The article deals with the issue of financial crisis, which has been a dominant society-wide topic for more than six years. The authors discuss Roman depositum and mutuum, or the deposit and loan for use. It looks at the history of these institutes and explains their nature in the light of present bank account agreement. Contrary to supporters of bank fractional reserve demand deposits, the article explains that such agreement (treating loans and deposits interchangeably) is impermissible due to a priori legal and economic principles.
The article discusses monastic capital investments and rents deposited in the accounts of the Gdańsk Kämmerei from the second half of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. Records found in ten Kämmerei books make it possible to propose reflections about the finances of Gdańsk and to present another aspect of religious relations in this economic and cultural centre, exceptional in the Commonwealth. Particular importance is attached to the mechanisms of establishing, modifying and terminating the deposits in both town coffers associated with economic trends and the religious atmosphere during the period under examination. In the Middle Ages, local monasteries obtained from the town of Gdańsk assorted rents and funds stemming from pious foundations and privileges. The system of such support broke down together within the onset of the Reformation. At the end of the sixteenth century, new social and religious conditions gave rise to commercial investments of monetary and capital surpluses, which from the mid-seventeenth century no longer played a greater role in the town’s economy and Church institutions. Not until the second half of the seventeenth century, after the economic crisis of the Commonwealth became conspicuous, was Gdańsk perceived as an attractive and secure site for locating money and, while experiencing economic difficulties, the town too sought sources of credit for its trade and production. This process resulted in an increasingly frequent deposit of capital in the Gdańsk town hall. At the turn of the seventeenth century, the town in this fashion drew the capital of almost all the Gdańsk and suburban monasteries as well as more distant monastic institutions, especially those in Warsaw. The best in this respect proved to be the 1701–1710 decade. The town, embroiled in the economic problems of the period, was incapable of servicing the obligations, and in about 1717 it experienced a one- or even two-percentage point reduction of the interest rates. Nonetheless, servicing the obligations remained irregular and constant delays continued for many years. The last monastic deposit was opened in 1725, and the monasteries increasingly frequently withdrew their assets from the accounts of the Gdansk communal bank. Despite all odds, even upon the threshold of the liquidation of the monasteries in Gdańsk (the cassation of the orders in the Kingdom of Prussia took place at the beginning of the nineteenth century), monastic institutions existing at that time in the city on the Motława had at their disposal an imposing number of investments, of which many survived in the Kämmerei for more than a hundred, and in one case 200, years.
During a survey of the fortified settlement of Lužice culture in position Hradiská, which was also settled in the La Tène Period, a smaller deposit of iron tools was found at the foot of one of the cliffs of a nearby Late La Tène fort at Martáková skala in 1987. The deposit consisted of a massive iron axe with rectangular socket, a big socketed chisel and a knife with tapering tang. Among La Tène hoards all three objects belong to the most frequent and functionally relatively universal tool types. The axe and chisel were used mainly in wood logging and woodworking; the knife was a versatile tool mostly for domestic use or as a weapon in hunting and fighting. The analysis of the deposit inventory showed that the objects had been produced and buried in the Late La Tène period, at the earliest around the turn of the two last centuries BC (level LTD 1). Thus they belong to the time horizon in which the custom of burying iron tools deposits and the reasons for doing so are the most notable, and concrete acts of such burials are the most numerous. The hoard might also have had a votive character, although find circumstances rather signal accidental and temporary abandonment of the objects. Apart from the referred to hill-forts the article mentions sites in neighbouring villages of Bošáca (the hill-fort is less marked and the character of its settlement less clear) and Trenčianske Bohuslavice (oppidum), whose location and chronological classification are comparable. The article also states an absence of lowland agricultural settlements in the settlement structure of the micro region of Bošácka and Moravskolieskovská valleys.
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