Ius commune on the Periphery? A Study of Peasants’ Wills in Poland in the XV–XVII centuries

1 Introduction

The issue of law of wills in rural parts of the Kingdom of Poland has already become the subject of careful study^[2)]. This may not come as a surprise if one considers that, according to the findings of historiography, peasants probably accounted for just over 70 % of the population living on lands of the Kingdom of Poland^[3)]. The question of what the testamentary legal practice of such a large group of people looked like therefore remains a matter of considerable interest. At the same time, it must be stressed that the available source base of published, printed, peasant wills in Poland has expanded considerably since previous studies of peasant testamentary law. These wills have not survived as separate documents, but rather in entries in the court records of the office to which the testator declared the content of his last will. The vast majority of them were written in the Old Polish language, although dispositions in Latin and German also appear. This study is an attempt to describe the basic institutions and dispositions used in peasant wills and to place them in the ius commune conceptual grid. The considerations in the following article are based on a corpus of 161 published peasants’ wills dating from the 15^th to the 17^th century and from various areas of the Kingdom of Poland. Due to the state of preservation of rural court records, the majority of wills come from the historical territories of Lesser Poland (Małopolska) and Red Ruthenia (Ruś Czerwona). The source corpus consists both of wills documented in rural court records published to date^[4)], and those published individually in scientific articles^[5)]. The most significant element of the researched source corpus, however, is the extensive collection of peasant wills published by the historian Janusz Łosowski of the Marie Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin^[6)]. Losowski’s collection – the fruit of an impressive archival search – is also important in that it provides a completely new source base and fresh inspiration for renewed research devoted to the subject of testamentary law among the peasantry^[7)]. This article is intended as a pilot study on the content and form of peasant wills in Poland in the early modern period, based on this extended source base. It does not pretend to give definitive answers, which is usually impossible in the current state of research anyway, but rather tries to outline the general picture and the main features of peasants’ wills as they appear from a careful legal-historical reading. From my own perspective, I would contend that Losowski’s impressive edition (nt. 6) has not yet received due attention from legal historians^[8)].

2 Normative context

Before proceeding to present the peasant will in Poland on the basis of an analysis of the sources, it is worth devoting a few words to outlining the normative context. In other words, it is necessary to ask what order of private law governed peasants deciding to make a will. The answer to this question is of fundamental importance, but poses enormous difficulties. This is because, despite the emergence of a separate peasant social class in Poland, there was never any formation of a nationally or even regionally uniform rural judicial law. In villages founded under Magdeburg Law ruled formally the Sachsenspiegel and the Magdeburg Weichbild, as also in towns^[9)]. In practice, however, German law remained completely unknown in the villages and was virtually never applied in court practice^[10)]: applications went directly to the Magdeburg municipal court in Germany. Deficiencies in the knowledge and application of German law in Poland were to be remedied in 1356 when King Casimir established, as a final Polish instance in municipal cases, the ‘Iudicium iuris supremi teuthonici Magdeburgensis in arce Cracoviensi’ (Higher Court of German Magdeburg Law at the Royal Castle)^[11)]. This court was to serve appeals and also to issue instructive judicial decisions: Polish ‘ortyle’ from German ‘Urteile’. Therefore, its role was to limit the previous custom of appealing before the Magdeburg municipal court. Meanwhile, research by Jagiellonian University’s eminent legal historian Stanisław Kutrzeba has shown that, even during the period of the Kraków court’s most prolific activity, the extent of its influence on rural courts was limited to the immediate vicinity of Kraków itself^[12)].

From the beginning of the 16^th century, private villages, whether owned by the nobility or the clergy, enjoyed judicial immunity from public courts, which meant that the owner of the village exercised judicial power over its inhabitants^[13)]. This power was accompanied by the legislative powers of the village owner through the so-called dominion laws, i.e. binding legal acts issued for a given village. It must be emphasised that such dominion laws did not, as a rule, interfere with the provincial and stately private law. They were far more often limited to administrative relations between the village community and the manor, and in particular concerned the feudal obligations of the peasants towards the manor. It is evident from the surviving dominion laws that they interfered only quite exceptionally with the content of local inheritance law, and, if they did, this was usually in the broad interest of the manor. Thus, some of the dominion laws imposed the public form of the will (i.e. before the village clerk) to be compulsory^[14)]. Another example is the restriction of the freedom of testament for mayors or village heads by introducing the non-divisibility of their inheritance: the aim in this case was to limit the number of village officials, in case each of the heirs of a mayor or village head claimed the office in question^[15)]. Finally, dominion laws sometimes imposed the non-divestiture of smaller agricultural fields through testamentary succession^[16)]. In all the cases mentioned above, the dominion laws were rather interventionist in nature, and their aim was not to comprehensively regulate the rules of rural testamentary succession, but to ensure stable legal turnover of rural land and rational rules of manorial management^[17)]. This, after all, guaranteed to the court the achievement of specific profits from agricultural production. On the scale of the Kingdom of Poland, the legal situation of the Chełmno land regulated primarily in Kulmer Handfeste was exceptional^[18)]. There, the written law of Chełmno county, in the version of the Neustadt revision (rewizja nowomiejska) of 1580, was universally applicable, including in the villages and elsewhere.

As can be seen, a relatively wide autonomy was left to the peasants in the field of private law, i.e. legal acts performed by peasants according to local custom were usually accepted by the village owner himself as effective. It must therefore be assumed that, in the absence of state and dominion private law norms, villages were governed by local customary law^[19)]. Customary law, on the other hand, by its very nature remains fluid and underdetermined as the current legal practice of a given community. For the sake of completeness, let us note that no inventory of peasant customary law in Poland has survived. No wonder: who would compile one? The peasants themselves, being mostly illiterate, were not able to cope with such a challenge. Besides, there was no need to write down the customary law since the information on the subject was a tradition handed down from generation to generation. The village owners, on the other hand, did not interfere with and were not interested in local private law orders, thus implying far-reaching legal particularism.

In view of this, it has to be acknowledged that – apart from the Chełmno region – we do not have any normative sources in the field of rural testamentary law. With regard to the issue at hand, this means primarily two things. Firstly, peasants’ wills as source texts on legal practice are of crucial importance for any attempt to reconstruct the order of rural testamentary law in Poland in general^[20)]. Secondly, the reading and analysis of peasant wills unfortunately remains suspended in a certain normative vacuum, and their content cannot be confronted and compared with an objective point of reference in the legal basis. This, in turn, prompts one to be far more cautious when making general theses and drawing general conclusions.

3 Main features and dispositions of peasant wills

The content of peasant wills can be analysed from a number of interesting angles. They constitute declarations of the last will of generally illiterate people. As such, they are an invaluable source for learning about peasant life as seen through the eyes of the peasant himself, summing up his course on his deathbed. After all, the will as a literary genre is not limited to indicating the testator’s legal successors. It also contains religious elements, evoking specific images of God and the afterlife, and testimony to the testator’s personal piety. Between the lines of these wills, practical information can be found on the family model, the position of women in the household, the relationship between spouses, and moral views addressed by parents towards their children^[21)]. Furthermore, on the basis of peasant wills, attempts can be made to estimate the level of wealth of peasant holdings in a given area. Meanwhile, the present consideration of peasant wills is limited purely to the legal aspects. Therefore, elements belonging rather to economic history, social history, or spiritual history, which should be separately triangulated, are deliberately omitted.

The fact that the peasant testator remained an illiterate person entails another special feature. His oral declaration was edited in writing by someone else. It is quite clear that the person of the scribe had an enormous influence on the specific shape of the will, the choice of words, and whole concepts, as well as the technical terms that made up the repeatedly reproduced form^[22)]. Nonetheless, my reading was guided by the methodological assumption proposed by the Utrecht University historian Anna Adamska, according to whom a will is an authentic testimony of the testator’s intent, and the editor was merely ‘a technician who was able to express the testator’s intentions by means of a conventionalized text, and was not supposed to influence its provisions’^[23)]. The final approval of the text of the will was usually confirmed by the testator, after the written content had been read to him or her, by his or her own cross signature^[24)]. Incidentally, it is worth noting that, in the reality of the rural environment, the person writing the will was only rarely a professional: only exceptionally was it possible to engage a scribe from a neighbouring town^[25)]. Usually, after an ad hoc search for someone who knew how to write and draft a will^[26)], and in the absence of a professional court clerk, the role of the notary was often performed by a local parish priest^[27)] or ecclesiastical servant – especially in villages with church property – or court officials and, later also village teachers. The name of the person drawing up the will was not essential for it to be effective^[28)]. Therefore, the village scribe usually remained anonymous, without mentioning his or her name in the body of the will – as opposed to the names of the witnesses or jurors present when the will was drawn up. Nor was there any obstacle to the will being written by a person related to the testator. Cases of the writer revealing himself are highly exceptional^[29)].

Undoubtedly, the most significant disposition for a Roman canonical will was the establishment of an heir as universal successor to the testator. The heir was intended not only to take over all the testator’s goods of succession, but also to assume the testator’s debts and claims. First of all, it should be noted that the establishment of an heir in this way is virtually absent from Polish peasant wills. These wills are in fact more or less extensive collections of legacies, with additional dispositions of an ancillary nature. In essence, therefore, we are dealing with a Germanic type of will, which is a collection of individual legatees in the absence of any indication of a general successor to the testator^[30)]. Such a solution is not surprising insofar as the very concept of universal succession remains highly abstract even today for those without specialised legal training. Meanwhile, the Germanic type of will allowed the intuitive needs of the testator to be met in a simple and predictable manner. By way of legacies, specific things went to specific persons or institutions indicated in the will.

In the wills I analysed, it is admittedly possible to come across a testamentary disposition which, in literal terms, somewhat resembles the traditional establishment of an heir. This quasi-establishment of an heir designates the beneficiary of the succession in the absence of an enumeration of specific legacies^[31)]. In fact, we are probably dealing here with a solution analogous to that used in Polish land law (the nobility’s own law)^[32)]. In land law, the testator could dispose freely only of movable property, while the immovables, on the other hand, had to go to his legal heirs, who in this sense were heirs by compulsory law. In the case of land, the distribution took place only among the legal heirs. The testator was free to dispose in his will only insofar as he could assign unequal portions to his legal heirs, but never omit one. This solution was designed to prevent testators from disposing of particularly valuable family assets to third parties: it therefore radically upheld the value of family solidarity in succession law. In this context, it is important to recognise that, in the case of the quasi-establishment of an heir, the testator’s disposition consisted of a purely declaratory designation of non-testamentary heirs (or some of them) as recipients of the inheritance. Indeed, it can be seen that it was usually one of one’s own children who were endowed. It is significant that in all the wills analysed for this study not a single one is a quasi-establishment of an heir outside the family.

Cases in which the testator named a more distant relative as heir are extremely rare. It seems, moreover, that also in such cases the testator – in the absence of his own descendants – indicated his closest relative. An example of such a disposition may be the above-cited will of Stanisław Bzdula, where the testator, in an extremely laconic will, indicated his brother as the beneficiary with the words „omnia bona mea que habeo quatuor vacas dono ac legitime perpetuique lego fratri meo legitimo Martino Bsdula In Matys Motłoch’s will, on the other hand, we can observe the testator’s special relationship with his nephew Walenty Sporek, to whom the testator endowed half of the inheritance. It is clear that there was a strong personal relationship between the testator and his nephew arising from the testator’s gratitude for the kindness and care shown to him^[33)]. The other half of the estate went to the testator’s stepson Jan Dziatek. This content of the testator’s testamentary dispositions, along with the lack of information about the testator’s own children, leads us to conclude that the stepson was regarded as the testator’s most immediate family member. One is free to assume, therefore, that in the absence of the designation of an heir in the will, the heir remains ab intestato as designated by local customary law.

Of course, this positioning of the matter does not resolve all the problems and doubts that arise. How far did the circle of heirs extend without a will? Can they be described as necessary heirs, and, if so, to what extent? Does consideration for the testator’s closest relatives lead to the precedence of a non-probate succession over a testamentary succession^[34)]? These questions cannot be answered with certainty on the basis of the content of the wills themselves. In the absence of a normative reference, it would be necessary to examine the records of village court cases in which a relative of the testator, who had been omitted from the will, would sue the testator’s heir for the release of inherited property. Subsequent research will therefore need to confront surviving wills with cases recorded in village court books. However, even this research does not guarantee positive results. This is because the investigations to date have shown that village courts rarely gave specific legal bases for their decisions, and even in these cases various orders were mixed up in an arbitrary manner; e.g. the commandments of the Decalogue, local custom, and ‘law’ as a general term were juxtaposed side by side^[35)]. It is at present impossible for me to determine definitively whether the village court was actually guided by any legal basis or merely by its own equity intuitions.

The boundary between the quasi-establishment of an heir and a legatee remained fluid and, above all, did not present any practical meaning for the testators themselves. This is because the testators, regardless of the words used, were trying to achieve a concrete effect in the form of bestowing their property on their relatives, in particular their children. It is noteworthy that testators generally treated their sons and daughters equal, demonstrating a certain egalitarianism^[36)]. The wills analysed here consist, for the most part, of numerous detailed legacies of the testator’s individual items to specific individuals. It is possible to observe the principle that testators sought to endow each of their children equally in their wills with legacies, although they sometimes privileged one of them who was particularly promising, obedient or helpful to the testator^[37)]. In addition, smaller legacies were willingly bestowed on people personally related to the testator: siblings, siblings-in-law, acquaintances, co-workers, or farmhands^[38)]. Interestingly, the subject of legacies in peasants’ wills could be either movable property (primarily items useful on farms such as grain, livestock, clothing, and money were bequeathed) or entire properties. In doing so, the property itself was bequeathed without indicating any specific form of legal authority. From a dogmatic point of view, the peasants’ entitlements to the land varied according to the specific territory. For example, in Mazovia peasants only had the right of perpetual lease, while in the royal and ecclesiastical estates they usually had the so-called purchase right to land, similar to divided ownership^[39)]. However, even where peasants were not formally allowed to testate the property they were using, the village owners usually accepted the customary turnover of land by inheritance: after all, the most important thing was that the land should be cultivated and the number of labourers on the manor should not be reduced.

A separate issue is the position of the widow or widower of the testator, who is often mentioned in wills provided she or he lived to see her or his spouse’s will. Significant exceptions include the situation where the spouse is omitted from the will, which should be duly justified^[40)]. Driven by the desire to ensure a decent and stable livelihood after the testator’s death, a specific property was usually handed over to the spouse for use. Considerations of the personal relationship forged between the spouses also played an important role^[41)]. Some such dispositions explicitly state that the holder’s authority over the property should cease upon his or her death^[42)]. Others, on the other hand, simply refer to the land in question and do not indicate precisely the form of legal authority that should accrue to the recipient. However, a reading of the research material as a whole shows that rural legal terminology is quite fluid on this point: even the formula allocating to the spouse a ‘perpetual right’ to the property assumes the moment of the spouse’s death as the end date. This is demonstrated by the fact that, in such a situation, the testator was free to decide in his will the fate of the property in question after the death of the ‘perpetually’ entitled spouse^[43)]. In conclusion, it must be said that by allocating real estate to a spouse for de facto ownership, the peasant testators had in mind a lifetime use for maintenance purposes and not a transfer of ownership with the right to dispose of the property. With this solution, the testator had the certainty of ensuring a peaceful remainder of life for her or his spouse, while at the same time not exposing her or his descendants to the removal of the most valuable assets outside the family circle after the death of the beneficiary spouse. In addition to real estate, legacies of sums of money or grain to the testator’s spouse are extremely common.

Peasant testators seem to have treated their endeavours to regulate the property relations in the family after their death as one organic whole. The goal of endowing their children was important, while the means of achieving this goal, i.e. whether they satisfied their children’s expectations while they were still alive in the form of a gift or only in a will, was not important. It is therefore very common in peasant wills to also list among the legatees, children formally omitted from the will, but gifted while the testator was still alive. In such cases, the testator would meticulously note what goods the person had received, and emphasise that they had already been sufficiently rewarded^[44)]. On the other hand, one gets the impression of a certain measure of mistrust on the part of the testators, who seem to have feared that making a will might be seen as binding on themselves. That is why they often tried to specify that they were only disposing of property in the event of death and not by way of donation. They therefore stipulated that they retained the power to revoke their wills^[45)], and also stressed that their dispositions would only be effective after their death^[46)].

The desire to consider all members of the immediate family holistically is not surprising. After all, in the initial formulation of their wills, testators often declared that the purpose of their final act was precisely to prevent conflicts between relatives after their death. We must remember, however, that due to a lack of normative sources, one cannot define the principles of intestate succession in customary peasant law in Poland with certainty. Peace in the family was definitely one of the declared objects of a will; another one may have been continuity in the household. We do find cases in which the testator decided to treat a particular child better or worse because of his or her personal qualities or behaviour^[47)]. If, in a very few cases, any of the testator’s children were fully disinherited, that is, have received nothing in the will nor as a gift during the testator’s lifetime^[48)], then such drastic behaviour on the part of the testator, harming the interests of his immediate family, required strong justification. For example, in his will, Jan Jastrzębski somewhat disowned his prodigal son, who had exposed his father to liability for his debts and even for buying his son out of the death penalty^[49)]. It can be presumed that the testator’s radical reaction stemmed not only from the purely financial loss suffered due to his son’s reprehensible behaviour, but also from his moral disapproval of his son’s criminal acts. At times, the testator seemed to convince himself by multiplying the arguments for omitting the child from the will: both paying him off with a donation during the testator’s lifetime and punishing him for his reprehensible behaviour towards the testator^[50)]. Children gifted while the testator was still alive were usually mentioned in the will, but they were no longer allocated a separate estate in the will. This situation should not, however, be interpreted as disinheritance: it was certainly not treated as such either by the testators themselves or by the beneficiaries of the inheritance, since they would have already received an expected share of the estate from their father or mother.

A separate category of legacies consists of the numerous piae causae legacies to ecclesiastical institutions. These were usually earmarked for the local parish church or parish priest; sometimes for ecclesiastical ministers, but less frequently for a particular monastery with which the testator might have felt personally connected^[51)]. The objects of legations were usually sums of money, sometimes for a specific purpose, such as buying candles or a vestment for the church. However, we also know of cases of legations of entire properties to the parish church^[52)]. In such a case, the testator would most probably have been childless and without any closer relatives. However, the wording of such a will itself does not make it possible to establish the circle of testatorless heirs, as it does not mention any of the testator’s relatives at all. Legatespiae causae, being a manifestation of the testator’s personal piety, were usually accompanied by instructions to pray for the soul of the deceased, sometimes in a specific form specified by the testator (e.g. to say mass, ring bells, or recite the rosary on specific days). The instructions accompanying the legates piae causae were also sometimes directed towards the welfare of the neighbour, e.g. by giving alms to the poor in the form of a meal or a monetary donation. Specific stipulations regarding the testator’s burial place were rather rarely included and only by representatives of the wealthier and more influential peasantry group, e.g. aldermen, innkeepers, millers, etc.^[53)].

It can be seen that in addition to their stated aim of preventing family conflicts, peasant testators often sought to influence the behaviour of the living after their death. The legal instrument used for this was the recommendation, which, next to the legatee, is the most common type of disposition used in rural wills. The objectives of the instructions are relatively recurrent: ensuring the salvation of the testator’s soul through regular prayers, the proper management of the farmland left behind^[54)], settling the testator’s affairs (payment of a specific debt, collection of a specific claim), providing for the care of vulnerable persons in the family (e.g. care of the testator’s mentally ill daughter)^[55)], and showing obedience to the testator’s spouse.

As a general rule, the fulfilment of testamentary instructions was to be ensured by the persons endowed in the will. Very often, however, testators appointed the executors of the will separately. In the sources analysed they are often referred to as ‘guardians of the will’. Undoubtedly, testators were keen to ensure the proper effect of their dispositions. Their role was important insofar as it was common in wills to draw up an inventory of the testator’s debts and claims. Sometimes the testator imposed an order on a particular beneficiary of the will to pay a particular debt. Otherwise, the obligation to settle the bond situation after the testator’s death fell to the will’s executors. For this reason, executors were usually chosen either from the immediate family (son-in-law, brother-in-law, or spouse) or from among persons enjoying particular authority in the local community^[56)]. The tasks of the executors of wills were understood pragmatically: they were to act autonomously for the effective fulfilment of the will’s disposition and had wide freedom of action to do so. Sometimes testators even left it to the executors themselves to specify the content of the disposition. For example, in his will, Maciej Bierzgiel established lifetime use of land for the benefit of his wife together with the obligation to maintain and raise his stepdaughter Dorota^[57)]. In contrast, in case of the death of the testator’s wife, the executors were to ‘appease and connive’ Dorota. It is clear from the wording of the will that the testator did not indicate what specifically should accrue to the stepdaughter. Presumably, it was up to the executors to decide what benefit would satisfy the testator’s stepdaughter’s legitimate claims and, therefore, in some way they co-created the content of the will.

The scope of testamentary freedom may be limited by the requirement of a third party’s consent to the drafting and content of the will. In general, it must be said that the peasants’ freedom to testify did not suffer any serious restrictions. Admittedly, isolated cases can be discerned where the spouse’s consent to the content of the will was incorporated into the content of the will^[58)]. One should not draw too far-fetched conclusions from this: it is probably only a matter of moral support for the testator’s last will. Only rarely does a peasant’s request to the authorities, i.e. to the village owner, for approval of the will appear in wills^[59)]. Perhaps such a requirement was the result of a specific legal regulation for a particular village, or perhaps the testator was non-bindingly seeking the approval of a public authority in order to recruit village officials as potential executors of the will. In any case, asking for approval of a will is by no means the rule, but an exception in the analysed texts. This supports the thesis that the legal basis for the peasants to testify in their own view was the old customary law and not the legislative will of the village owner.

The form of the vast majority of the wills analysed was that the testator summoned the village officials to his house and there, in front of them, orally declared his will, which was written down on the spot and later entered into the village court book. This form thus coincided with the practice of urban Magdeburg law, which knew the form of a public will made in the testator’s home, drawn up on a bed of pain. Alternatively, the peasant testator would go before the village court, composed of a mayor and two oath-keepers, and there orally declare his or her last will, which was written down on the fly and immediately entered into the village court book. This form was however much less common, as in peasant circles wills were not drawn up further in advance, in anticipation of death at a later date, but only in the face of a life-threatening illness. After all, most surviving wills open with a formula stating that the testator is sick in body, although sound of mind. The above-mentioned forms of wills used in rural law were of a mixed oral-written nature and it is difficult to clearly categorise them as purely oral or purely written. Therefore it seems that the recording of the will in the village books was an element essential to the validity of the will itself. Wills written by the testator himself (holographic wills), on the other hand, do not appear at all in the sources known to us: an obvious thing if one considers the illiteracy that was widespread among peasants. The form of the peasant wills did not require the signature of the testator: If the testator did sign, it was almost always only with the sign of the cross. Village officials or private witnesses also usually made the sign of the cross in place of their signature. The will was thus drawn up not by the village clerk, but by a literate person selected to write the document.

The purely private form of the will is much rarer: in that case the testator declared his or her will orally in front of a minimum of two witnesses^[60)]. The witnesses would then make a sworn statement to the village court as to the contents of the will so made. Such a will was also subject to entry in the village court book. This shows that, on the one hand, in rural testamentary law it was possible to draw up a will without the involvement of public officials. On the other hand, that in each case it was sought to guarantee the publicity and permanence of the disposition on the death of the testator by entry in the public register, which was the village court book.

4 Peasant wills in the ius commune grid

The issue of the potential reception of Roman law in the Polish legal orders of the various states with regard to wills has already been addressed by other legal historians. It is difficult to speak of definitive and irrefutable results, but it is generally accepted that there can in fact be no reception of the ius commune in Polish law. References to the sources of Roman and canon law appeared mainly in the works of learned writers educated at universities. Their role, however, was limited to illustrating the erudition and readership of the author in question. However, as far as the content of the legal norms in force or the judgements made (law in action) was concerned, these were usually based on local customary law or indigenous statute law. In land law, for example, although influenced by canon law, the institution of a will as such was allowed, but the freedom to testify was fundamentally restricted by making it impossible to testify on immovable property as the most valuable asset^[61)]. The prohibition of testamentary estates – deeply rooted in customary law – was explicitly regulated by the Sejm constitutions of 1505 and 1510. The only normative exception was the Third Lithuanian Statute of 1588, which was binding on the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and only subsidiarily on the territory of the Kingdom of Poland, and this was because this part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not have its own compilation of the law of the nobility. The influence of Roman law is clearly discernible in this piece of legislation, but it is a mediated influence: the drafters of the Statute relied not directly on Roman sources, but on the popular study of Roman law “Summa legum levis, brevis et utilis” by Master Rajmund (magister Raymundus). The practice of municipal law, on the other hand, was based primarily on the interpretation of Magdeburg law sources (Sachsenspiegel and Weichbild) together with Magdeburg court rulings. In order to curb the practice of appealing to a court located outside the borders of the Kingdom of Poland, King Casimir the Great established the Court of German Law at the Royal Castle in Krakow in the 14^th century. An analysis of disputes in testamentary cases decided before this Court shows that only exceptionally did the judges refer to sources of Roman law^[62)]. Also in municipal law, therefore, it is not possible to speak of the reception of learned law in the field of ius commune^[63)].

The situation is similar if one asks about the reception in Polish law of the principles of canon law in the field of wills. At the turn of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, particular Polish canon law (i.e. synodal legislation) did not devote separate attention to the substantive law of wills. The only issue in this matter was the question of the exclusive jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts in inheritance disputes, which exclusivity was particularly opposed by municipal courts. However, one thing must be acknowledged and is not doubted by researchers of the subject: the very idea of a will, originally absent from Polish customary law, as well as from the customary laws of Slavic and Germanic peoples in general, probably emerged under the influence of canon law and, indirectly, Roman law.

Having presented the main features of peasant wills in Poland in the early modern period, it is worth asking about the possible influence of learned law on the content of rural testamentary law. It must be admitted that there can be no question of the reception of Roman law or canon law in this respect. Admittedly, peasant wills were familiar with and often contained constructions also known in Roman law, e.g. usufruct or command, as well as legations to individuals. However, it is not possible to demonstrate a connection or even inspiration with the solutions of Roman law in rural law. It must therefore be considered that the solutions mentioned above were adopted in rural common law spontaneously, independently of external influences. This is not surprising: after all, the needs of testators are similar despite the distance in time and space, and the number of possible useful legal solutions remains limited. Perhaps, therefore, the influence of learned law is limited to the institution of the will itself, which also appeared in Polish municipal or land law only under the influence of canon law.

5 Conclusions

The work presented here sought to provide an outline of the main features of peasant wills in the Kingdom of Poland in the late medieval and early modern periods on the basis of an analysis of surviving wills that have been published in print. Even at this level, the perspective covered is extremely interesting. A number of issues raise questions, the most serious of which boil down to the question of the shape of the peasant order of non-testamentary inheritance and the relationship of non-testamentary inheritance to testamentary inheritance. Unsurprisingly, the peasant will does not provide for the establishment of an heir, but rather a set of legatees: but what then of the inheritance debts if the testator has not named the executors of the will? These questions must remain without a conclusive answer for the time being, as providing one would require turning to a completely different type of source in the future: the rural legacies of the inheritance courts.

In the meantime, it is worth adding that the potential source base of further peasant wills for researchers’ inquiries is very promising. Firstly, it is to be hoped that hitherto unpublished rural court records will in time be published in print or digital versions^[64)]. Although they will provide information on the state of peasant testamentary law mainly in the territory of Lesser Poland and, to a lesser extent, Red Ruthenia, nevertheless, in view of the phenomenon of strong legal particularism, the testamentary practice of even neighbouring villages may have differed significantly. Secondly, references to the legal life of peasants can also be successfully sought in sources implicitly attributed to other social classes. A full and methodical search of church archives, where the wills of peasants living in villages constituting church estates can be found, can prove extremely valuable. It should also not be forgotten that villages usually maintained close economic contacts with the nearest towns. On the other hand, everyday life in small urban centres more closely resembled the occupations of farmers than the sophisticated occupations of the wealthy inhabitants of the capital. In practice, the petty bourgeoisie, like the peasants, made a living primarily from small-scale farming and backyard animal husbandry. The archival research carried out by the team led by Agnieszka Bartoszewicz (of the History Institute of the University of Warsaw) in the court books of small towns proves that these books often contained wills of peasants which were in one way or another connected with the petty bourgeoisie^[65)]. The direction of this research seems extremely interesting and undoubtedly deserves to be further explored.