Oe 1 Bü 14526

A volume of contracts by which Prince Friedrich Ludwig of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen (1746-1818) sold, or let in hereditary lease, the estates in South Prussia granted to him by the Prussian crown in 1796 and 1797. It contains thirty documents on 287 pages and is kept in the Hohenlohe-Zentralarchiv Neuenstein. Each document is a contract together with the papers filed with it. Most date from 1798 to 1806; one copies a privilege of 1766.

Historical background

The estates lay in the province formed from Prussia’s share of the partitions of Poland: Kamionna and Kolno, Pszczew, Witów, and the lordships of Trąbczyn and Zagórów. Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen did not live on them. They were managed first by Johann Wilhelm Glenck, his building and economy councillor, and from about 1805 by Peter Friedrich von Triebenfeld as general agent. From 1798 the estates were sold or divided. Whole estates were sold to single buyers. Farms and forest land were let in parcels to settlers in hereditary lease: the lessee paid a sum on entry and a fixed annual rent, and held the land heritably. A sale of noble land required the consent of the crown.

Contents

Kamionna and Kolno

Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen sold both estates to George Conrad Leixner, an official of the bank at Frankfurt an der Oder, for 142,000 Rthl [4, 5]. The volume holds two versions of the contract, the royal confirmation with the powers of attorney filed with it, and the letter that sent Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen his copy [4, 5, 22, 23].

Pszczew

By a contract of July 1804 the whole lordship of Pszczew was made over to the townspeople of Pszczew and six villages for 180,000 Rthl and a yearly ground rent of 1,000 Rthl; 137,000 Rthl of the price was met by taking over mortgage debts [18, 19]. The contract is present in two copies. A decision of the authorities refusing permission for the lease is also present, as is a royal approval of 1806 [18, 24]. Three documents concern single holdings in the lordship, among them a privilege of the Bishop of Poznań of 1766 for a holding at Głażewo, in German translation with its Latin and Polish original [3, 29, 30].

Witów

Preliminary terms record a sale of Witów to Martin Honrichs and Valentin von Kwasieborski for 16,000 Rthl [2]. Later terms record its sale by Triebenfeld to Franz Meierowitz for 20,000 Rthl and a yearly payment of 500 Rthl, conditional on the annulment of the earlier sale [21]. A covering note concerns the files on Witów [1].

Trąbczyn and Zagórów

Most of the contracts were made before the patrimonial court of the Trąbczyn estates, with Triebenfeld acting for Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen. Six grant single holdings of between one and six Hufen to named lessees [6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14]. Others cover larger areas: 20 Hufen to the district administrator Tschachmann, with the right to resell in parcels; 270 Hufen at Trąbczyn, Łazy, Osiny and Przybysław to named settlers; and the farm of Althütte to six settlers, in two contracts [13, 15, 16, 17]. A contract for land at Drzewce is filed with its cancellation three months later [10]. The farm of Kopojno was let for six years, from 1805 to 1811 [9]. A separate grant conveys the manor house at Swięcia [20].

The hereditary leases share a set of terms: entry money and an annual rent, the lessee’s liability for taxes, an obligation to buy drink from the lordship and to use its mill, a fee of one tenth on any later sale, and forfeiture after two years’ arrears [8, 11, 13].

Szetlewek

Glenck sold the farm of Szetlewek to the miller Samuel Lucke for 12,333 Rthl, of which 8,333 Rthl went to the holder of a pledge on the estate, von Radzinski [25]. Three further documents concern an earlier agreement of 20 November 1798 for settling the estate, its cancellation, and the dispute with the pledge holder [26, 27, 28].

Form and language

The documents are in German. Passages in Polish occur where a contract was read out or recorded in that language, and one document has a Latin and Polish original. Powers of attorney, royal confirmations and notarial certifications are filed with the contracts they belong to and form part of the same document. The largest runs to 28 pages. The documents keep the archive’s numbering, which does not follow their dates.

Related holdings

The grants of 1796 and 1797 and the registration of title: Oe 1 Bü 14525. A court file of one hereditary lease in the Trąbczyn forest: 53/71/0/-/57. A petition of 1805 concerning lessees in arrears at Oleśnica: I. HA GR, Rep. 7 C, Nr. 3705. Letters of Triebenfeld to Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen: Oe 1 Bü 9454. Copies made about 1930 of the power of attorney, of the Chamber’s consent of 1806 to the parcelling, and of a further lease, of forest at Drzewce: 53/968/0/-/801.

Scans

The volume was photographed open, in 172 images, most of them two facing pages. Each opening was cut at the fold. The first automatic cuts were often misplaced, because in a bound volume the fold is a dark shadow and not a gap between two sheets. Every fold was then checked by the editor, who moved 43 of them. Most pages were also trimmed at one edge to remove a strip of the leaf lying underneath. Blank pages were left out. The edition has 287 pages of text and the title page.

Transcription

The German text was transcribed by an AI system and supplied by the editor, one file for each page. Its typical errors are a single wrong letter and, more seriously, a real word substituted for the right one without any mark of doubt.

Division into documents

Each document is a contract together with its enclosures: powers of attorney, confirmations and certifications. The enclosures were at first treated as separate documents and then merged back, because an enclosure often begins partway down a page and a page can belong to only one document.

Corrections

An AI model (Claude) read all the pages. It worked through every word the transcription had marked as doubtful and settled most of them. It also searched for errors the transcription had not marked, and 152 such words were corrected. Each change was made within its own line and is logged with its basis: usually the same word written clearly elsewhere in the contract, a second copy of the same contract in the volume, or the standard wording of these contracts. A few were read from the scan. Four readings and the cut-off margin of one page remain unsettled.

Summaries and translation

The model translated each document into English. The summaries were first written from those translations. In October 2026 they were written again, in German, from a reading of each document in its German text, and each of their 182 statements was then checked against the document. All held as finally worded; where a statement rested on a word not read with certainty, it was cut or left general. The English summaries are translations of the German.