But the cultural and intellectual level of Luís Machado Freire is what impresses us most. The testator ordered 1,000 réis to be set aside each year from the earnings of the entail for its owners to buy books, for the creation of a library in the morgadio with “all the books that there may be in this kingdom of Portugal”. There should be a book inventory, whose care would depend on the administrators, who were subject to penalties if any copy were lost or damaged (ANTT, Morgados e Capelas, Registos Vinculares, Castelo Branco, processo 27, fl. 125). Likewise, Luís Machado Freire set aside 500 réis yearly to buy offensive and defensive weapons (swords, arquebuses, muskets, rifles, pikes, taffeta gambesons, knitted skirts, etc.), of which an inventory would also be made.

The founder’s concern with the conservation and memory of what belonged to him is seen throughout the document. It is particularly evident in a rare description of a morgadio’s archive, one of very few to be found in modern documentation. The testator had a chest made where to store his will and the book where all his properties would be described, as well as the remaining deeds and notes, of which an inventory would also be made (ANTT, Morgados e Capelas, Registos Vinculares, Castelo Branco, processo 27, fl. 129). So that nothing would be lost, he had another chest made, where a copy of the will and other documentation would be kept in the office of the Confraternity of the Souls (Confraria das Almas) in Pêro Viseu.

The date of Luís Machado Freire’s death is unknown, but we do know that his last will was carried out. As he wished, his nephews, Diogo Dias Machado and Maria Machada, got married and produced children (ESTEVES, 2004, p. 194). The oldest, Diogo Dias Machado Preto, became the administrator of this morgadio and another, established in 1725 by his maternal uncle, Luís Machado Freire – the namesake of his uncle and his successor as the prior of Pêro Viseu. The entail then became known as the morgadio of Pêro Viseu and Chãos.

Already in the nineteenth century, through the marriage of the administrator Isabel Osório de Macedo to Jerónimo Trigueiros de Aragão, viscount of Outeiro and count of Idanha-a-Nova, the patrimony in this entail was incorporated into the house of this family. It ended up being dispersed as a result of the extinction of the entails in Portugal in 1863 (ESTEVES, 2004, p. 205). But its memory was not extinguished and is present today in the various buildings constructed by the descendants of the sisters of Luís Machado Freire in the places of Pêro Viseu and Chãos, including the chapel of the morgadio, first dedicated to Saint Francis Xavier, as determined by the founder, and later to São Romão (Saint Romanus) (TRIGUEIROS, 2018).