The Evolution of Castilian Forestry Law from Old to New Spain, c. 1270–1580

Scholars in recent years have revealed much about the dynamism of the Castilian legal system in New Spain. Far from arbitrary, this system functioned as a tool of empire precisely because it invited Indigenous subjects to negotiate their legal rights, responsibilities, and communitarian customs through the legal process. In both Old and New Spain, conflicts over the use and regulation of forests were common among cases brought before royal magistrates. While environmental historians have been attentive to certain aspects of forest use and regulation in New Spain, this paper takes a broader approach by placing novohispano forestry law and its adjudication within the broader context of Castile’s political and legal consolidation from the late medieval period, especially with regard to the jurisdictional rights of non- and new-Christian communities. It argues that while Nahua communities in central New Spain were often successful in defending their forest rights, their engagement with the colonial legal system in the long term contributed to the weakening of traditional stewardship practices formerly rooted in the Nahua altepetl and its tlaxilacalli communities and eroded the common-pool nature of community forestlands.