The Manueline pillory of Alfeizerão

The Manueline pillory of Alfeizerão

1- Description and asset classification
Built in Alfeizerão in the reign of D. Manuel I following the granting of the Foral of the fortunate king in 1514, it was overthrown in the troubled period of the liberal struggles and rebuilt in 1984-85 next to the parish church, which would certainly not be the place for the its original deployment.
The pillory is described as follows on the DGPC – Directorate General for Cultural Heritage page:
«The reconstruction certainly respects the original typology of the pillory, almost identical to that of Turquel, also an old couto of the Monastery of Alcobaça, and very similar to others in the region, such as those of Aljubarrota, Maiorga, or Cela. On top of three circular steps, with a rounded parapet, dating from the reconstruction but certainly not very different from the 16th century, stands the set of the shaft, capital and finial. The column rests on a ring decorated with a string of buttons, carved from the same stone as that section of the shaft, which would certainly form part of a larger framed base. The shaft consists of two sections with spiral grooves, both in the same direction (on the right), with rows of quatrefoils between the flutes. The two sections are joined in the center through a simple smooth ring, from the reconstruction. The capital, on a narrow smooth ring, is in a basket, surrounded by acanthus foliage. The top consists of a truncated pyramidal body with a square base, decorated with fleurs-de-lis, which also appear in the coat of arms of the Cistercian order, and plant decoration (cogulhos) in levels along the edges, in addition to the representation of the two towers. on one of the faces".
The pillory has been classified as an IIP – Property of Public Interest since 1933 (Decree-Law no. the integration of the pillory in the “ZEP – Special Area for the Joint Protection of the Ruins of the Cloths of the Wall of Alfeizerão Castle and of the Pelourinho of Alfeizerão”, with a favorable opinion in the same year; which is followed, on 8 February 2012, by the proposal to establish an individual ZEP for the pillory, which received a favorable opinion on 29 February of the same year.

2 - Historical and chronological notes
It is a Manueline pillory built at the expense of the Alcobaça monastery or the municipality of the village of Alfeizerão, after King Manuel's charter of 1 October 1514 was granted. The date on which it was erected is not certain. The Manueline charters of the Alcobaça coutos were not completed in 1514, because the Alcobaça monastery embargoed them in some chapters, being partially reformed in a process that culminated in the royal sentence of 6 July 1556 (DGA/TT, Feitos da Coroa, Ancient Core, 487). However, presumably, the coutos pillory would have been raised by the end of the decade. Cela Nova, for example, whose charter was handed over to its municipal authorities on December 28, 1516 (in a Delivery Notice carried out in Alfeizerão), had a pillory built by the abbot D. Jorge de Melo, whose validity over the monastery ended in year 1519 (Marques, 2001).
In 1782, Friar Manuel de Figueiredo sees the pillory of Alfeizerão in a place a little away from the Casa da Câmara and the town jail and says that its figure shows its antiquity (Coutinho, 2020:8). Its destruction took place a little less than a century later, in the heat of the anticlericalism of the liberal cause. In the notes to a reprint of “Os Pelourinhos do Distrito de Leiria”, a communication presented by João Saldanha Oliveira e Sousa in 1935 (Sousa, 2007), it is noted that it was dismantled following a decision by the Municipality of Alcobaça with the date of December 4, 1866.
After the pillory was dismantled and dismantled (or broken), its fragments remained in the vicinity of the church. In the aforementioned communication by João Saldanha Oliveira e Sousa, he explains that in Alfeizerão, two of the stone friars that border the churchyard of the parish church are drums from the column that formed part of its pillory – “Perhaps they will be enough to restore this column,” he says. A photo of a postcard from the parish church of Alfeizerão taken around 1950, shows the two stone columns mentioned by the Marquis of Rio Maior, which would be two sections or logs of the monument's shaft or column. In the photo, by the way, three stone friars can be distinguished and, although the details of these column fragments are not visible, we know, from the sources and observing the reconstructed pillory, that the shaft of the pillory was split into three sections.
In the Bulletin of the Board of Province of Estremadura, series II, of the year 1952 (Edition and property of the Board of Province of Estremadura), Mário Guedes Real wrote an article entitled “Pelourinhos dos extinct municipalities of Estremadura II – Pelourinhos demolished” in which he mentions the pillory of Alfeizerão with an illustration of its remains, also suggesting the