The royal audience, or chancery, the supreme and final court of appeal in civil causes, was entirely remodelled. The place of its sittings, before indeterminate, and consequently occasioning much trouble and cost to the litigants, was fixed at Valladolid. Laws were passed to protect the tribunal from the interference of the crown, and the queen was careful to fill the bench with magistrates whose wisdom and integrity would afford the best guarantee for a faithful interpretation of the law. An attorney was provided at the public expense, under the title of “advocate for the poor,” whose duty it was to defend the suits of such as were unable to maintain them at their own cost. The sovereigns testified their respect for the law by reviving the ancient but obsolete practice of presiding personally in the tribunals at least once a week. “I well remember,” says Oviedo,[b] one of their court, “to have seen the queen, together with the Catholic king her husband, sitting in judgment in the Alcazar of Madrid, every Friday, dispensing justice to all such, great and small, as came to demand it. This was indeed the golden age of justice,” continues the enthusiastic writer, “and since our sainted mistress has been taken from us, it has been more difficult, and far more costly, to transact business with a stripling of a secretary, than it was with the queen and all her ministers.” By the modifications then introduced, the basis was laid of the judiciary system, such as it has been perpetuated to the present age. The law acquired an authority which, in the language of a Spanish writer, “caused a decree, signed by two or three judges, to be more respected since that time than an army before.”[51] [Sidenote: [1479-1480 A.D.]] Whatever reforms might have been introduced into the Castilian judicatures, they would have been of little avail without a corresponding improvement in the system of jurisprudence by which their decisions were to be regulated. This was made up of the Visigothic code as the basis, the _fueros_ of the Castilian princes, as far back as the eleventh century, and the _Siete Partidas_, the famous compilation of Alfonso X, digested chiefly from maxims of the civil law. The deficiencies of these ancient codes had been gradually supplied by such an accumulation of statutes and ordinances as rendered the legislation of Castile in the highest degree complex, and often contradictory. The embarrassment resulting from this may be imagined.