Laws and Language
During the Middle Ages the Basque Provinces were states enjoying full liberty, and even when they became part of the kingdoms of France and Spain they still accorded to their…
“Laws and Language” from The Basque Country by Romilly Fedden, 1921.
The oak, that sacred tree of Zeus, whose leaves crowned the victor in the Olympic sports, whose waving boughs shaded the temples, amidst whose leaves the oracles whispered; the sacred tree of the Druids, venerated by the Christians in the Middle Ages, is symbolic of traditions dear to the Basque. It was beneath the oak of Guernica,—that Guernakaco arbola sung by the peasant poet José Maria Iparraguirre in the national hymn, celebrated by Jean Jacques Rousseau, saluted by the brave Tour d’ Auvergne and his grenadiers in 1794,—it was beneath that oak and the oak at Ustaritz 'that the Bilzaar, or the assembly of the old, met yearly. This was a congress of notables which was convened in the open air to administer justice and to maintain the laws.
During the Middle Ages the Basque Provinces were states enjoying full liberty, and even when they became part of the kingdoms of France and Spain they still accorded to their sovereigns only a free and voluntary service. The ancient laws, venerated under the name of fors in France and fueros in Spain, were based on custom or upon written charter. These fors embodied the usages, privileges and immunities of the seven provinces, and though they varied in form in each province they did not vary in principle.
The key to the Basque laws was respect for individual liberty. There exist in Guipuzcoa certain cartas pueblas—or lists of the population—dated as early as 1226, which lead to the belief that the first groups of the people in that province after the great invasions were under the kings of Castille, but that these communal groups jealously guarded their fueros, the laws which they had held from time immemorial. Later the deputies met in one or another of the twenty-three towns of the province, and the first junta was held July 6, 1397, in the marvellous ogival church of San Salvador at Guetaria, when the fueros of Guipuzcoa were first tabulated under fifty or sixty headings.
In the fueros, in the juntas, in the elections of deputies, there was a constant mingling of religion and pure democracy. Before the election there was a mass, and the elected took his oath upon the cross. The juntas were presided over by the Alcalde of the place, sometimes a simple workman, or fisherman, as at Fontarabia. So, at Azcoitia, a tailor presided over a meeting where the proudest nobles of Spain were seated. Great care was also taken to secure honesty at the polls. At Tolosa, any man seen talking politics with a priest lost his right to vote.
As every family was represented by its chief in the commune, so every commune was represented by a delegate at the congress. The Basque delegates took the oath giving to their overlord the right to protect them in these words: “We who can will and do more than you, we make you our sovereign that you may protect us and that you may maintain our laws.”
The sovereign took the oath to respect the laws: “I swear that I will be a faithful and good sovereign to the people of this land, to each and to all, I will maintain the fors, privileges, customs and usages, written or unwritten; I will defend them with my might; I will render and see justice rendered to the poor as to the rich.”
The peoples, through their representatives, swore ‘‘to aid, counsel and defend” the sovereign. A contract this, based upon a noble self-respect. Where there is respect for self, there is respect for the rights of others,—in other words, for law. Where there is respect for law, there is union and strength in the nation, order and discipline in the community, fecundity and continuity in the family. The respect for law is one of the secrets of that force which has preserved the Basque people intact through the centuries. 'Not only had they laws governing the larger issues of life, but also for their social pleasures, their dances, their games, even for their deportment in the street.
The rights of succession in the Basque Provinces are of the most ancient origin and profoundly rooted in the social character. Long before the law of primogeniture was established in other parts of the Pyrenees, it existed in the Basque nation without distinction of class or sex. The eldest born son or daughter was the heir to the property whether of the rich man or the poor man.
The first result of this law is the fixity of the family. The family homestead acquires a personality, becomes an entity giving its name to the dwellers beneath its roof, creating for them not only duties and obligations, but also assuring to them consideration and material prosperity*.. One of the first things which strikes the traveller in the Basque country is the dignity of life. The ample houses, spaced in valley and on hill arid mountain slope, have nothing in common with the ordinary one-storey habitations of the French peasant. These Basque homesteads impress the imagination as the expression of a patriarchal life. They have an air of stability, of dignity and of permanency; they are evidently not the transitory abode of the light-minded who are here to-day and gone to-morrow. They are houses of wide, sheltering roof-tree and wide doorway, of three and four storeys, set in the midst of a domain which includes garden, field, pasture, woodland and vineyard. This domain is considered as a whole, each part being dependent on the others, and it is the family duty and joy to keep this domain intact.
The house is called in Basque Etcheonda or Stem-house. In Germany the same expression is found: Stammhaus. This is the stem, the sturdy trunk, the family tree, from which the branches shoot. Its preservation is the first consideration. Such a house once established, it is necessary to ensure its transmission in order to satisfy that ambition for permanence which is a Basque characteristic. This, then, is the origin of the Basque laws of succession. Up to the time of the French Revolution, which brought all the provinces of France under one code, the eldest child inherited house and domain. “The result of this was that the eldest, if a son, identified himself from his early youth with his father whose old age he would sustain, and worked with ardour to save enough money to make dowries for his sisters, that they might marry with men of a fortune equal to that of their brothers. The younger sons who remained at home, received a share of the stock on their marriage to heiresses of other houses. But more often than not, the younger sons left to seek their fortune in the colonies, which, when made, enabled them to return to their native place, build homesteads, and found, in their turn, mother houses.”
When the Revolution, in 1793, ordained that children must inherit equally, the Basque people used every means to evade the law. The younger children were so imbued with the reverence for the old ideas that they refused to share equally with their elders. It was found so difficult to enforce the law that it was finally changed and the eldest child might be given a quarter of the whole. But law does not change tradition. The parents still use every means to ensure the protection of the property, and the younger children still refuse to accept a share which may destroy the continuity of the home.
There is no longer any law of primogeniture, but the father and mother choose their heir, who is always, by custom, the eldest son or daughter. The eldest daughter is often preferred, because she will marry earlier and often meets “an American,” or wealthy Basque returned from South America, who will build up the family fortunes. The daughter, moreover, will live with her parents, and is often chosen because the mother knows her character and has more confidence in her as a house-mate than an unknown daughter-in-law.
One interesting point about these customs of succession is that the other children are never jealous of the one chosen to carry on the family. They understand that it is not from any preference for the one chosen, but with the sole aim of ensuring the persistence of the family domain, and so, the importance of the family in the country.
The laws of succession as they exist to-day are only a feeble picture of those which flourished in old times, but they yet maintain the evidence of a magnificent social organisation. Created to assure the stability of the patrimony and homestead, they assure at the same time the continuance of tradition; they also are favourable to the progress of civilisation. Instead of quarrelling over the shreds of their patrimony, the children accept the lot which is theirs by custom; one only carries on the family in the old homestead, one or two marry in the neighbourhood, the others go into the priesthood, the army, or to the colonies. The result is that peace reigns in these quiet, spacious dwellings.
The Basque homesteads are homes of peace. How often has one seen engraved in stone above the door, in Basque, the words, “May peace be in this house. ’’Or that other at St. Etienne de Balgorry, “ Cutiare quin dugun, Baquia asqui dugula,” which means, “With little, have we but peace, it is enough.” This peace is not only the result of living under wise laws, true to traditions handed down from the remotest times, it has its roots, as well, in a deep religious belief. Since St. Amand brought Christ to the Basques in 631, they have held the faith. Eschaldene Fededen, “Basques and faithful,” stands synonymous. The family life is animated by respect amounting to reverence for the authority of the father in things general, and for the authority of the mother in the household. The position of the woman has always been an honoured one among this people, and a high ideal of morality has been held and attained. The Basque language has no word for adultery, and public opinion condemns with the utmost severity any laxity of morals.
A curious instance of the vigorous manner in which the community guards the standard of propriety came to dur notice at St. Jean-Pied-de-Port in May 1919. Night was made hideous by cat-calls, drums, whistles, trumpets. It was not till this had continued for several evenings that we succeeded in discovering the cause. A woman of sixty in the old town was about to marry a man of twenty-seven from a neighbouring village, and all the youth of the place were engaged for a week in thus pleasantly giving voice to the general disapprobation. The woman, who was rich but miserly, was told that she could buy them of for 500 francs to spend in feasting. As she did not pay, the charivari, as it is called, continued nightly for a week. Any house suspected of impropriety may be thus pleasantly serenaded.
It was on the little steam tram winding carefully around the steep hills between Oloron and Tardets that a, fellow-traveller, a French buyer of wood for the government, became communicative. He was no great admirer of the Basques. He allowed them to be sober, honest, industrious and domestic, but one scented the bitterness of battles waged with hard- headed peasants in many a little mountain town. All his life he had passed in this business of travelling and appraising and acquiring trees and woods and forests,—a detestable vocation which barred him from any very high degree of sympathy. But he had found his ignorance of the Basque tongue such a disadvantage that he had determined that his two little boys should learn it early. To this end, he had installed two Basque servants who were to faire le menage—he allowed them to be clean and ready workers—and to speak Basque with the children. They gave the utmost satisfaction in the first capacity, but the children did not learn a word of Basque. The mistress remonstrated with the maids, who replied that they would certainly not speak their language to the children. They did not wish the children to learn Basque, for in that case strangers would understand what they said.
This little story is, one feels, typical of the spirit which has preserved this people. They will serve you, they are always polite and pleasant, but they will not allow you to share their lives or to speak their language, which is to know their thoughts. The very difficulty of its idiom has kept the world outside its barriers. In France the spoken limits of the Basque language are the same to-day as they have been for centuries, but in Spain it has lost ground. In Alava it will soon be an unknown tongue; Biscaye is penetrated by the Spanish patois; Navarre has seen, during the past century, over two hundred towns and villages exchange Basque for Spanish.
The Basque language possesses a scale of fifty^three sounds with six vowels, a, e, i, o, u, ü. The written language, though based on French or Spanish orthography, is phonetic. Although one of the oldest forms of speech, it has a meagre literature. The first Basque book was printed as late as 1545. For this reason rules for the writing of the language may be said to still be in the making. This was amusingly proved one evening at St. Jean- Pied-de-Port. We had before us a verse in the Basque of the sixteenth century, and the same verse in modern Basque. We asked our hostess, an intelligent, educated woman, to translate the modern Basque. Part of it she rendered into French, but some of the words she said she did not know. She thought it must be Basque of another province. She called in a lad who read the verse with the same result. Then they both read the verse written in the sixteenth-century Basque and translated it with ease. This was the Basque that they knew, and they assured us that the second version was mis-spelt. So here, to-day, in St. Jean are people who use the written form of the sixteenth century instead of the modern orthography.
The Basque language (Eskuara) means “clearly speaking,” and has been compared by its admirers to algebra, whose elements are simple, but whose combinations are innumerable. It is declared by them to be a model of clarity and simplicity, order and logic. All of this must be taken by the layman at second hand. But we may accept the fact that the language is unrelated to any other known and is believed to be a mother tongue. The language has no words for utensils brought into use in modern times. For such, a Latin, French or Spanish word is used with a Basque termination. As an example, the word fork, fourchette in French, becomes “ fourchetta.” A knife, however, which was a primitive implement, has a Basque name and is called nabela.
The Béarnais have a little story which they like to tell. The good God, they say, wishing to punish the devil for the temptation of Eve, sent him to the Pays Basque with the command that he should there remain until he had mastered the language. At the end of seven years, God relented, finding the punishment too hard, and called the devil to come to Him. The devil had no sooner crossed the bridge of Gastelondo than he found he had forgotten all that he had so hardly learned.
As for the Basques themselves, they believe that they descend from Adam and that the Basque tongue was spoken in the Garden of Eden.
Fedden, Romilly. The Basque Country. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921.
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