Łuków castle court records 1743–1744

I. Introduction and description of the archival fonds

The subject of this study is the Łuków castle court records, the inscriptions series (libri inscriptionum), kept by the chancery of the Łuków castle starosta in the Łuków land of the Lublin Voivodeship. The material is made available in digital form by the Polskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne (Skanoteka, fonds 2067). The edition covers two consecutive units of this series: call no. 56 (the 1743 annual volume) — 175 image files, 169 of them processed (scans 004–172); call no. 57 (the 1744 annual volume) — 219 image files, 213 of them processed (scans 002–214). In total, 382 image files have been examined so far.

In the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth the forum castrense performed three functions: judicial (the four castle articles – gwałt, that is rape, arson, assault on a nobleman’s house and robbery on the public highway – together with cases involving non-landed nobility), executive (the starosta also enforced the judgments of the land courts and of the Tribunal) and – the most important one for our purposes – the perpetual notarial function. Acts of land law were entered in the castle court registers “ad perpetuam rei memoriam”: resignations, dowry settlements, obligations, quittances and life estates. This third function makes the inscriptions series in practice a register of the property and credit dealings of the entire local nobility.

The difference from the land court registers is one of constitutional standing, not merely of name. The land court was the court of the landed nobility: its judge, deputy judge and clerk were elected by the sejmik and appointed by the king; it sat in session several times a year, and its registers were perpetual by their very nature – it was to them that cases concerning landed estates belonged, headed by resignations of hereditary property. The castle court was the court of the starosta, a royal official, and worked continuously: in the volumes examined the office accepted entries on 308 different days over 24 months. The perpetual status of its registers was not original – it was granted to individual castle courts by the constitutions of the Sejm from the sixteenth century onwards, and before that an entry concerning landed property had to be transferred to the land court registers at the next session, or it lost its force. In Łuków in 1743–1744 the two institutions operate side by side: the castle court accepts perpetual resignations (13 resignations in this edition), while the parties cite resignations made “before the land court records” (entry no. 1568: a resignation on the Thursday after Jubilate Sunday 1743) and an act drawn up “in Łuków, at the laying out of the land court records” (entry no. 1876); the castle court records feature the Łuków land judge Jan Jezierski (entries nos. 369, 1902; in entry no. 1647 already as the late Jan Dominik Jezierski) and the deputy judge Tomasz Celiński (entry no. 794, the reading of the office uncertain). The edition does not establish the date on which the Łuków castle court was granted perpetual status – that is a question for the constitutions of the Sejm, not for the registers themselves.

A feature characteristic of castle court registers – and clearly visible in the volume examined – is the entering in them of acts concerning estates lying outside the territorial jurisdiction of the office. The material edited contains 16 such entries (among them nos. 223, no. 372, no. 373, no. 453, no. 755 and others); they concern estates in the Sandomierz, Podlasie, Masovian and Brest Litovsk Voivodeships and in the Drohiczyn, Mielnik, Stężyca, Sochaczew and Warsaw lands. Jurisdiction was determined by the presence of the parties, not by the location of the estates; the parties themselves then indicated in the forum clause the court before which they would answer.

II. Diplomatics and palaeography of the volumes examined

The volume is written in several hands. The dominant one is an early modern neo-Gothic cursive with a strong slant and elaborate majuscules, with numerous ligatures. Successive protocols of inscriptions are kept in other hands – one of them is markedly more legible, with the features of a humanistic cursive and wider spacing between words. The change of hand coincides with the change of chancery unit (the protocol), which confirms that the chancery’s work was organised around clerks keeping successive fascicles.

The system of abbreviations is typical of a castle court chancery: suspensions (“Flor. Pol.” = florenorum Polonicalium, “7bris” = septembris), contractions with an overline (“Gnus”, “Gsa”, “Mgs”, “Adm. Rev.”), Tironian signs (“etc.” in the form of the characteristic flourish that closes almost every formula). The status designations pose a difficulty of their own: the majuscule G can be confusingly similar to P, while the ligature NN. has three minims and is easily taken for MM.

The layout of an entry is settled and repetitive. The session heading (the date in the formula of the liturgical calendar) is followed by the intitulation of the parties with their status designation and filiation, the formula of appearance and capacity (“sanus et recognovit” – being in good health, he declared; for women “in assistentia mariti sui”), the disposition proper to the act, the official confirmation (roboratio) with the vadium clause (“idque sub vadio … et Foro praesenti”) and the subscriptions.

“Gnus N. olim G. N. filius sanus et recognovit quia ipse … tenetur et debet, quam in omnibus et singulis Bonis suis inscribit et assecurat … idque sub simili vadio … et Foro praesenti.”

In translation: “Urodzony N., son of the late urodzony N., being in good health, declared that he … is bound and owes; which sum he inscribes and secures upon all and each of his estates … and that under a like vadium … and before the present court”.

The language is the early modern Latin of the Commonwealth, densely interlaced with Polonisms wherever Latin has no equivalent for local realities: cognomina (“dictus Sędek”, “dicti Oleksiki”, “dictus Wąsacz”), microtoponyms (“od Zasadrawca”, “na Zapłotniu”, “pole Siedliczne”), measures (“zagon”, “sulcus”), and even whole phrases introduced by “alias” (“granities Ostrowieckie alias …”). In 739 entries the clerk recorded the deponent’s illiteracy with the formula “Ignarus/Ignara personae litterarum”, which amounts to 34.7% of the whole; in 411 entries an autograph signature has survived (19.3%).

A curiosity of the chancery’s practice is a formula referring to a ready-made model: instead of the full text of a life estate the clerk notes “scribat in forma Cancellariae solita” (let it be written in the customary chancery form; entry no. 849). This attests to the existence of a chancery formulary and to the fact that the fair copy was produced at a second stage.

A reading trap: the abbreviation “ol.” (olim) read as “et”

The reading error in this hand that is most dangerous for genealogy concerns neither a surname nor a date, but a two-letter abbreviation. The chancery writes “ol.” (olim – formerly, that is “the late”) as the letter “o” with a struck-through shaft; the shape is deceptively similar to “et”. The difference in consequences is fundamental: “Stephano Jasienski ol. N. Pauli filio” means “to Stefan Jasieński, son of the late urodzony Paweł”, whereas the reading “et Paulo filio ejus” would give “and to Paweł, his son” – thus reversing the filiation and turning the father into the son of his own child.

What settles the matter is not the shape of the sign but the grammatical case of the word that follows: the genitive (“Pauli filio”) means “to the son of Paweł”, the dative with “et” (“et Paulo filio ejus”) – “and to Paweł, his son”. A securely read “et” in this hand is low and has no shaft.

The methodological conclusion of this revision is a rule that takes precedence over palaeography: the status of the father is settled by the construction of the act as a whole, not by the shape of a single abbreviation. A dowry quittance with a renunciation is addressed to a father who is ALIVE – the daughter declares that she has been satisfied “through the hands of her aforesaid parent” (per manus praefati Parentis sui), and gives a quittance to that same parent; had the father been dead, the chancery would have given the quittance to his successors and would have repeated “olim” at that point as well. Where the shape of the sign speaks for one reading and the formulary of the act for another, the formulary takes precedence, and the word itself is marked as an uncertain reading.

State of preservation and traces of the clerk’s work

The material is not uniformly legible, and it says as much itself. 4 entries were written and then cancelled (nos. 275, 307, 965, 1066): one broken off in the middle of the opening formula (no. 275), one whose continuation the clerk struck out with two crossing lines running across the whole folio (no. 307), one struck out with a marginal cancellation note (no. 965) and one in which the original amount of the sum was struck out, “viginti quatuor” written above it, and the whole repeated in a corrected version on the following folio (no. 1066). Such entries are more valuable to the researcher than fair copies: they show how the text came into being.

Physical damage is concentrated at the end of the 1744 volume: in 7 entries (nos. 2114, 2125, 2127, 2128, 2130, 2131, 2132) the folio has a loss of paper destroying the beginnings of the lines – in such places the surviving endings of the formulas are given without conjectural restoration, and the gaps are marked with brackets. Water damage and ink stains hinder the reading in 10 entries. All doubtful places have been marked with the formula “[uncertain reading]” – in total this concerns 761 entries.

Agreement with the personal-name tags of the Polish Genealogical Society was recorded separately. In 224 entries the remarks field records a divergence from the tags: a person missing from the tags, a different form of the surname, a different given name, or the omission of place names. These divergences have not been smoothed over – the tag takes precedence as an independent reading, but the discrepancy remains visible in the source.

III. The range of business and the dynamics of property transactions

A quantitative summary of the legal acts (classified by the entry's dominant act; each entry counted once):

The picture is unambiguous: the castle court register is above all a record of credit and of its discharge. Quittances (quietationes) together with cancellations of inscriptions, and inscriptions of sums together with cessions of debts, make up the bulk of the material between them. Purely proprietary acts – resignations and donations – are fewer, but it is they that transfer ownership.

In the fields describing the acts it proved possible to read 1143 monetary amounts with a total value of approx. 780 473 złp. The median is 50 złp and the maximum 100 000 złp. The distribution is strongly right-skewed: small sums predominate, characteristic of the petty nobility.

The span is enormous: from 2 złp – the smallest partial sum that could be read (entry no. 1601 breaks up earlier inscriptions of 12 and 10 złp into cessions of 3, 2 and 5 złp) – up to 100 000 złp. The ten largest sums in the edition:

It is worth setting these two ends of the scale side by side. The median of 50 złp is the value of a few strips of arable; the sum in entry no. 466 – 100 000 złp inscribed to a future wife in a marriage contract secured by a penalty of 300 000 złp (entry no. 465) – belongs to an entirely different world of property, one that appears in this register only fleetingly, and only because the parties happened to be in Łuków. Both scales are contained in the same fascicle, often on neighbouring folios.

Money, interest and the term of payment

The unit of account is the Polish złoty (florenus Polonicalis); foreign coin and older reckonings also appear, however. The number of entries in which a given unit is mentioned:

The register itself supplies the conversion rates: the red złoty (Hungarian ducat) is reckoned at 18 złp (entry no. 664 – a debt of 5280 złp payable in red złoty), the struck thaler appears in small dues (entry no. 120 – five thalers for a mare), tynfs in settlements among townspeople (entry no. 876). The mark, a medieval unit, still holds its place in records of penalties and of consolidated sums (entry no. 792: 136 marks together with seven earlier inscriptions make up 548 złp).

Interest, where it is mentioned, usually amounts to 10 per hundred (per decem a centum) and so matches the statutory rate – entry no. 1654 states it plainly as a figure, not periphrastically. A redeemable annuity inscription for the Bernardine convent in Łuków (entry no. 629, 2000 złp on the Rogale estate) is charged with a rent of 7 % a year: church capital is cheaper than secular. Dates of payment are set by feast days (most often St John the Baptist, 24 June) rather than by a calendar date. In 4 entries one meets the clause “non obstante calamitate et hostilitate temporum” – protecting the creditor in the event of disaster or war (no. 664, 816, 1654, 1926).

The long memory of the record

The castle court register is an instrument of long-term memory. In 23 entries documents older than the century of the entry itself are invoked – the earliest of them an inscription of 1646, revived in entry no. 1162: the cession of part of a sum of 11 000 złp, secured on the village of Kozłów and on half the town of Parysów, and once due to the deponent's great-grandmother (in the source “quartae aviae suae”). Almost a hundred years and four generations pass between the creation of the obligation and its transaction in Łuków.

This memory is broken by wars. In entry no. 1601 the chancery states plainly that the original inscriptions had been entered in older records, “burnt by the enemies of Our Fatherland”; the further circulation of the sums then proceeds solely on the basis of secondary oblatas and the memory of the parties. That single sentence explains why cessions of a few złp are sometimes written up in this register with the same care as transactions a thousand times larger: for the petty nobility an entry in the castle court is the only proof that remains.

The rhythm of the office's work is set by the roczki and the sessions; 568 distinct dating formulas of sessions were identified in the material edited. Each of them was verified by calendar calculation (agreement of the day of the week with the feast given, in the Gregorian calendar); discrepancies were noted in the “Remarks” field.

IV. A collective portrait of the participants in the legal acts

The database comprises 10640 personal records, reduced to 3862 distinct persons. There are 753 surnames in their source form; after merging the masculine and feminine forms (Zyrzyński / Zyrzyńska) 570 families remain. On average there are 5.0 personal mentions per entry.

The last row of the table holds 4 personal records in which the manuscript does not allow a decision between two readings: “Nob./Gen.” for Jan Izdebski (entry no. 6) and Adam Oleński (no. 158) and “Adm. Rev./Gen.” in entry no. 2119, where two men named Kazimierz Pniewski appear — a religious, rector of the Piarist college, and his late father, sword-bearer of Zakroczym — and the identical given name and surname make it impossible to assign the titles between them. These records have not been counted to any estate.

The pyramid of estates confirms the picture known from research on Podlasie and the Łuków land: the petty nobility (Nobilis) is overwhelmingly dominant, farming shares of ancestral villages with double-barrelled names (Krasusy-Mikłusy, Krasusy-Zaolszynie, Krasusy-Zembry, Krasusy-Gołowierzchy, Wysokiny Tęczki, Pióry Wielkie, Pióry Pytki). The Generosi stratum is made up of the wealthier nobility and castle officials; the Magnifici – of land dignitaries (sword-bearer, pantler, standard-bearer, tribune, deputy voivode). Magnates appear only occasionally, usually as a party to large credit transactions.

Persons from outside the noble estate appear rarely and in strictly defined roles: clergy (54 entries) as parties to pious bequests, as attorneys and arbitrators; townspeople (18 entries) in small transactions; peasants (26 entries) almost exclusively as the object of an act – subjects donated together with their “prosapia” and with the right to pursue fugitives; Jews (21 entries) as tavern lessees, granting quittances for wrongs suffered.

A methodological note on the statistics of persons: the database distinguishes four categories of presence in the source. (1) Persons appearing before the office – named in an entry as parties to, or participants in, an act: there are 2734 of them. (2) Boundary neighbours – named solely in order to describe the boundaries of the strip of land being donated or pledged (“inter metas N. on the one side and N. on the other”); they never came before the office and decided nothing: there are 183 of them. (3) Persons known only from a filiation – cited as the father, mother or spouse of a party, in order to identify that party: 808, of whom 508 are always recorded with the abbreviation “olim”, that is as already deceased, and 300 without that mark. The formula “olim” does not, therefore, create a category of its own: the deceased in this register is almost always somebody’s father or mother, cited in order to tell one Jan from another. (4) Other persons mentioned passively – neither parties, nor neighbours, nor links in a filiation: 137 (former possessors, legal predecessors, persons cited in the summary of a decree; 43 of them are recorded as deceased). Together this gives 3862 distinct persons in the index of persons, but only the first category says anything at all about actual participation in legal transactions; all the percentages of “activity” given below are calculated on that category alone. The second category is the most treacherous of them: a boundary neighbour looks in the index exactly like a party, and it can happen that in the whole register he did nothing but own the field next door.

The activity of women. Of the 2734 persons appearing before the office, 641 are women, that is 23.4% – and it is this figure, not the percentage of entries, that measures their share in legal transactions. A woman appears as a party or a participant in 1017 entries (47.7%); in 279 entries she is the first deponent named, and so the person who performs the act. By way of comparison: there are 1137 entries in which a woman appears in any role at all – including the bare mention of her as the mother or wife of a party – but that figure measures the visibility of women in the source, not their capacity to act.

The formula of assistance (“in assistentia mariti sui”) occurs in 266 entries, and widows acting on their own as “relicta vidua” – in 179. The legal distinction is worth stressing: the husband’s assistance did not deprive a married woman of her capacity to act, but was a formal requirement – it is the wife who makes the declaration, the husband is merely present. A widow acted on her own, and it is she who most often appears as a creditor.

The networks of connection are those of family and neighbourhood. A typical case is a package of three or four entries drawn up on the same day: a daughter’s quittance for her paternal estate, the settlement of her dowry on her husband’s estate and a mutual life estate between the spouses; or: a pledge of an estate to a father-in-law, the settlement of the wife’s dowry, and the immediate cession of that same sum to a third party. Cash circulates within a single day and a single family.

All the surnames in figures

The table covers 571 surnames, arranged alphabetically. The masculine and feminine forms of the same surname are merged into a single row and given as “Borkowski (Borkowska)”; they are merged only where both forms actually occur in the material, so that surnames that do not inflect for gender (Rola, Pióro, Strus, Sobol) and forms attested in the feminine only remain separate. The percentage of persons is calculated against all 3862 persons mentioned in the index, the percentage of entries — against the 2132 entries of the whole edition. Persons whose surname the manuscript does not give, or gives illegibly, are gathered in the row “(no surname)”: there are 28 of them. The penultimate column calls for caution: it gives the six localities most often named in the acts in which a given surname occurs — and an act also names the village of the other party and the boundaries of the neighbours. So it happens that what heads the list is not the family’s ancestral seat but the village of the people it did business with; this is a lead to be checked, not a determination of the family seat. The ancestral seat can be identified with confidence only by collating the material with the parish registers. The column “Entries” counts the acts in which the surname is carried by a person record — the party’s own, or that of a parent or spouse recorded alongside the party in order to identify them. This is not the same as the number of hits returned by the search box: the search runs over the whole text of a row, so it also picks up adjectives formed from village names (“granice jasińskie”) and mentions in the remarks field, and it will not find a wife entered only in her husband’s person record. Both figures are correct; they measure different things.

The cognomen as a tool of identification

In a community where a dozen or more families of the same surname live in a single village, a cognomen is not an ornament but a precondition for recognising a person. The material edited contains 326 different cognomina, introduced by the source formula “dictus” (“called”). The most frequent of them:

Below are all the cognomina read in both annual volumes, together with the surnames they occur with and the number of personal mentions. The same cognomen is sometimes recorded with several surnames — sometimes a trace of kinship, sometimes mere coincidence, and so all the variants are given, without singling any one out.