Piotr Górecki

Economy, society, and lordship in medieval Poland, 1100-1250

CONTENTS: Guide to Polish and German Place-Names Introduction Taverns, Markets, and Oxen: Exchange and the Economy of an Ecclesiastical Estate Peasants, Craftsmen, and Revenues in the Economy of an Ecclesiastical Estate Ecclesiastical Immunity and Access to Peasants: Hunting, Transport, Defense Ecclesiastical Immunity and Jurisdiction over Peasants The German Law of Rural Settlement: Sources and Elements German Law within the Polish Duchies: Variation and Routine Adaptations of German Law: Regional Peripheries and Tenurial Variation Conclusion Bibliography Index.

A Historian as a Source of Law: Abbot Peter of Henryków and the Invocation of Norms in Medieval Poland, c. 1200–1270

Sometime in the later 1260s, Peter, the third abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Henrykow in Silesia, wrote his remarkable history of the monasterys foundation and estate. The history is a series of stories about the individual holdings that the monastery obtained in the course of the thirteenth century. Apparently at a late stage of his life, Peter looked back at the preceding decades with considerable apprehension, and he explicitly cast his work as an exercise in reassurance.

Communities of legal memory in Medieval Poland, c. 1200–1240

An important feature of the legal system of medieval Poland in the later twelfth and earlier thirteenth centuries was the role of several kinds of local groups in legal transactions, especially transfers of landed property. Such groups were varied and fluid, but their membership, mobilization, and functions comprise coherent patterns, which can be traced from lists of witnesses present at legal transactions presided over by Piast dukes, and from the collective activities whereby high clergy, ducal officials, and local groups effected, reiterated, and remembered legal transactions. The local groups included (among others) ‘neighbourhoods’ of settlers near the places that were affected by the legal transactions; inhabitants of local centres of population, exchange, and lordship; and familiae of the high clergy, ducal officials, or parties to the transactions. This paper reconstructs the collective activities whereby such groups recognized and remembered legal transactions, as well as the physical, personal,...

Community, Memory and Law in Medieval Poland

One of the interesting issues in recent historiography is the formation and functions of social groups in the legal system of medieval society, espe-cially in the establishment and maintenance of memory relevant to law and dispute.1 In the context of early medieval Poland, these areas of interest have until recently focused on the ‘neighbourhood’, that elusive social and settlement grouping attested in the written sources as the vicinia or the opole, and presumed to have constituted the most local unit of royal, ducal and seigneurial authority.2 In general, Polish historians have portrayed the ‘neighbourhood’, and other units of territory and settlement, as essentially aspects of the history of early statecraft. This rather formalist approach has tended to deflect attention from several informal but important features of the ‘neighbourhood’ and other settlement groups, including their formation and recruitment, and their possible functions as communities of memory.3 More generally, emphasis on formal statecraft has deflected attention from the significance of collective memory, local and otherwise, in the legal system of medieval Poland in the early thirteenth century.4 In this chapter, I shall use a few case studies to reconstruct some of the groups that participated in the legal process, examine their recruitment and composition, and assess their possible significance as communities of legal memory.

The Text and the World: The Henryków Book, Its Authors, and their Region, 1160–1310

The Cistercian abbey of Henryków in Silesia, settled in 1227, is perhaps best known to medievalists primarily because of the Henryków Book, a codex compiled c.1310, containing two narratives of the abbey’s (and region’s) history from c.1160 to the date of compilation of the codex, as well as a list of the bishops of Wroc?aw and a number of charters embedded within the narrative histories. Each of the narratives contains a number of ‘accounts’ (rationes), which describe the histories of individual localities – inheritances, villages, manors, or estates – that together comprise the monastery’s holdings. The Henryków Book (hereafter simply the Book) has long been used by scholars as a source for the history of Silesia, and reached a broader audience in the excellent translation by Piotr Górecki, published in 2007, which includes an extensive introduction and notes.(1) In the book under review, Górecki – who is probably the most prolific scholar working in English on medieval Polish history, and who has devoted much of his life to the study of the Book and its context – provides a painstakingly thorough close reading of the Book, and an analysis of what it, in conjunction with other (primarily documentary evidence) can tell us about the history of one part of Silesia in this period. This is micro-history at its best, presenting us with a deep insight into a local world of monks, aristocrats, peasants, rulers, and townspeople; and the various threads – of patronage, commerce, violence, religion, narrative, and memory – that bound them together in the 13th century, a time of far-reaching transition in this area (just as it was in other European regions).

A View from a Distance

Susan Reynoldss article is a culmination and a turning point. It builds on several approaches to medieval law and culture, of which two strike me as especially important. One is a study of legal history as a domain of human activity, especially habitual or routine activity, pursued by a wide range of social groups. The other is a search for the meaning and the criteria of the enormous transition during the central Middle Ages, which Christopher Dawson at the dawn of this subject, and Robert Bartlett in its currently definitive moment, have identified as “the making of Europe.” The first subject exists above all thanks to the work of Reynolds herself, while the second is an outcome of a number of quite distinct scholarly trajectories, spanning several generations. Apart from some suggestive and implicit links, those two subjects have, over the past quarter century, been pursued separately. Reynoldss article brings them together.