The story
Seven and a half centuries of one estate in central Poland, told in the order the documents fall, era by era. Some eras are published in full, some have their first documents, and one is named here so you can see what is missing.
Trąbczyn is a village and an estate in the country between Konin and Kalisz. It is named in writing from 1240, and people have been arguing over it in writing since at least 1399, and the arguments were written down because land in this part of Europe changed hands by document: a boundary was a line of earth mounds attested by a court, a tenancy was a privilege with a seal on it, and an owner who could not produce his papers did not own much.
This archive is being built era by era. Each has its own account below. The Middle Ages have their first documents, from the printed charters of Greater Poland. The Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen years are the most fully published. The boundary dispute before them has its documents, and the two eras after Michalina Miączyńska have their first. Her own era exists in the research and in archives in Warsaw and Berlin, and is named here rather than left out, so that what is absent is at least visible.
Trąbczyn in the Middle Ages
The Cistercian abbey of Ląd, which held the villages around Trąbczyn, and the knights who held Trąbczyn itself. 1173 to 1440. 21 documents, 1173 to 1440. The name of this era is a working name.
These documents are not from an archive but from the Kodeks Dyplomatyczny Wielkopolski, the printed edition of the medieval charters of Greater Poland, each entry given whole with its editors’ summary and notes. Most of them concern the abbey of Ląd on the Warta, founded by the dukes of Poland. Duke Mieszko gave it “little Vronchin”, Wrąbczynek, in 1173 (the gift), and Archbishop Fulko the tithes of Zagórów, Skokum, Kopojno, Trąbczyn, Szetlew, Łukom and Wrąbczyn, in a document dated 1240 (the tithes). Kopojno came to the abbey by exchange in 1291, and in 1407 the King allowed it to make its village of Zagórów a town under the law of Magdeburg (the town privilege).
Trąbczyn itself was held by knights. Duke Bolesław gave the village to Count Mikołaj, the treasurer of Ląd, in 1276 (the gift of Trąbczyn). The heirs of Trąbczyn appear in a lawsuit of 1346, and in 1399 the Archbishop of Gniezno gave the tithe of Trąbczyn’s fields to the abbey against the parish priest of Trąbczyn (the judgment). In 1434 a canon of Kruszwica, Wojciech, son of Otto of Trąbczyn, made his brother Jan his proctor in their mother’s house at Trąbczyn (the power of attorney).
The Trąbczyn and Łukom boundary dispute
The Prusimski family, who held Trąbczyn, against the Chełmski family of Łukom next door. c. 1589 to 1788. 96 documents, 1589 to 1791.
Two hundred years of argument between neighbouring estates about where one ended and the other began. It runs through courts at Konin, Pyzdry and Kalisz, and the evidence is physical: eighty notches cut into boundary trees, mounds raised and levelled and raised again, a pond-ground that each side said was theirs. In 1771 the Łukom side took possession of twelve Olęder farmsteads along with the land they stood on, and the settlers found themselves the subject of a lawsuit between men they had never met.
The first documents of this era are here. Four are entries of the land court at Konin: an order of 1589 for an inspection, after a new pond at Łukom flooded the woods of Trąbczyn (1589); two judgments by default of 1644 over the notches (1644); a decree of 1728 that sent a commissioner onto the disputed ground (1728); and a decree of 1763 over potash stopped on its way to Gdańsk (1763). The fifth is the decree of the commission that the Polish parliament appointed to end the dispute, which walked the boundary in September 1775, ruled for the Prusimski side and had new mounds raised along the line (the decree). That decree did not end it. The Łukom side had brought commissioners of its own, who gave a decree the other way, and both sides went on protesting and searching the court books for each other’s decree (1775 to 1777). The Crown Tribunal decided between the two decrees in 1782 and had forty-one mounds raised along a line drawn on the map (the decree of 1782). Entries from the court registers of Konin and Kalisz, from 1754 to 1788, follow the quarrel on the ground and in court before and after; each holding is listed under Sources. A Warsaw newspaper reported the funeral of Paweł Prusimski at Trąbczyn in December 1754 (the report). From the last years before the partition come a register of the hearth tax of 1789 (1789) and the visitation of the parish of Trąbczyn in 1790 and 1791, which counts its 760 souls (the visitation). A fuller account of these years is still to be written.
The Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen years
Friedrich Ludwig, Prince of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, a Prussian general given the estate by the King. 1796 to 1807. 348 documents, 1798 to 1816.
Poland was partitioned out of existence between 1772 and 1795, and Trąbczyn ended up in the Prussian share. In 1796 the King gave the estate to a general who already had debts, and what followed was eleven years of trying to turn Polish land into Prussian money, and nine more of going to law about it after the land was gone.
This is the era the site publishes: the agent’s letters, and the contracts by which the estate was taken apart and let out to the people who worked it.
The Miączyńska restitution
Michalina Prusimska, married name Dąbska and later Miączyńska, the daughter of the last Polish owner. 1807 onward. Not yet published.
She got the estates back in 1807, through the governing commission of the new Duchy of Warsaw, and then spent some thirty years in court over what was left of them. Her claim reached back past the Prussian grant to her father’s title, so the documents of this era argue about the same boundaries as the first.
The records are at the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw and the Secret State Archives in Berlin.
The estate under Włodzimierz Miączyński
Count Włodzimierz Miączyński, Michalina’s son, who held the estate from her death in 1851 to his own in 1879. 2 documents, 1858 and 1860. The name of this era is a working name.
The colonists on the Trąbczyn estate, in the two Olęder colonies then called Staro-Łazińska and Nowo-Łazińska, sued the Count in 1859 over their rights of pasture and wood in his forest. He answered with a counterclaim against 97 of them, arguing that the contract the Prince of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen had made with fourteen colonists in 1805 did not bind him (the summons of 1860).
In 1858 the colony of Emilienheim owed hearth tax and barracks money for 29 householders (the tax list).
The liquidation: the peasants’ land and the servitudes
From the Russian reform of 1864, under Włodzimierz Miączyński and the owners after him. 12 documents, 1868 to 1897. The name of this era is a working name.
The Russian reform of 1864 made the peasants owners of the land they farmed. The liquidation table of the Łazińsk colony, confirmed by the Central Commission for Peasant Affairs on 8 February 1868, lists its 91 farmsteads, the school, the cemetery and the common land, 1,691 Morgen in all, and fixes a liquidation capital of 10,055 roubles 70 kopecks for the former owner (the table). Its copy of 1869 leaves the settlers the right to graze their cattle in the forest “Studzianka” and to gather fallen wood there twice a week, and no other (the copy).
In 1884 the fuel each farmstead might take from the forest was fixed at 104 cloth-loads a year (the inscription). In 1892 the colonists gave up their rights in the forest to the owner of Trąbczyn, Countess Maria Wielopolska, for 393 Morgen of manor land (the inscription of 1894), and a survey of 1896 measured the whole allotment and each farmstead’s land (the statement). The historian Albert Breyer copied the table of Łazińsk, and those of Emilienheim and Orliny, in the 1930s (his notebook).
The twentieth century
The manor parcelled out; the German settlements of the commune of Trąbczyn. 8 documents, 1935 and 1936. The name of this era is a working name.
By the 1930s the manor had been parcelled out, and its remaining land, bought by a man named Jesse, was called Włodzimierow. The historian Albert Breyer went to Łazińsk and Emilienheim in July 1936 and wrote down what the settlers told him: about their land and their schools, who had gone to Volhynia, Russia, America or Brazil, how they spoke, and how they marked their graves (his notebooks). A second notebook adds that Włodzimierow had been parcelled out about 1911, almost all of it to Germans (the second notebook).
In a third notebook, of 1935 and 1936, Breyer counted the farmers of Łazińsk, from 87 in 1840 to 146 in 1935 (his table), and wrote notes on Orlin and Józefów: their speech, houses and customs, their poverty, and their dealings with the Poles (the notebook).