53/17/0/-/Konin Gr.118

Twenty-nine entries on thirty-seven pages of the register of the castle court of Konin for 1780 to 1782, kept in the State Archive in Poznań (Archiwum Państwowe w Poznaniu). They carry the quarrel between Antoni Prusimski of Trąbczyn and Stanisław Ścibor Chełmski of Łukomia to its decision by the Crown Tribunal and to the attempt to mark the boundary on the ground, and they show two other suits of Prusimski’s in the same years. They are in Latin, three of them in Polish, and are twenty-nine documents.

Historical background

Since 1775 two boundary decrees had stood against each other: that of the parliament’s commission, for Prusimski, and that of the commissioners Chełmski had brought, for Chełmski: 53/17/0/-/Konin Gr.145, 53/17/0/-/Konin Gr.116. In 1778 each side was still protesting against the other’s: 53/17/0/-/Konin Gr.117. The entries here show how it ended. The Crown Tribunal at Piotrków decided the cause “from the map” and ruled on the two decrees, and sent an officer to raise the boundary mounds along a line it had drawn on that map. The Tribunal’s decree itself is not in the edition.

Most entries of a register like this one are one-line notes that a paper was brought in and lies among the papers produced; here sixteen of the twenty-nine are. The papers themselves were kept apart and are not in the book.

Contents

The boundary: the Tribunal’s line on the ground, 1782. On 18 March 1782 a decree of a sitting on the ground, about the Olęder settlement belonging to Trąbczyn, was brought in [11]. In June the boundary chamberlain of Inowrocław, Jakub Górski, protested: he had come, engaged by Prusimski, to carry out the Tribunal’s decree of 23 January between Trąbczyn Minus or Nowa Wieś and Łukom and to raise the mounds along the line drawn on the map; Chełmski in person pushed away the man with the surveyor’s chain, kicked the chain off the line and threatened, and Górski stopped to ask the War Department for soldiers [17]. Chełmski answered on 15 June that an executive officer has to carry out a decree of the Tribunal and not interpret it, that Górski had gone beyond it and had wrongly described him as resisting, and that his act was null [19]. Chełmski had also announced a protest against the Tribunal’s decree itself, which was never written [15], and cited Prusimski and Górski before the Tribunal [21]; Prusimski cited Chełmski, the chamberlain of the land of Dobrzyń and the convent of Ląd [22]. In December the boundary decree of the sitting on the ground, with the description of the mounds, was brought in [28], and so was the delivery of an Olęder settler of Trąbczyn, Martin Hunt [29]. An inspection of a place on Trąbczyn’s ground had been brought in for Prusimski in June [18].

Wood cut across the new line, December 1782. Prusimski had Chełmski cited before the castle court of Kalisz for acts of violence [25]. On 7 December his messenger reported 221 building pines felled on the Trąbczyn side of the line, by his account on 28 November, by Chełmski’s people [26], and the Trąbczyn steward Leon Maszewski protested in Polish, naming the men of Łomów and Łukom who had come with sledges and axes [27].

The convent of Ląd. Prusimski had charged the Cistercians of Ląd, owners of Drzewce, with colluding with Chełmski at the boundary commission. On 22 November 1781 their administrator, Father Tesselin Malechowski, protested in Polish that the convent had acknowledged the meeting point of the three grounds as Chełmski showed it for the reasons in the commission’s decree, and offered an oath [8]. In January 1782 the abbot, Benedykt Lubstowski, and the convent cited Prusimski before the Tribunal to be cleared of the charge, relying on the inspection of 1592 [10]; a further citation followed in September [24].

The Tracholz debt and Grab. The claim that Chełmski had bought from the merchant Tracholz was now to be heard at a sitting on the ground at Grab, the estate of the late Katarzyna Prusimska. Citations to it were entered for the land court judge Stefan Zielonacki and for Chełmski [1] [2] [9], and for Prusimski [16]. One is given in full: Prusimski and the Bogdańskis, husband and wife, she the heiress of Katarzyna Prusimska, are to appear on 3 June 1782, and four subjects from Nowa Wieś are to be produced as witnesses [14]. In August Prusimski’s plenipotentiary asked the office whether a report of a citation of Chełmski’s had been declared; none had [20].

The succession to Prusimski’s uncles. Prusimski cited Kazimierz Zakrzewski and his sons, and the land court, before the Tribunal in October 1781 [4] and again in April 1782 [12], and his plenipotentiary Piotr Gosławski protested against a decree of the land court that had refused him a delay [13]. The citation of 21 September 1782 is given in full. It names those who claimed a share: the children and grandchildren of Marianna, Wiktoria and Konstancja Prusimska. And it sets out the plaintiff’s own descent: son of Stefan Prusimski and Wiktoria Malczewska, grandson of Krzysztof Prusimski and Teresa Golińska, and sole successor of his uncles Antoni and Paweł, who died childless. He relies on a Tribunal decree of 1738 and argues that daughters whom their father has dowered can claim nothing from their brothers [23].

Other citations and a protest. Notes record a protest by Prusimski against Chełmski [3], two citations of Prusimski by Chełmski [5] [7], and one by the former and the present owner of Biskupice [6].

Form and language

Each entry stands among others on its page; the pages are shown whole and the other entries are not transcribed. The Latin is heavily abbreviated; the long entries were read against the scans a second time, word for word, and a few words in them remain marked as doubtful. Fifteen entries have no dated heading of a sitting above them and are dated from the headings before and after, some only to the year; each says so. One heading gives a weekday and a day of the month that do not agree, and the weekday is followed. One note is unfinished, and one entry is a heading with nothing written under it. One note, which the editor had photographed but not transcribed, was transcribed for the edition.

Antoni Prusimski appears here as “Ostroróg Prusimski” and as knight of the Order of St Stanislaus. The citation of September 1782 is the only document in the edition that names his parents and grandparents.

Related holdings

The commission’s decree of 1775: 53/17/0/-/Konin Gr.145. The registers before this one: 53/17/0/-/Konin Gr.116, 53/17/0/-/Konin Gr.117. Katarzyna Prusimska: 53/17/0/-/Konin Gr.136, 53/6/0/-/45.

Scans

The folder has thirty-two photographs of this book, each showing two facing pages. Each was cut at the fold. Thirty-seven of the sixty-four halves carry an entry that is transcribed and are shown whole; twenty-seven are left out. The photographs are from Skanoteka, the scanning project of the Polish genealogical society (skanoteka.genealodzy.pl), and carry its watermark across the middle of the image.

Transcription

The editor transcribed the entries that concern Trąbczyn and supplied them by paragraph, with the Latin written out. One note on a photographed page was not in the editor’s text; an AI model (Claude) transcribed it from the scan, four lines in a clear hand. One entry in the editor’s text, a note of a decree for the town of Brdów, does not concern Trąbczyn and is left out.

Check against the scans

An AI model (Claude) read the holding against the scans in two passes and corrected 175 readings. The first pass was a light one: every heading and date line, the twenty short entries word for word, the opening and close of the longer ones, and the signatures, 42 readings. At the editor’s word the longer entries were then read through, eight documents on sixteen pages, and 133 more readings were corrected. Nineteen words remain marked as doubtful: they were looked at and could not be read with confidence.

Those that change the sense: the first note is a report “to the Tribunal”, and its plaintiff Zielonacki is “judge”, not the court; Gałecki and Skórzewski are “the former and the present” heirs of Biskupice; a citation is to the “condescension”, the sitting on the ground, at Grab; the abbot is Ludwik Benedykt Lubstowski; the witnesses of a note of August 1782 are Reczkowski, Świętosław Bogusławski and the messenger Matuszkiewicz; and the boundary decree of December 1782 was “given”, not entered “in the protocol”. Signatures were added under six entries.

The second pass found five passages where the transcription had passed over a line or some words, and restored them. In the protest for Prusimski against the land court, three lines: the court refused the delay because, it said, the cause belonged to the register of Greater Poland, while the Tribunal was then hearing that of Płock; it “cut off the delay and ordered the matter to be brought in”. In Górski’s protest, the words that Chełmski acted “setting at nought the authority of the Tribunal”. Other corrections that change the sense: in the citation to the sitting at Grab, Teresa Bogdańska is the successor of her two late sisters, and the four working men to be produced are Prusimski’s own subjects; Chełmski charges Górski with “interpreting” the decree, and says its line cannot be carried out without cutting off the one settler adjudged to him; and the pines felled in November 1782 were carted away “to” Chełmski’s estates. Each change is logged with its reason.

Division and dating

Each entry is a document. Ten are dated by the line “Actum in Conin” directly above them and three by the heading of their sitting elsewhere on the opening. Fifteen have no dated heading on a photographed page: six of them could be dated to the month and nine only to the year, from the headings before and after them. One heading names the Saturday before Michaelmas and the 29th, which was the Sunday; it is dated to the Saturday, the 28th. Each says so.

Translation

The English is the editor’s own translation and was not made again. It was changed in forty-nine places where the text had been corrected; six lines that had come into the file from a chat window were taken out; and the note that was newly transcribed was translated in the editor’s terms.

Summaries

The summaries were written in German from the Latin and Polish and translated into English. Each of their 69 statements was then checked against its document and rests on words that are not marked as doubtful. All held.