53/17/0/-/Konin Gr.114

Two entries on four pages of a book of reports of the castle court of Konin for the years 1765 to 1767, kept in the State Archive in Poznań (Archiwum Państwowe w Poznaniu). Both are reports of a court messenger, made in 1767 for Antoni Prusimski, on an embankment that flooded the Olęder settlers of Trąbczyn. They are in Latin, with the thing seen described in Polish, and are two documents.

Historical background

By 1767 Trąbczyn belonged to Antoni Prusimski, later Starost of Niszczewice. In its woods, towards the boundary with Łukom, he and his predecessors had settled Olęder farmers. On that boundary lay the pond-ground (stawisko), the bed of a former pond, which both estates claimed. An embankment across its outlet held the water back onto whoever lay upstream. The commission of 1775 judged the pond-ground to be Trąbczyn’s and awarded Prusimski damages for the flooding: 53/17/0/-/Konin Gr.145.

The volume belongs to the archive’s fonds “Księgi sądu i urzędu grodzkiego w Koninie”, the books of the castle court and castle office of Konin. A report (relatio) was the commonest kind of entry in these books: a sworn court messenger came before the office and declared what he had seen or done, and the declaration was written down. A man who meant to go to law over damage had it seen and reported in this way first, so that the state of things on a given day stood in a public record.

Contents

April 1767. On 22 April the court messenger Bartłomiej Szepczyński of Trąbczyn declared at Konin that on Holy Saturday, at the request of Antoni Prusimski of Kolno, heir of Trąbczyn, he had gone onto the estate with two noblemen, Stanisław Lipiński and Józef Rudkowski. He saw an embankment lately raised at the end of the pond-ground. Because of it the water that runs from the pond-ground through the Trąbczyn lands had backed up and flooded the Olęder settlers living in the Trąbczyn woods, with their manured fields and their meadows. He stated that people of the neighbouring estate of Łukom had done this on the order of its heir [1].

August 1767. On 6 August he reported again. On the Friday after Saint James, with the noblemen Józef Gołembiewski and Rudkowski, he had seen the embankment in the wood on the pond-ground, by the boundary of the Łukom lands but raised on Trąbczyn ground. The water dammed in the pond spilled onto the fields and meadows of the Trąbczyn Olęder settlers, so that the meadows of four of them lay under water and could not be mown. He and the noblemen declared that the embankment had been raised some years before by the heirs of Łukomia and had now been repaired [2].

Form and language

The book is a register of rough entries, many to a page. The first report stands at the foot of leaf 297 and the top of leaf 297 verso, the second at the foot of leaf 334 and the top of leaf 334 verso. The other entries on those pages are not transcribed. The frame of each report is abbreviated Latin, which the transcription writes out; what the messenger saw is in Polish, in the spelling of the clerk.

Related holdings

The inspection of the same estate in 1754: 53/17/0/-/Konin Gr.136. The decree of 1775, which ruled on the pond-ground and the flooding: 53/17/0/-/Konin Gr.145.

Scans

The archive supplied fourteen images of this book: two single pages and twelve images of two facing pages each. The two entries stand on four pages; the two that come from double images were cut at the fold. Ten images carry nothing that is transcribed and are not used.

Transcription

The editor transcribed the two entries and supplied them by paragraph, with the abbreviations of the Latin written out.

Check against the scans

An AI model (Claude) read both entries word for word against the scans. The transcription was close: three readings were corrected, none of which changes what the reports say happened. Each change is logged with its reason.

Division and dating

Each entry is a document. Each is dated by its own opening line, by the church calendar: the Wednesday after Easter 1767, which was 22 April, and the feast of the Transfiguration, 6 August 1767.

Translation

The English is the editor’s own translation and was not made again. It was changed in five places: three follow the corrected readings, and two make plain that it was the messenger, not Prusimski, who went onto the estate. A second English version of the second entry in the editor’s files, with notes, is a duplicate and is not used.

Summaries

The summaries were written in German from the Latin and Polish and translated into English. Each of their nine statements was then checked against its document. All held.