Testamenty mieszczan grodzieńskich w XVII-XVIII wieku

Abstract

The present article describes the specific nature of last will documents. It discusses in detail all the sections of 81 wills written in Grodno in the 17th and 18th centuries. The analysis of the content of these texts provides a lot of information about their authors: their profession, possessions, religious beliefs, where they wanted to be buried, how important religion was to them, as well as the nature of their family relationships which is manifested in what they willed to whom. The last wills of Grodno townsmen from the years 1640-1796 were written in accordance with certain patterns, similarly to the wills written by townsmen in Sieradz, Pabianice or Kielce. In Grodno, most of these documents were approved by the chief administrator or juror of the city; in the 18th century, also by a Soviet administrator. Last wills were usually written in the testator's house, right before their death. The most unique documents from the corpus are the original versions of the wills, these kinds of documents rarely survived in the original versions. Among the 81 testaments, 22 documents were made by the members of the patriciate. There are also wills made by artisans, merchants, a pharmacist, as well as the inhabitants of the villages near Grodno. The full list of the testators can be found in the appendix to the article. Most of the testators were Roman-Catholics. They did not leave any detailed suggestions for their burial ceremonies. They made one person responsible for the burial, stated what amount of money was to be spent on the ceremony, and asked for a mass. They rarely left cash to be spent on their burial; usually, they ordered a part of their property to be sold for that purpose; sometimes the heirs had to pay for the funeral. However, not all the wills contain funeral instructions. The main motivation behind writing the last will seems to have been in most cases the testator's intention to prevent conflicts between their heirs. The few instances of leaving money to religious institutions seem to confirm this view: only 27 testators out of 81 left some of their possessions to religious institutions: money, land, clothes or dishes. Cash was rarely willed in such instances; debts that other people bad failed to pay the testators before they died were more common: the institutions were expected to exact the money themselves. Moreover, the heirs were reluctant to give the possessions willed to church, they often ceded this responsibility to their heirs. The most important kind of property included in the wills was land: 69% of wills contain statements of this kind. It does not necessarily mean that the inhabitants of Grodno were farmers, though, the patriciate and the inhabitants of the nearby villages owned most of the land. The testators rarely left gold, silver, tin or copper to their heirs; cash was willed even less often. Such donations decreased in number in the 18th century, which is explained by the testators by the losses they suffered as a result of plundering during "Moscow deluge" . It should be noticed that historians have been interested in testaments written in big cities, such as Gdansk, Kraków, Warsaw for a Jong time. Testaments written in smaller cities, such as Sieradz, Przemyśl or Pabianice have also been analysed. However, all these publications discuss the documents produced in the Kingdom of Poland ("Korona") , whereas the last wills written in The Grand Duchy of Lithmania remain largely neglected.