Portrait of Pedro de Figueiredo de Alarcão.

For this institution, the couple took the third part of their inheritance and their free assets (movable and patrimonial) “wherever they may be”, some farms in Lobagueira and Ribeira de Palhais and all the inheritance they had there, as well as a farmstead in Alcântara. The founders destined the entail to their second son, Henrique de Figueiredo, who had the obligation to have an annual mass said every Sunday in the chapel of Our Lady in the convent of São Bento de Xabregas where they were to be buried. In addition to these, he would have “one mass sung on the day of the Conception in the said convent, in the chapel where they lay”. The Franciscan priests would receive 3,000 réis each year for the masses, and three cloth habits, for the convent in greatest need. The heirs “to whom this morgadio came” had to use the third part of their inheritance to add to it “up to five hundred thousand reis” and this was ordered by the founders “under penalty of our blessing”. They also had the duty to fulfill their duties with an “honest conscience” and the morgadio should always be added and no part of it “exchanged, sold, pledged or traded” (ACBL, Testamentos, cx.12, no. 1).

Church of Encarnação.

Henrique died in 1520 and, as stipulated in the institution, the morgadio fell to  his brother and firstborn son of Rui and Maria, Jorge de Figueiredo Correia, clerk of the treasury of king João III and captain donatory of Ilhéus da Baía (Brazil). Besides this entail, Jorge would inherit from his father the Quinta de Ota – bought in 1499, leased in 6$000 réis to the convent of Odivelas – and from his maternal grandfather, Brás Afonso Correia, the morgadio of Castelo – composed by houses and lands located mostly in Lisbon – gathering an important patrimony. In 1522 Jorge de Figueiredo Correia, applying his grandfather’s inheritance, added the farmstead of Ota with the purchase of more land. In 1549 he obtained against his brothers a sentence that definitively removed from the partition both this farmstead and the morgadio of Lobagueira, which, in future inheritances, were taken together (SOUSA, 2017: 149 ff.; ACBL, Sentenças, cx.25, no. 3).

During the first twenty years of the seventeenth century, Jorge de Figueiredo (grandson of Jorge de Figueiredo Correia) built on his land of Lobagueira a church dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Encarnação (Our Lady of the Incarnation). The morgado also used his position as a “very illustrious nobleman of the main nobility of this kingdom, related to all the great” to strengthen his dominion over the place, obtaining the privilege of the patronage of the same church (SOUSA, 2007: 189). His son Rui de Figueiredo de Alarcão – one of the noblemen who actively participated in the conspiracy that ousted king Filipe IV of Castile and placed on the Portuguese throne king João IV in 1640 – built in this church a grave for himself and his family and here would be buried his descendants with the respective solemn moments.

Propaganda pamphlet about the confirmation and granting by king José I of one more day of fair in Lobagueira.

Index of the tombo of the House of Belmonte Archive (1807) with reference to the morgadio of Lobagueira, its properties and charges.