we will now consider. | |
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Notes: Note 1: David Herlihy, Tuscans and their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) Back. Note 2: It is interesting to note that the Malikite tradition within Islamic law, the legal tradition that was typically followed in Al-Andalous and the Maghreb, also called for a marriage ceremony that involved separate dates for contract and ceremony. Back. Note 3: See AMC, PN Baguena, 59 (1571) for one example of this standard wording: "Legitimate marriage was contracted with legitimate words ... before Holy Mother Church ... and was consummated in carnal knowledge, and they became legitimate spouses, settled in the same house with one table and one bed... ." ("... fue contraydo matrimonio legittimo por palabras legittimas ... en faz de la Santa Madre Yglesia ... y pro copula carnal consumado y fueron hechos legittimos conjuges en in mesma cassa estando en una messa y cama... .") Back. Note 4: My own favorite example of an earlier agreement is found in a series of documents within the Teruel Cathedral Archive relating to the marriage of one Catherina de Funes and Martinez de Marzilla. Catherina, whose name is one of the few words abbreviated in the manuscript announcing her marriage and inviting guests to celebrate, apparently was a self-confident woman; when she did not receive all that she was promised at the time of marriage, she took Martinez to court in Teruel, and eventually won a settlement that included full ownership of his mill. AIC Teruel, pergs. 345 and 394. Back. Note 5: Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) Appendix I.Instead of considering the effect such a reorganization has upon inheritance, I examined the actual arrangements through which the two families being joined by marriage sought to balance their contributions to the new household. Back. Note 6: AMC, PN Baguena, 60 (December 24, 1572). Back. Note 7: AMC, PN Baguena, 59 (October 19, 1569). Agueda's parents, in turn, offered, "the sum and quantity of three thousand sueldos," permitting us to conclude that Pascal's estate was worth approximately this amount. Back. Note 8: The wheat may have had symbolic value but, since the Jiloca valley produced wheat as well as wine, it is more likely that wheat was a valuable commodity in its own right. An accounting of debts in 1609 (AMC, PN Baguena, 145, suelto) lists debts owed in coin and in wheat. See the section on business. Back. Note 9: AMC, PN Baguena, 65 (May 10, 1584). Back. Note 10: Cartas de hermandad, or property agreements, appear throughout the notarial protocols of Baguena, although they are not often discussed in the work of other researchers. In "Herencia y Matrimonio en la Valencia del Seiscientos," in Familia, Grupos Sociales y Mujer en Espana (s. XV-XIX) (Murcia: Universidad, 1991) Rosa V. Matali Vidal discusses the carta dotal in conjunction with marriage contracts, but defines this agreement very clearly as a list of the property the wife brought to the marriage. The cartas de hermandad are quite different: they were essentially an explicit agreement between a man and a wife to hold all property in common, while each was alive—a sort of early community property agreement. That the cartas exist at all may be a good indication that, although both bride and groom's families contributed to the couple's estate, the property was presumed to be under the husband's control unless other arrangements were made. Cartas appear to have been used as an equalizer in cases where contributions from the two families were unequal, particularly in terms of a wife explicitly renouncing her right to property should her husband die. Back. Note 11: AMC, PN Baguena, 65 (April 22, 1584) "... in casso de dissolucion del presente matrimonio por muerte del dicho Miguel Navarro la dicha Catherina haya de tener y tenga viuded foral en veynte mil sueldos Jaqs. En los Bienes hazienda y censales del dicho Miguel Navarro... ." Back. Note 12: AMC, PN Baguena, 147, contains a memorandum of " what Senora Polonia Lopez, widow of the erstwhile Geronimo Gil de Bernabe, will give to her daughter Catalina Gil de Bernabe in anticipation of her marriage, in which may God be served." ("lo que la Sra Polonia Lopez viuda del quondam Geronimo Gil de Bernabe en contemplacion de matrimonio suo en que dios fuere servido") The total amount of the gift was 16,000 sueldos, in cash, land, and a promissory note to be paid out over four years. Back. Note 13: AMC, PN Baguena, 144 (May 20, 1607). Back. Note 14: AHPT, PN Teruel, 1084, 62 (July 6, 1586) Back. Note 15: AMC, PN Baguena, 60 (October 21, 1572). Back. Note 16: See the section on business for a discussion of loans and debts. One other possible explanation for the absence of new Christian marriage contracts within the notarial protocols might be that such documents were kept within the formerly Muslim community by an official there. The implication would be that converted Muslims continued Muslim practices in secret, away from the eyes of the Christians of the village. While this might be a reasonable explanation in those parts of Spain where Arabic was still widely used, it seems much less likely in Aragon, where Arabic was no longer spoken or written. Certainly this idea was never expressed by any of the old Christians of the villages, and this I consider to be most significant; it is very much at odds with Inquisition opinion on the matter. Back. Note 17: See, for example, the contract for the marriage of Miguel Royo and Ysabel Anento, signed by Ysabel's legal guardian (AMC, PN Baguena, 59) and Miguel's parents, as well as by the couple. Back. Note 18: AMC, PN Baguena, 59. Evidence within the document for Miguel's youth includes the descriptions "youth" (mancebo) and "resident" (habitante) instead of "citizen" (vecino.) We must rely upon indirect evidence here because Baguena's baptismal records begin in 1565, and so are of no help in establishing Miguel's age. Back. Note 19: This payment was clearly part of the duty of a parent toward a child. Gil de Bernabe went on to require that, as long as Ysabel remained unmarried, her brother provide for her as a parent would—that is, that he "give her food, drink, clothing, and shoes" (darla de comer, bevir, vestir y calzar). AMC, PN Baguena, 114. Back. Note 20: In 1574, Francisco Diaz, "stranger from the Indies" (Indiano estrangero), wed Maria Perivanes. AHDT, LP Burbaguena I (October 30, 1574). In 1601, the same Francisco Indiano, now, according to the parish priest, 108 years old, married a 60-year-old widow. AHDT, LP Burbaguena II (January 8, 1601). Back. Note 21: There is actually a tenth marriage we could include here. In December 1545, Ludovicus de Agreda wed Maria de Luna. Both family names appear later among lists of Moriscos; neither family name appears on the lists of old Christians. The record was entered in Latin, but the notation neofitus is equivalent to the standard nuevo convertido of later years. AHPT, LP Burbaguena I. Back. Note 22: The record, in Latin, gives the bride's name as Elizabeth, instead of Ysabel. Back. Note 23: See, for example, Lea, op. cit., 204-206. Back. Note 24: On May, 8, 1547, Domingo Ximeno married Maria Castillo. Bride and groom were related to the second and third degrees of consanguinity; a dispensation permitted them to marry. AHDT, LP Baguena I. It is interesting that the "familiar" for the Inquisition in Burbaguena in the late 1500s was from the Ximeno family. Back. Note 25: Both cities are listed as Morisco locations by Lapeyre in his Geographie de L'Espagne Morisque (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1959). Back. Note 26: The 1581 list of those Moriscos who made their Easter duty tells us that there were five Agreda households in Burbaguena in 1581. Four households had a daughter named Maria. AHDT, Burbaguena I, 201. Back. Note 27: The marriage lists for 1609-1611 fortunately include the names of both the bride and groom's parents. Luis was wed on April 2, 1610. AHDT, Burbaguena II. Back. Note 28: On August, 27, 1586, Francisco Villanueva borrowed 874 sueldos from Miguel Polo of Anento. His house in Burbaguena, "on the new street, contiguous with the house of Juan de Agreda the younger blacksmith and with the house of Miguel de Agreda the musician" ("en la calle nueva conf. con casa de Juan de Agreda herrero menor y con casa de Miguel de Agreda menestral") was used to secure the loan. AMC, PN Baguena, 107. Back. Note 29: The economic life of the villages is discussed more completely in the section on business. Back. Note 30: The metropolitan church in Saragossa did grant dispensations for marriages (discussed previously) within forbidden grades of consanguinity; these dispensations, however, seem to have been routinely granted. Back.
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