Note 128 — Chapter V

There is some little obscurity about this important personage (st. 71, 671, and elsewhere); but she was named Urraca, (st. 1550,) and belonged to the class of persons technically called Alcahuetas, or “Go-betweens”; a class which, from the seclusion of women in Spain, and perhaps from the influence of Moorish society and manners, figures largely in the early literature of the country, and sometimes in the later. The Partidas (Part. VII. Tít. 22) devotes two laws to them; and the “Tragicomedia of Celestina,” who is herself once called Trota-conventos, (end of Act. II.,) is their chief monument. Of their activity in the days of the Archpriest a whimsical proof is given in the extraordinary number of odious and ridiculous names and epithets accumulated on them in st. 898-902.