This research whose focus is the morphological compounds in Portuguese in the 16th and 17th centuries aims to contribute to describing this phenomenon from a historical perspective. In this way, we aim to expand studies on the word formation process during the earliest periods of Portuguese language, especially on compounding. In addition, we adopted theoretical and methodological assumptions of Construction Morphology, so we apply the concepts of construction and scheme, ideas that generative theory did not support. For the corpus, we gathered morphological compounds on the basis of 22 texts selected from Corpus Histórico do Português Tycho Brahe, a resource which contains texts in Portuguese written by authors that were born between 1380 and 1978. As a result, we describe and analyze 26 elements, covering relevant questions for the study of morphological compounding, such as the boundaries between composition and affixation, and the productivity of the studied phenomenon.