The Legislative Powers of the King and the Sejm in Relation to Royal Towns in Poland in the 14th–16th Centuries

Abstract

Granting a location privilege that ensured townspeople would be subject to a specific law did not mean this was always the case. Although the clauses of German law in the location privileges specified the applicable law - for example ius Magdeburgense, ius Novoforense, or ius Culmense - knowledge of German law in the towns of the Kingdom of Poland was limited in the late Middle Ages. Moreover, the law was often inadequate for local conditions. This inadequacy, as we II as the incompleteness of the regulations of Saxon-Magdeburg law, were among the main reasons for its modification, in which the monarch played an important role. The first part of the article summarises the findings on the role of German law clauses in location privileges. The second part discusses the king's competence to legislate for cities that developed or modified the law guaranteed in the German law clauses. The main sources used were Saxon-Magdeburg law (a gloss on the Saxon Mirror and a gloss on the Magdeburg Weichbild), which authorized the monarch to introduce regulations that replaced written law. In the Jagiellonian Kingdom of Poland, however, the central legislative authority was not only the monarch, but also the Sejm, which claimed the power to enact laws for towns and townspeople. The third part of the article discusses how this power developed alongside changes in the monarch’s legislative role.