Philippine Studies 28 ( 1980): 142-75
Filipino Class Structure in the Sixteenth Century
WILLIAM HENRY SCOTT
This study offers summary results of a study of sixteenth century Filipino class structure insofar as it can be reconstructed from the data preserved in contemporary Spanish sources. The major accounts on which it is based have been available in English since the publication of the Blair and Robertson translations early in the 2oth century, and have recently been made accessible to the general Filipino reading public by F. Landa Jocano in a convenient and inexpensive volume entitled The Philippines at the Spanish Contact. At least four of these accounts were written for the specific purpose of analyzing Filipino society so that colonial administrators could make use of indigenous institutions to govern their new subjects. Yet any history teacher who has tried to use them to extract even such simple details as the rights and duties of each social class, for purposes of his own understanding and his students’ edification, know how frustrating the exercise can be.
The problems are many. The accounts were not, of course, written by social scientists and are therefore understandably disorderly, imprecise, and even contradictory. They do not, for example, distinguish legislative, judicial, and executive functions in native governments, nor do they even indicate whether datu is a social class or a political office. On one page they tell us that a ruling chief has life-and-death authority over his subjects, but on the next, that these subjects wander off to join some other chief if they feel like it. They describe a second social class as “freemen – neither rich nor poor” as if liberty were an economic attribute, while one account calls them “plebeians” and another “gentlemen and cavaliers.” The maharlika, whom the modern Filipino knows as “noblemen,” show up as oarsmen rowing their masters boats or field-hands harvesting his crops. And a third category called “slaves” everybody agrees are not slaves at all; yet they may be captured in raids, bought and sold in domestic and foreign markets, or sacrificed alive at their master’s funeral. Moreover, if the data as recorded in the original documents are confusing, they are made even more so by the need to translate sixteenth century Spanish terms which have no equivalent in modern English. Thus pechero becomes “commoner” and loses its significance as somebody who renders feudal dues.
It was a decade of frustrating attempts to resolve such contradictions that inspired the present study. Basic documents used for the study were:
- Miguel de Loarca’s Relacion de las Islas Filipinas (1582);
- Juan de Plasencia’s Relacion de las costumbres que los indios se han tener en estas islas and Instrucción de las costumbres que antiguamente tenian los naturales de la Pampanga en sus Pleitos (1589);
- Pedro Chirino’s Relacion de las Islas Filipinas (1604);
- chapter eight of Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas;
- the anonymous late sixteenth century Boxer manuscript;
- and the unpublished Historia de las Islas e Indios de las Bisayas (1688) of Francisco Alcina.
The goal of this study was to discover a distinct, non-contradictory, and functional meaning for each Filipino term used in the Spanish accounts.
LUZON
Father Plasencia describes Filipinos as being divided into four social conditions or “estates”: principales, hidalgos, pecheros, and esclavos. These appear to be functional divisions as he conceived them, for he separates the common tribute-payer (pechero) from the “true” slaves, calls the principales “datus,” and comments that they are “like knights” (como caballeros), that is, holder of an office, not members of a class. In a separate treatise on custom law, however, he only distinguishes three estates: those of ruler, ruled, and slave, as Doctor of Canon Law Antonio de Morga also did, and like Morga does not equate principal with datu. Members of the first two of these estates are enfranchised with the right to make or break client-patron relationships, but are distinguished from one another for purposes of administering justice and fixing fines, wergeld, and inheritance. Those in the First Estate have the right to trial by their peers, those in the Second to trial by those in the First. The Third have no right to trial at all. They are not enfranchised in the eyes of the law and are dependent upon their masters’ favor for justice; they do not even appear in the statutes Plasencia codified by interviewing wise old men in Pampanga.
The Spaniards called all members of this First Estate, whether actually occupying positions of rule or not, principales. Since the Real Academia Espanola defines principal as a “person or thing that holds first place in value or importance and is given precedence and preference before others,” it is a suitable term, more so than any English equivalent. None of the accounts give a Filipino equivalent for this word, but it was surely either maginoo or some other derivative of poon /punò (“chief leader”). Plasencia translates “Lord God” as Panginoon Dios, and one of the leaders who surrendered the Port of Manila in 1571 was Maginoo Marlanaway. The force of the word is made clear in the San Buenaventura dictionary: punò is defined as “principal or head of a lineage,” ginoo as “noble by lineage and parentage, family and descent,” and maginoo as “principal in lineage or parentage,” and senor (lord) is equated with all three. They are obviously to be distinguished from nouveau riche imitators scornfully called maygintao, “man with gold” – or, as San Buenaventura says, “Hidalgo by gold, not lineage, a ‘dark knight,’ as we would say.” Whatever it was called, the class constituted a birthright aristocracy with claims to respect, obedience, and support from those of subordinate status. They will be called “chiefs” in this paper, in the sense of being of the chiefly class, not in the sense of being rulers.
People in the Second Estate had the theoretical right to shift allegiance from one maginoo to another and so were called libres or libertos in later Spanish accounts, and freemen in modern English. But they were not free in the sense that they had no chief at all: rather they were vassals who rendered service to some overlord. Some paid feudal dues in the form of agricultural labor and were called timawa, while others rendered military service and were called maharlika. But in either case, whether men of substance following their lords to war or humble farmers working his fields in season, they were enfranchised in the eyes of the law and could bring suit.
The unenfranchised and disfranchised of the Third Estate were called alipin, a term all Spanish sources translate as slave. The Academia defines esclavo as “one who lacks liberty because of being under the control of another.” so the term does not necessarily connote chattel or captive. In the Philippines, the majority of them were actually serfs, peons, bondsmen, debtors, or dependents – or what Filipinos called “householders,” alipin namama hay. Those who could be legally sold were called “hearth slaves,” alipin sa gigilid, and the distinction was often deliberately blurred by oppressive creditors haling them before a Spanish judge who was ignorant of Philippine social structure. All alipin were in a condition of more- or less servitude, but this servitude was negotiable so they could not necessarily be distinguished from the Second Estate by their economic condition alone. What sets the alipin of the Third Estate apart from the maginoo, maharlika, and timawa of the first two Estates is their want of franchise – the right to change lords or file a law suit.
None of the accounts record any political office other than that of datu, the ruler of a barangay. Other Spanish sources refer to any super-baranganic political power, or pretensions to power, as oddities or actual aberrations, especially the one at the mouth of the Pasig River which they regard as an alien intrusion. Morga uses the world datu only once, applying it to officers (mandadores) who assist a chief in the administration of a barangay, and barangay itself he calls a parcialidad (faction or party). These variations probably reflect the viewpoint of a highly placed colonial official stationed in a former harbor principality where his personal contact with Filipinos was restricted to members of the ex-royalty. The principalia to whom he refers had already absorbed the heirs of conquered rulers with impressive personal titles like Rajah Matanda Acheh, Rajaj Muda Solayman, and Si Bunaw Lakan Dula, who in their day had obviously been super-ordinate to mere datus since Legazpi recognized their right to surrender Manila in the name of all the other chiefs. By Morga’s day, twenty-five years later, their descendants’ political prerogatives had already been converted into economic advantages like exemption from tribute. The process is unconsciously reflected in the rhetoric of all four accounts: they describe the role of the ruling chiefs in the past tense, but those of their subjects and slaves in the present.
THE FIRST ESTATE
The Spanish accounts do not describe the class of maginoo but only the office of datu. A datu, needless to say, must be a member of the maginoo class. The meaning of the word is made clear by the early Tagalog-Spanish dictionaries: he is the ruler of a barangay (e.g., “nagdarato: to rule the barrio or barangay”), and a barangay is a “barrio of people subject to one” – and synonymous with dolohan, “barrio or faction of people subject to one head.” Plasencia thinks each one of them was a single family in origin, and since barangay also means “boat,” he speculates that the role of datu arose from the captain of a boat migrating to the Philippines with his family, relatives, and servants. It is difficult to believe that Philippine barrios could have maintained their discrete boatload identities across centuries or millennia, but Plasencia, like other Spaniards of his day, thought the Filipino people had only arrived in the archipelago a short time before. A more likely explanation would be that a datu is one who governs like the captain of a ship, that is, with uncontested authority. In fact, most datus were captains of ships; rowing for them is listed among their vassals’ duties in every one of the accounts. Perhaps a barangay was the social unit necessary to build, launch, supply, and fight a man-of-war and support its captain’s argosies.
At any event, a barangay varied in size from thirty to a hundred households, and was normally part of a settlement (pueblo) which included other barangays; either contiguous to it or at some distance. These settlements, or at least the land they occupy, appear to be what the dictionaries call a bayan, namely, “place for a pueblo” or “pueblo where the people live,” as in the question, “Kaninong pabuwisan ang bayang ito?” (whose estate is the bay an here?) Assuming this to be the case, a given barangay might have claims to swidden land in more than one bayan, and serfs (alipin namamahay) might be inherited from one barangay to another but could not be removed from the bayan itself. Taytay, Rizal had four barangays – and four datus – with a hundred families each when Father Chirino arrived in 1591. The Boxer manuscript thinks three or four datus are normal for such a settlement, in contrast to one or two in the Visayas. Loarca says that if ten or more datus live in the same pueblo, they obey the wealthiest among them, but Morga says only the best warriors are obeyed and Plasencia holds that the datus were not subject to one another at all “except by way of friendship and kinship.” Plasencia adds, “the chiefs helped one another with their barangays in the wars they had.”
Sources of Datu’s Authority. The Boxer manuscript calls datus “senores de titulo” (titled lords). Eligibility for title is maginoo lineage which is reckoned bilaterally, though the office itself, being exercised only by men, passes through the male line from father to son or brother. The office is the source of the datu’s authority, but his power depends upon the fealty of men in the Second Estate and the support of those in the Third. Since the former are enfranchised, they can in theory give their allegiance to the datu of their choice, and their choice is usually the best warrior. (Datus who die with a reputation for bravery in battle go to the grave accompanied by live slaves – in actual ships in the case of those of special Viking valor.) A powerful datu is therefore, literally, a popular datu, some so much so as to attract others of their peers. In such cases, important decisions especially legislative – are made by the chief datu’s calling them all together and securing their acquiescence, his large house serving as the barrio hall. (Loarca comments from Panay, “the Pintados do not have this policy because nobody wishes to recognize another as more of a chief.”) All the accounts list the datu’s duties as twofold: to govern his people, and to lead them in war (though good administrator Morga adds, “and succor them in their struggles and needs”). It is quite understandable, of course, that nobody mentions the primary duty of any lord to his vassals- that of defending them against their enemies, especially foreign invaders.
A datu has the duty to render judgment in any lawsuit filed by his followers. He convokes the litigants, hears sworn testimony, and hands down a decision – all in the presence of his people, and sometimes with the assistance of older men. His decision may be appealed, however, to an arbiter of the contestants’ choice from another community, even a non-datu. In the case of theft, the datu presides over – and may initiate and enforce – trial by oath, divination, or ordeal. He also participates in dispensing justice within the First Estate, appearing before a wise legalist acceptable to him and his accuser if he himself is sued, or combining with his peers to initiate such action in the case of others, and to contribute police power to enforce their decision afterwards. Where such arbitration fails, the plaintiff inaugurates a kin feud which runs its violent course until mutual exhaustion satisfies honor and both parties agree to payment of wergelds.
The provisions of the law are handed down by tradition, but are liable to amendment by consensus among ruling datus, and to circumvention by any among them powerful enough to do so. Penalties vary with the relative social status of the parties, and include restitution or indemnification in the case of theft, death for witchcraft, murder, sexual advance, or infraction of religious taboo, and fines in all other cases. In the case of capital punishment or the totally dependent status of gigilid slavery, the presiding datu takes possession of the condemned man’s children and accomplices, and compensates the plaintiff himself.
Control over disposition of barangay real property is vested in its datu. The distribution of irrigated land is of major consideration, but hillside swiddens are worked freely by any barangay member or even aliens with claims through intermarriage or prior arrangement with the datu. The datu has the right to retain certain land use privileges to himself: for example, the restriction of access to fisheries, or the collection of fees from a market opened at a strategic passage on a waterway. A datu may alienate territory – presumably on behalf of his entire barangay – or even convert his rights into regular payments from his subjects. The ruler of Pila, Laguna, for example, purchased it in gold from its former chief and then charged rentals from his own maharlika for its use. It is noteworthy that the rate was fixed at four cavans a year rather than at some percentage of the produce or size of the holding.
Services Received. A datu receives services, agricultural produce, and respect from his people who, in Laguna at least, are called his katunguhan, literally, “those who go along.” The respect is shown by such deferential behavior as covering the mouth with the hand when addressing him, or contracting the body in a profound bow on entering his presence indoors and raising the hands alongside the cheeks. The same deference is shown his family and descendants, in office or out – to all maginoo, in short – and slander against any of them is severely punished. He receives a share of harvests as tribute except from men of maginoo lineage, and additional contributions such as a jar of sugarcane wine or tuba at unscheduled seasons like feasts or funerals. Services are also of two kinds: seasonal field labor from which nobody is exempted of whatever class or condition, participation in maritime and military expeditions, and unscheduled occasions like house construction or opening new land, for all of which work the laborers are fed or feasted. The importance of seafaring duties is indicated by the considerable detail with which they are specified in the accounts: to equip and supply the vessel and then to row it, either as slaves or warriors, or to come, provisioned and armed, as soon as called and as often, and to follow wherever the datu leads.
Perhaps a clue to the Spanish assessment of the office of datu may be found in the fact that Plasencia likens them to knights (“como caballeros”) while he equates maharlika, timawa, and alipin directly with hidalgo, pechero, and esclavo, with no such reservation as “como.” A caballero is one endowed with a caballeria ( a knighthood) and a caballeria is an encomienda, that is, “a commission: the office of certain knights of the military orders [or] the place, territory, or fees of this office.” The Blancas de San Jose dictionary glosses encomienda with pabuwisan, from buwis, tribute or dues (pecho) – which is what Chief Saripada Humabon wanted Magellan to pay when he anchored in the port of Cebu. A caballero is thus one who collects dues from a certain district. It is probably the lack of a reigning monarch qualified to so invest Filipino datus that moves Father Plasencia to say “como.”
THE SECOND ESTATE
Philippine custom law calls members of the Second Estate timawa, which Plasencia translates as “common people” (la gente común) and Morga as “plebeians” (plebeyos), both being terms which in sixteenth century Spanish suggest ineligibility to marry a person of royal blood. Their franchise depends upon competence to enter into client-patron relationships, not upon birthright; that is, if they are not in debt to anybody, they are free to make such contracts, both as client, and as creditors to debtors or master to slaves. They enjoy agricultural rights to a portion of the barangay land, both to use and bequeath, and to harvest without paying any tribute. Although contractual relations vary and appear to include tribute in some cases, their patrons are basically their lords, not their landlords. Their normal obligation is agricultural labor worked off in groups when summoned for planting or harvesting, but they may also be liable to work fisheries, accompany expeditions, or row boats. And, like members of the Third Estate, they can be called out for irregular services like supporting feasts or building houses.
Membership in the Second Estate is largely acquired. The timawa have their ultimate origin in the First and Third Estates. From the First they absorb the illegitimate offspring of maginoo with their unmarried slaves and married serfs, and from the Third, those who have successfully repaid debts, completed indenture, or literally purchased their freedom in gold. The definitions in the early Tagalog dictionaries are unambiguous. San Buenaventura defines timawa as “without servitude (esclavonia), neither rich nor poor,” and manga timawa as “the free, the common people after the magnates,” and illustrates with the example, “titimawain kita” (I’ll set thee free). Blancas de San Jose is even more illuminating:
“A free man who was formerly a slave, and from this they say timawa of one who escapes death by chance, like one in the hangman’s noose and the rope breaks, or the bull that cannot be captured because of his bravery, and, changing the accent, Nagtitimawak of a slave who has freed himself by running away from his master, and the same with animals.”
The Maharlika Aristocracy. The Second Estate also includes a birthright aristocracy called maharlika who render military service. The maharlika accompanies his captain abroad at his own expense whenever he calls and wherever he goes, rows his boat not as a galley slave but as a comrade-at-arms, and receives his share of the spoils afterwards. Plasencia’s is the only account which mentions maharlika and it does not explain the origin of their ascribed status. Probably they were a sort of diluted maginoo blood – perhaps the descendants of mixed marriages between a ruling dynasty and one out of power, or scions of a conquered line which struck this bargain to retain some of its privileges. At any event, the maharlika are subject to the same requirements of seasonal and extraordinary community labor as everybody else in the barangay. Technically, they are less free than the ordinary timawa since, if they want to transfer their allegiance once they are married, they must host a public feast and pay their datu from six to eighteen pesos in gold. Their profession was destined to disappear under the colonial regime, of course, just as the mangayaw raids in which they practiced it disappeared. Indeed, it seems that it was already being downgraded in Plasencia’s day: those datus controlling market places and collecting fishing fees were exemplars of the socioeconomic changes which produced chiefs like the lord of Pila whose maharlika were reduced to a kind of inquilino status. A generation later San Buenaventura had already forgotten that they were “free” (libres) rather than “freed” (libertos), and so, evidently, had the Filipino people by the next century when Juan Francisco de San Antonio could cite as common Tagalog usage, “Minahadlika ako nang panginaan ka” (my master freed me). The Blancas de San Jose dictionary defines them as “free men though with a certain subjugation in that they may not leave the barangay: they are the people called villeins (la gente villano),” literally countryfolk living outside some nobleman’s villa. In 1754, long after they had disappeared, of course, Juan Delgado simply calls them “plebeians.”
Plasencia calls the maharlika “hidalgos” and, as a matter of fact, the parallels are noteworthy. Training and maintenance for the warrior life are expensive for both the maharlika and hidalgo, so they must be men of substance to enter their profession, though they may be handsomely reimbursed in booty later. But substance alone is not enough: qualification in both cases includes descent from others of their class – for four generations, in the case of the hidalgo. Like the maharlika, the hidalgo is bound to his master by tighter feudal ties than the ordinary vassal; in the event of breach of faith, his lord may seize both his goods and his person, while even a serf is guaranteed the land to which he is attached. In like manner, the maharlika is fined for breaking his contract if he leaves his datu. And if the hidalgo can no longer shoulder the financial burden of warfare, he can ritually unmake his contract and drop down to a cheaper vassal status, that of villano. Something like this seems to have happened to the maharlika between 1590 and 1630.
THE THIRD ESTATE
An alipin is a man in debt to another man. His subordination is therefore obligatory, not contractual: the other man is technically his creditor rather than his lord, and may be a maginoo, maharlika, timawa, or another alipin. The alipin has birthright claim to work a piece of the barangay land which cannot be taken away from him or he from it, except in the case of a commuted death sentence by which he becomes a chattel slave. The alipin may be born as such – in which case he is called gintubo – but what he really inherits from his parents is their debt, indenture, or sentence. Although he cannot be legally seized or sold, his debt can be transferred from one creditor to another for profit and to his detriment. For this reason, a man who falls into debt seeks to become alipin to one of his own relatives if possible. As a matter of fact, men in extreme penury may voluntarily seek the security of alipin status, that is, be napaaalipin as opposed to na-aalipin. Since the degree of alipin indebtedness can vary, when that debt is passed on to heirs it also varies according to the wife’s status, and indeed, according to the debts either parent has inherited from preceding generations. For example, if alipin and timawa marry, their offspring will be only half alipin; or if an alipin has three non-alipin grandparents, only one quarter, – social conditions described in Spanish accounts with the rather unsatisfactory expressions “half slave” and “quarter slave.” What all this means in practical terms is that such alipin only work off half their father’s, or one-fourth their grandfather’s, indebtedness during alternate months. Such partial alipin, moreover, have the right to enforce their manumission if they can afford the price.
The normal alipin with land rights is called namamahay (householder), and the one who has lost that right, alipin sa gigilid (hearth slave), a category which also includes those who never had such a right in the first place, namely, captives or purchases. The Boxer manuscript makes the curious remark that there is a kind of slaves of both namamahay and gigilid status called tagalos. If this is not a flat error, it may have been obtained from some informant of Bornean descent, and thus reflects an attitude based on a former relationship between the two peoples.
Alipin Namamahay. Spanish accounts consistently translate alipin as “slave,” but their authors just as consistently deplore the illogic of including the namamahay in the same category as the gigilid, or even in the category of esclavo at all. That the gigilid – or at least some gigilid – were chattel house slaves “like those we have,” as Morga says, was obvious, but it was just as obvious that the serf-like namamahay were not. One of the longest entries in the San Buenaventura belabors the point, and includes the following passage:
“These namamahay slaves in Silanga, which is on the way to Giling-giling from Lumban, make one field called tonga, and it is to be noted that they have no further obligation to their master; in Pila, Bay, Pillila (Pililla] and Moron [Morong] , they are almost free for they serve their master no more than from time to time, and [they say] he almost has to beg them to go with him to other places or to help him with something, the same as he does with the freemen; in all the hills as far as Calaylayan, they serve their master from time to time if he calls them, but if he calls them too often it’s considered an abuse.”
Father Plasencia solves the problem directly and sensibly: he calls them pecheros (tribute-payers). The pecho they pay is called buwis and amounts to half their crop, and the one who pays it is called nunuwis. Or his lord may agree to a fixed fee of four cavans of palay a year instead, the same rate the datu of Pila was charging his maharlika for their land use in the 1580s. In addition, he is expected to present a measure of threshed rice or a jar of wine for his master’s wedding feasts or funerals, and generally a share of any special foodstuffs he may acquire for himself, for example, the leg of a deer taken in the hunt. Like everybody else, he comes at his master’s call to plant and harvest his fields, build his houses, carry his cargo, equip his boat, and row it when he goes abroad – not as a warrior but as an oarsman, unless relieved of this status as an accolade for bravery – and in any emergency such as his master’s being sick, captured, or flooded out. He owns his own house, possessions, and gold, and bequeaths them to his heirs, but his ownership of the land he uses is restricted: he cannot alienate it. If his master moves out of the settlement, he continues to serve him as a kind of absentee landlord, and if his master dies, he is obligated to all his heirs, and must divide his services among them. Upon his own death, his creditor has the right to take one of his children for gigilid domestic service in his own house, but if he takes more, he is considered a tyrant.
A man enters namamahay status by three routes: inheritance from namamahay parents, dropping down from the Second Estate, or rising up from gigilid status. If his debt stems from legal action or insolvency, he and his creditor agree about the duration of the bondage and an equivalent cash value for its satisfaction. In Father Plasencia’s day this never exceeded ten taels in gold, or roughly the marke value of 320 cavans of rice at Manila prices. This custom continued under the Spanish occupation and so exercised the friars’ conscience that their theologians argued the fine points of its morality for a century. (How long can a man justly be indentured for such-and-such a debt? At what age does a child handed over for its father’s debts become productive enough to be reckoned an asset rather than a liability? ) Those who rose from the ranks of the gigilid hearth slaves might actually have purchased their freedom, but mainly they were transferred to namamahay house holding when they married, simply for their master’s own convenience. For this reason, it also seems likely – though the Spanish sources do not say so – that captives and purchased slaves may have been set up in namamahay housekeeping status from the beginning.
Alipin sa Gigilid. Gilid is the “innermost part of the house where the hearth is,” and the use of the term to distinguish a kind of alipin calls attention to the typical place of their service, or, perhaps, conception. They are members of their master’s household who, unlike namamahay householders, eat out of their master’s pot. They are as dependent upon him as his own children, and from this circumstance arises his-moral right to sell them. In actual practice, however, he rarely does. He may transfer them to some other creditor, but raw materials for the slave trade or human sacrifice is not procured from the household, or even from the alipin labor pool which implements a datu’s public and private projects. Quite the opposite, they may be rewarded at their master’s pleasure, or his hope of motivating them, by being permitted to retain some of the fruits of their labor, even to the extent of eventually purchasing their liberty. Indeed, if they can accumulate enough gold, say through the trade as a goldsmith or participating in raids, they can buy their way not only into namamahay status, but even timawa. (Juan Francisco de San Antonio, reporting the old thirty-peso manumission price 130 years later, comments, “and if he gave sixty or more, he was free of everything and became an hidalgo.”)
The main sources of alipin sa gigilid recruitment are the children born in their master’s house, not infrequently natural children by his own alipin of either status, and those of men under commuted death sentence who mortgage one of their own to somebody who can afford to raise them, thus preserving their own liberty to support the rest. Once a hearth slave grows up, however, it may be more practical and profitable to set him up in his own house instead of feeding and housing him and his new family. All the accounts distinguish the namamahay not only as having his own house separate from his master’s, but as being married and having his own family. The author of the Boxer manuscript describes the situation with some surprise:
“His master can sell him because none of these slaves who are in their master’s house are married, but all [are] maidens and bachelors, and in the case of a male who wishes to marry, the chief does not lose him; and such a one is called namarnahay when married, and then lives by himself, and, surprising enough, they would (even] give the slaves who were in the chiefs’ houses permission to marry, and nobody would hinder the men.”
The terms gigilid and namamahay, therefore, more accurately distinguish a man’s residence than his economic status, and are incidental to a sliding scale of downward social mobility occasioned by punitive disfranchisement and economic reversal. The condemned man’s debt to society or fiscal creditor can be underwritten by some other man motivated by kin loyalty or hope of gain. If both are alipin and neighbors and relatives, their new relationship may be no more visible than a redistribution of their labor. But the social stigma is considerable, for the gigilid of a namamahay is called by the insulting term bulisik, “vile” or “despicable.” Still worse, the poor wretch who becomes the gigilid of a gigilid of a namamahay is branded bulislis, “exposed,” like the private parts when one’s dress is hitched up – a term which may reflect a relationship between master and slave.
Slaves purchased from outside the community, and captives taken in war or raids, are also counted among the gigilid and may be real chattel without even the security of the parental affection of some master in whose house they grew up. If they are destined for resale or sacrifice, they may be temporarily employed – as field hands, for example – but will literally be non-persons in society. But if they are brought into the community as functioning alipin, they will perforce enjoy the rights of food, shelter, and work of other alipin. Their children will then be born into society not as aliens but as gintubo, “children of alipin,” and as such be eligible for whatever upward social mobility fortune may offer them.
The categories of namamahay and gigilid thus appear to have been dysfunctional at the time they were first described by Spanish observers. If a man raised a gigilid slave to manhood, married him off as a namamahay householder, and then seized one of his children to raise as a gigilid slave, what was that child’s status on reaching maturity? Do these categories distinguish membership in ascribed subclasses, or simply conditions of residence? The categories as described would be fully functional only in a society in which real slavery was limited to domestic service and slaves therefore lived in their masters’ houses, and men were born alipin but not alipin namamahay or alipin sa gigilid. Gintubo, the birthright status of such alipin commoners, would then serve to distinguish the operative core of the class from social transients or newcomers who had not yet learned their role. But if such a society underwent economic changes which either increased the value of slave labor or restricted slave holders’ other sources of income, strong motivation for modifications would arise. That such changes were taking place in the 1590s but being resisted, is suggested by the following passage from the Boxer manuscript:
“If they have many children, when many have been taken and he takes more, they consider it a tyrannical abuse, and once those who are leaving the chiefs house to marry leave, they do not return to render him any more service than the namamahay do, unless he uses force, and this they consider a worse tyranny inasmuch as they were given permission to leave his house and he makes them return to it; and these slaves inherited these customs from their ancestors.”
This confusion of alipin status was brought to Spanish attention- by an ill-fated attempt to replace Filipino concepts of slavery with Christian concepts of slavery. Most contemporary sources attribute the confusion to a combination of Filipino cupidity and Spanish ignorance, the former using the latter for their own purposes. Typical is the following entry in the San Buenaventura dictionary:
“Gintubo: [slavery] inherited from one to another; this is the first kind of slaves. Nagkakagintubo: slaves of this kind. Gintubo ni ama: “My father inherited it”; this the Filipinos say before the judges, and those who do not know the significance of the word judge the slaves to be sagigilid, so it should be noted that under this name, gintubo, the two kinds which follow [viz., gigilid and namamahay] are covered, and they should not say that gintubo is sa gigilid since it also includes the nama mahay.”
Despite such well-intended erudition, however, the confusion was profound enough to survive into the twentieth century, long after the alipin who caused it had disappeared. The 1972 Panganiban Diksyunaryo-Tesauro Pilipino-Ingles defines gintubo as “a slave born in the house of the master,” but considers it synonymous with “anak ng alipin.”
LUZON CULTURE
Luzon culture in the time of Morga and Plasencia differed from the Visayan in at least three particulars: it enjoyed more extensive commerce, it had been influenced by Bornean political contacts, and it lived off wet rice. Spanish records of the first generation of the Conquest consistently refer to Tagalog business interests as exceeding those of the Visayans, which, on the testimony of tribute-collector Loarca, were hardly developed. Augustinian Fray Martin de Rada attributed the decline of human sacrifice in the Manila area to the fact that Tagalogs were “more traders than warriors,” and Legazpi found Philippine internal trade dominated- or monopolized – by ships from Borneo and Luzon, which the Visayans called “Chinese” because of the origin of their wares. Manila itself had probably been founded early in the century by adventuresome Nakhoda Ragam Sultan Bulkeiah of Brunei, who also counts as the fourth Sultan of Sulu. Rice was grown under controlled irrigation in Pampanga, and in such deep water along the shores of Laguna de Bay that it was harvested from boats; the San Buenaventura dictionary lists thirteen terms for rice and six for “transplant,” and gives a detailed description of the process. This last consideration alone would be enough to account for three constant references in the descriptions of Tagalog social structure missing from the Visayan accounts: those to land use, inheritance, and universal field labor.
CONTINUE: VISAYAN Class Structure in the Sixteenth Century Philippines
Jordan Clark is a Canadian born descendant of Scottish immigrants living on the homelands of the Lekwungen speaking peoples. His interest in Philippine myth and folklore began in 2004. Finding it difficult to track down resources on the topic, he founded The Aswang Project in 2006. Shortly after, he embarked on a 5 year journey, along with producing partner Cheryl Anne del Rosario, to make the 2011 feature length documentary THE ASWANG PHENOMENON – an exploration of the aswang myth and its effects on Philippine society. In 2015 he directed “The Creatures of Philippine Mythology” web-series, which features 3 folkloric beings from the Philippines – the TIKBALANG, KAPRE and BAKUNAWA. Episodes are available to watch on YouTube. Jordan recently oversaw the editing for the English language release of Ferdinand Blumentritt’s DICCIONARIO MITOLÓGICO DE FILIPINAS (Dictionary of Philippine Mythology) and is working on two more releases with fellow creators scheduled for release later this year. When his nose isn’t in a book, he spends time with his amazing Filipina wife of 20 years and their smart and wonderful teenaged daughter.