The confraternities and brotherhoods of Catalan farm workers in the Expediente general de cofradías (1769-1784)

In 1769 Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes began a reform program which sought to determine the precise number of confraternities, guilds, and brotherhoods that existed in the Peninsular territories of the Spanish monarchy and which culminated in 1784 with a Royal Order that supressed a good deal of such organizations based on the inquiries that local authorities sent back to the central government. These inquiries are conserved today in the Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN), or National Historical Archive, and those that were submitted by the Catalan authorities are the ones we have used to carry out our study, which is focused on the corporations formed by farm workers and laborers. Once we completed this process, we went on to determine their patron saints, the type of festivities that they held, and how they financed these festivities and their daily activities.