The Third Statute of Lithuania was published in its original Ruthenian version in 1588, while only the Polish translation of this code was being published since 1614. However, the needs of legal transactions, and sometimes the willingness to take advantage of the tried and tested models, resulted in the creation of translations into German and Russian. One of these Russian translations can be found in the Warsaw Public Library (file reference number Akc. 286). On the basis of the paper and handwriting, one can initially assume that it comes from the turn of the 18th and the 19th century. In terms of language, it has a lot in common with the manuscript kept in the Lietuvos mokslų akademijos Vrublevskių library (file reference number F. 22–62) in Vilnius. However, it is distinctly different from the manuscript from the first half of the 17th century which was published in 1916 by Ivan I. Lappo.
PL
III Statut litewski wyszedł w oryginalnej ruskiej wersji w 1588 r., zaś od 1614 r. kodeks ten wydawano wyłącznie w polskim tłumaczeniu. Jednak potrzeby obrotu prawnego, a niekiedy też chęć korzystania ze sprawdzonych wzorów, spowodowały powstanie tłumaczeń na niemiecki i rosyjski. Jedno z takich rosyjskich tłumaczeń znajduje się w Bibliotece m.st. Warszawy (sygn. Akc. 286). Wstępnie można założyć – na podstawie papieru i pisma – że pochodzi ono z przełomu XVIII i XIX w. i pod względem języka ma wiele wspólnego z rękopisem przechowywanym w wileńskiej Lietuvos mokslų akademijos Vrublevskių biblioteka (sygn. F. 22–62), zdecydowanie różni się od wydanego w 1916 r. przez Iwana I. Łappo moskiewskiego rękopisu z pierwszej połowy XVII w.
Legal history in Poland is imperiled by a few threats. One of them is a model of the university education, promoted by the heads of faculties, which is devoted to strictly legal subjects. It may happen, that historical subjects will be eliminated or vastly limited in the course of the implementation of this model. Such kind of pressure inclines legal historians to emphasize their utility to contemporary legal science. However, it is worth noticing, that there are different dangers that lie in wait for Roman law and for Polish legal history. Basing instruction upon incomplete sources in showing a distant genesis of contemporary legal institutions causes an excessive simplification, which is a serious threat to the reliability of scientific research. The Polish legal history researcher will be helpful to a specialist of contemporary law only occasionally and in most of those rare cases his research will be used to point out the birth of a certain legal institution in Polish law. Another threat to Polish legal history is an intensive interest in mostly recent history. Although, after years of censorship in the state of real socialism, this situation is intelligible, as it resulted in abandoning the research of old-Polish times, nowadays conducted by only a few scholars. As far as the group of Romanists is concerned, they tend to indicate the Roman roots of almost all past, present and future legal institutions. However, this is cannot be done when applying all rigors of scientific research. A drop of the scientific level of publications may be observed as well. Authors do not investigate sources of the practice of the law, the use of legal history literature is insufficient and the publications of historians of other specializations are used only to a minimal degree. Legal historians in Poland have to deal with these main problems, if they hope for the further development of their discipline.
Henryk Rzewuski’s (1791–1866) works cannot be a source of knowledge about Polish-LithuanianCommonwealth’s legal history. The pieces of information given by him have been at times one-sided and deceptive. Nevertheless, they may – if used with a critical approach – provide details on the old jurisprudence in the 19th century and on the praxis of applying the old law under Russian rule. They also can be a research base on the author’s views on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s legal and political system, as well as their portrayal in the 19th-century gawęda szlachecka (literary genre associated primarily with noble storytelling, specific to Polish literature of that time). It is also worth continuing the search for – mentioned in Rzewuski’s manuscript – the two-volume Remarks on the Lithuanian Statute written by his father, Adam Wawrzyniec Rzewuski and allegedly published in1782, in Nieśwież. Although there is no certainty whether this work ever existed, it is worth searching for it.
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Prace Henryka Rzewuskiego (1791–1866) nie mogą być źródłem poznania dawnego prawa Rzeczypospolitej. Podane przezeń informacje były niekiedy jednostronne, niekiedy zaś dość bałamutne. Mogą jednak – przy krytycznym podejściu – dostarczać danych na temat znajomości prawa dawnej Rzeczypospolitej w XIX stuleciu i praktyce stosowania dawnego prawa pod rządami rosyjskimi. Mogą też być podstawą badań poglądów ich autora na prawo i ustrój Rzeczypospolitej, jak również obrazu tego prawa w dziewiętnastowiecznej gawędzie szlacheckiej. Warto też kontynuować poszukiwania – wskazanej w rękopisie Henryka Rzewuskiego – wydanej ponoć w 1782 r. w Nieświeżu dwutomowej pracy autorstwa jego ojca – Adama Wawrzyńca Rzewuskiego pt. Uwagi nad Statutem litewskim. Nie ma pewności, czy dzieło to w ogóle powstało, lecz poszukiwać warto.
The aim of the article is to present changes in the position of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania towards the Polish Crown within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the years 1569–1791. The analysis was based on the transformation of both common (monarch, Sejm) and separate (central and local offices, judicial system and law) institutions in the context of economic, social and cultural changes of the era. Gradually, the Commonwealth was transforming into a state in which Lithuania was not so much one of its two parts – along with the Crown, but one of its three provinces – along with Lesser Poland and Greater Poland. It was, however, a special province since it had its own ministers, offices, courts, treasury and fiscal courts along with its own codification of political and private law. The rule introduced in 1673 that every third Sejm was to be held in Grodno, however, was rarely observed. The reasons for this change were: the smaller population of the Grand Duchy, its lower fiscal income along with the war damage and territorial losses suffered in the mid-17th century. This transformation was also facilitated by the fact that the Lithuanian political system and laws became increasingly similar to the Polish ones. Another factor was the slow creation of a sense of political community among nobles of both the Crown and Lithuania. This feeling was born not only out of the same rights and privileges, but also owing to the immigration of the Crown noblemen to the lands of the Grand Duchy and joining – by marriage – Lithuanian noble families, which was especially the case among magnate families. During this period, the common culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth based on the Polish language – lingua franca of the whole state – was also created. Other languages also functioned in the Polish- -Lithuanian state, but Polish, enriched by Lithuanian, Ruthenian, Latin, German and Oriental elements, began to dominate. The Government Act of 3 May 1791 did not mention the Grand Duchy at all, but created a common government for the whole of Commonwealth – the Guard of Laws and Great Commissions. Mutual Pledge of the Two Nations, unanimously adopted on 20 October 1791, constituted an attempt to return to the dualism from the era of the Union of Lublin. This act granted Lithuanians half of the commissioners in the military and fiscal commissions and – in the future – in the police commission. Lithuania also retained separate ministers, offices, a separate treasury and tax judiciary. Thus, the gradual unification of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was still visible, while maintaining some separate aspects, which were important for Lithuanians, albeit secondary in the scale of the entire state. Nevertheless, this process was interrupted by the upcoming partitions.
Contemporary Polish legal historians’ writings rarely concern the political system of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and even less often any substantial or procedural law thereof. Matters relating to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania are becoming less and less popular in Polish academia as well. Actually, such a phenomenon is quite understandable, when one takes into account the expanding scholarly activities among Lithuanian and Belorussian researchers, and the archives abundant in source materials in these countries. Having that in mind, anyone interested should pay particular attention to Dr. Piotr Miłosz Pilarczyk’s monograph that deals with the topic of the Lithuanian Treasury Commission in the years 1765–1794. The strongest point of the above-mentioned book is undeniably the fact, that the author conducted extensive archival enquiry and based his work on collected primary source materials – mainly records of the judiciary activities of the Commission. Unfortunately, the author’s failure to include materials from other sources (for instance correspondence) resulted in an unsatisfactory presentation of the social background of the activity of the Commission’s court, and, consequently, the motives behind its decisions are not always discernible. Although Pilarczyk correctly describes investigated data, he nevertheless rarely enriches his analysis with his own questions. The reviewed monograph contains numerous examples of judiciary praxis, which varied from the model as regulated in the Third Lithuanian Statute (1588). Regrettably, despite the homogeneous character of sources cited in the study, no quantitative methods were applied, which would presumably have resulted in a more detailed image of new trends in the praxis of administration of justice, including possible new or unconventional grounds (motives) behind court decisions. Although Pilarczyk’s work does provide many meaningful findings, he could have produced more interesting results. Hopefully, scholars will further analyse the collected source materials in the future, with an objective of presenting either a quantitative or prosopographic study that could broaden the body of knowledge concerning the judiciary in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 18th century.
Po pozytywnie przyjętych przez krytykę kolejnych tomach Volumina Constitutionum oraz Acta malefi corum Wisniciae (1629-1665) 10 i Acta nigramalefi corum Wisniciae (1665-1785), krakowscy wydawcy kontynuują swą pracę „u podstaw” i opublikowali kolejne źródła miejskie: najstarszą księgę kryminalną krakowską z lat 1554-1625 oraz księgę miasta Dobczyc (1699-1737). Źródła w formie rękopiśmiennej nie były nieznane, ale wybór jest nader trafny: duże, zamożne, europejskie miasto, o ukształtowanym systemie sądownictwa, zróżnicowani podsądni z całej Rzeczypospolitej i szeroki wachlarz przestępstw. Obok niewielka mieścina – Dobczyce, stanowiąca co najwyżej satelitę odległej o niespełna 30 kilometrów metropolii. Na pozór – dwa różne światy. Czy także w świecie przestępczym?