53/17/0/-/Konin Gr.145

One entry of 122 pages in a book of the castle court of Konin for 1776, kept in the State Archive in Poznań (Archiwum Państwowe w Poznaniu). The entry is the decree of a boundary commission that sat in 1775 between the estates of Trąbczyn and Łukomia. It is in Polish, with the Latin formulas of the Polish courts, and is one document.

Historical background

Trąbczyn lay in the district of Konin in the province of Kalisz, in the west of the Polish Commonwealth. In the 1770s it belonged to Antoni Prusimski, Starost of Niszczewice. The neighbouring estate of Łukomia belonged to the brothers Heliodor Chełmski, a canon of Chełmno, and Stanisław Chełmski. A third neighbour was the Cistercian abbey of Ląd, which owned the village of Drzewce.

Estates of this kind were bounded by earthen mounds raised at intervals and by marks cut into trees. Where three estates met stood a corner mound, from which each stretch of boundary was reckoned. A boundary was proved by leading a court along it on the ground, by older court records, and by the sworn testimony of old inhabitants. A judgment was entered in the records of a castle court, which gave it public standing, and copies were then drawn from those records.

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. According to the archive’s description of the fonds, the castle court took shape at the end of the fourteenth century. For the nobility it first heard criminal cases under the four “castle articles”: arson, an attack on a nobleman’s house, robbery on the public road, and rape. In time it came to hear other criminal cases, and suits over land and sums of money, and it took over appeals from the town courts. Beside the court grew the castle office, where the court books were kept. The office was open every day for the entry of uncontested matters, and its books had public credit: what stood in them counted as proved.

Contents

The entry. The decree was presented at the castle court of Brześć Kujawski on 23 September 1776 by Simon Szaunski and entered in its records. The text here is an extract from those records, signed by Zboiński and sealed, as it was copied into the book of the court of Konin [1].

The commission. The Polish parliament appointed a commission to end the boundary dispute between Prusimski’s estates of Trąbczyn, Trąbczynek Mały or Nowa Wieś, Łazy and Osiny and Stanisław Chełmski’s village of Łukom, a dispute which the act says had run for decades with violence and the seizure of land. The act, recorded at Warsaw on 1 June 1774, is given in full with the oath the commissioners were to swear. The commission met on 13 September 1775 in the forest on the disputed ground, under Ludwik Dąmbski, voivode of Brześć Kujawski [1].

A divided court. In the first days the commissioners quarrelled over which of them should hold the pen, that is, write the court’s record. The president gave it to one boundary surveyor of Kalisz; the sub-chamberlain of Poznań, with the commissioners who sat on Chełmski’s side, gave it to another. A settlement between the parties was proposed and four commissioners were delegated to negotiate it. The court then went on sitting divided, and the decree says at its end that it was made by a divided court [1].

Prusimski’s boundary. The longest part of the decree follows Prusimski as he led the court along the line he claimed: from the corner mounds near the road from Zagórów to Kalisz, past an old wolf pit, the woods called Ostrowce, Miąsykąt, Dziadulina and Lusnie, a former pond, by then marsh, and eight mounds with forty-one marked trees, towards the ford called Czarny Bród. At each point the decree records what he showed, the documents and earlier judgments he produced, and his objections to the line Chełmski claimed and to a court inspection of 1592 [1].

The rulings. The court examined Chełmski’s line as well and heard sworn witnesses. It ruled on the corner point, found Prusimski’s line the better, and required him to confirm it by oath on the last mound with six witnesses. It had new mounds raised along the boundary between Trąbczyn and Łukomia, each of which the decree lists with its distance from the one before, and on part of the boundary between Trąbczyn and Biskupice [1].

Penalties and adjournment. The court found from the sworn testimony that, after Prusimski had put his own people into the inn on the highway, Stanisław Chełmski rode on it in person with several dozen armed men and had shots fired through its window; a nobleman named Krzeczkowski had his heel shot off, and the inn was set on fire. For this and for his encroachments on Trąbczyn ground Chełmski was sentenced to two weeks in the tower of the castle at Konin and to penalties payable to Prusimski, among them three hundred grzywnas, the unit in which fines were reckoned, for the unlawful use of firearms. He was also to pay 8,000 Polish złoty for timber felled and ground flooded, and the penalties due for having walked out of an earlier court on the ground in 1760. The rest of the boundary with Biskupice, and the question of costs, were adjourned to 21 May 1776. The court handed Prusimski the four sets of sworn testimony and a map of the boundary signed by the president. Six commissioners signed the decree, and with them Wojciech Czarnecki, the boundary surveyor of Kalisz who raised the mounds [1].

Form and language

The entry fills leaves 654 to 715 of the volume. Its opening and closing records, and the record of the Warsaw court that introduces the act of parliament, are in Latin; the rest is Polish with Latin legal phrases. The Polish is given here in modern spelling and by paragraph, as the editor transcribed it, and not in the spelling of the clerk. The English translation is the editor’s own. Its section headings, in square brackets, and its translator’s notes are the editor’s additions and are not part of the record.

Related holdings

Twenty years after this decree Prussia confiscated Prusimski’s estates and granted them to Prince Friedrich Ludwig of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen: I. HA GR, Rep. 7 C, Nr. 3570 and Oe 1 Bü 14525. Prusimski in exile at Venice in 1796: I. HA GR, Rep. 7 C, Nr. 1414. The return of the estates to his daughter in 1807: 1/174/0/2/73 and 1/174/0/1/6.

Scans

The archive supplied 62 images, each showing two facing pages of the bound volume. Each was cut at the fold into two pages. Two halves are not used: the left half of the first image, which is the end of another entry, and one blank page. The edition has 122 pages, beginning with the entry’s title page.

Transcription

The editor transcribed the entry and supplied the text in one file, with each page marked by the number of its leaf. The text is by paragraph, not line by line. It gives the Polish in modern spelling: i where the clerk wrote y, small letters where he wrote capitals, modern endings. The Latin is given as written, with its abbreviations filled out. One footnote of the editor’s, an English rendering of a Latin passage, is left out of the text.

Check against the scans

The editor had worked the text over before it came into the edition. An AI model (Claude) first read four pages word for word against the scans, and the signatures on the last page. It corrected 23 readings, added one line of the title page, and found six words that had been left out between two words with the same ending.

The editor then asked for the whole text to be checked for words left out. All 122 pages were read against the scans, and 233 passages were corrected. In 26 of them the transcription lacked words that stand on the scan, from a single word to about sixty; nearly all had been skipped between two occurrences of the same word. The other 207 are misread words that change the meaning. Slips of spelling that change nothing were not collected, because the text is in modern spelling. Each change is logged with its reason.

Seven of the corrections bear on what the court found or ordered. The largest restores about sixty words on leaf 709 verso: the court’s finding that Chełmski rode on the inn with several dozen armed men, had shots fired into it, and that it was set on fire. The others add or correct a fact, such as a name, a place or a distance, or restore legal wording.

Through the whole text 93 words were also corrected without the scans: words that lack an accent, or carry a wrong one, and are no Polish word as they stand, where the transcription itself writes the right form many times.

Division and dating

The whole entry is one document. It is dated 23 September 1776, the day the decree was entered in the court records at Brześć Kujawski; the commission itself opened on 13 September 1775.

Translation

The English is the editor’s own translation, made before the entry came into the edition, and was not made again. Its section headings and its twenty translator’s notes are the editor’s; the headings stand in square brackets and each note follows the paragraph it belongs to. The translation ends each page at the end of a sentence, so the English of a page can begin or end a few lines away from the Polish. In two places, where it was most of a page away, the break was moved. In most places where the transcription had slipped, the English already had the right sense. It was changed in 37 places to follow the corrections to the Polish, most of them to add the words that had been missing. One paragraph of about a hundred words at the head of leaf 680, which the translation lacked, was translated from the Polish by Claude in the editor’s terms. In one sentence the English was changed without any change to the Polish: Chełmski is to enter the tower at Konin twelve weeks from the decree and sit there two weeks; the translation had read a sitting of twelve weeks. An automatic check compared the marks of doubt and the terms of the two texts.

Summary

The summary was written in German from the English translation and the editor’s outline of the entry, and translated into English. After the check against the scans, its sentence on Chełmski’s sentence was rewritten to take in the raid on the inn. Each of its eighteen statements was checked against the document. All held.