PIOTR GÓRECKI

A Historian as a Source of Law: Abbot Peter of Henryków and the Invocation of Norms in Medieval Poland, c. 1200-1270

Sometime in the later 1260s, Peter, the third abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Henryków in Silesia, wrote his remarkable history of the monastery's foundation and estate. ¹ The history is a series of stories about the individual holdings that the monastery obtained in the course of the thirteenth century. ² Apparently at a late stage of his life, Peter looked back at the preceding decades with considerable apprehension, ³ and he explicitly cast his work as an exercise in reassurance. Addressing the monks directly, he repeatedly remarked that the purpose of the history was to help them respond to several kinds of legal claims to the monastic estate. ⁴ One of the threats he anticipated was claims by dispossessed heirs and their successors to the holdings acquired by the monastery during the preceding century. ⁵ His story of the forest of Glebowice, acquired by the monastery in 1234, includes an unusually interesting example of his approaches toward minimizing that threat.
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      Although the complete story of the forest went back nearly a full century, ⁶ the passages that reflect Peter's strategies of dispute prevention concern a relatively short succession of events, spanning the years 1227-1234. ⁷ These events began with a dispute. Sometime in late 1227, a "certain knight" named Stephen Kobylaglowa had "incited certain peasants ... to claim the forest of Glebowice for themselves." ⁸ Accordingly, the peasants told the duke of Silesia, Henry the Bearded, that the monastery had "illicitly seized" Glebowice from them, and that, "if this be, your grace, we ought to possess it by hereditary right because [its earliest possessor] had been the uterine brother of our grandfather." ⁹ The duke swiftly acceeded to the peasants' demand, "took the forest away from the monastery, and gave it to the peasants." However, the peasants' enjoyment of the newly regained forest was brief; equally swiftly, Stephen moved to acquire the forest for himself. "Upon noting that through [the action of] these peasants his shrewdness had prevailed," Stephen approached the duke and offered him an expensive warhorse, "which was at that time appraised at 28 silver marks before the duke," who "happily accepted the horse."
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      Abbot Peter culminated this story with a final exchange of statements between Duke Henry and Stephen. "For this favor and gift," he quoted Duke Henry as saying to Stephen, "if you ask me for something, you will get it." "My lord," Stephen answered, "you know that I serve you with the utmost pleasure, but my possessions are modest. So I ask that, in order that I may be able to serve you, my lord, that much better, you deign to grant me the forest that has now reverted to you." ¹⁰ This statement prompted Henry to dispossess the peasants (who at this point disappear from the story) and to grant the forest to Stephen. Peter identified this particular grant as the crucial threat to his fellow monks. "Here," he interjected at this point, "is the reason why Stephen's sons and heirs threaten to take away this forest from the monastery." In describing the threat in the present tense, Peter clearly implied that it continued into his own time—that is, that it had loomed over the monastery ever since the ducal grant to Stephen until the 1260s, and that it required a refutation, which he immediately undertook to provide. He promised the monks to demonstrate that, despite appearances to the contrary, the threat was illusory: "In the following [account], we shall show that Stephen's sons and their heirs have no right to demand or redeem this forest." ¹¹
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      He furnished that demonstration by means of a narration of the subsequent events. He recalled that, despite his earlier enthusiasm for it, Stephen had decided to relinquish Glebowice soon after he had acquired it. He "offered [the forest] for sale to various persons because he was poor and because at that time hardly anyone cared for a deserted holding [in the region of Henryków]." ¹² After some effort, the knight identified a potential buyer, an "aged" prior by the name of Vincent—a person of regional importance, whom Peter remembered as "a noble man," the uncle of another important man, and founder of the monastery at Kamieniec. ¹³ Stephen offered Vincent the forest for sale "several times." However, "the prior was a very old and cautious man, and he refused to deprive our monastery of this forest." ¹⁴ Thus, Vincent had been afraid to receive a holding that had formerly been possessed by the Henryków monastery.
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      Instead of buying the forest himself, Prior Vincent actively helped the monastery regain it. "He sent an appropriate messenger to Lord Henry, the abbot, ... to convince him to redeem the said forest for his monastery in any way he could." ¹⁵ Abbot Henry was sufficiently interested in Vincent's idea to visit the old man in person. During the visit, the abbot expressed his own fears with respect to the forest. Clearly, Glebowice had become a thicket of anxieties; while Vincent was afraid of the abbot and his monks, the abbot was afraid of Stephen and his heirs. The abbot's expression of fear initiated a crucial conversation, presented to the monks by Peter in direct speech. "If I buy this forest," the abbot said to Vincent, "Stephen's heirs will later demand it according to Polish law." ¹⁶ "Absolutely not," Vincent answered, and offered a remarkably lucid statement of a formal rationale for the purchase, which he knew would ease the abbot's fears as soon as he understood it. "You should know, lord abbot," he said,
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that it has been held among our ancestors and fathers since long ago that if anyone from the stock of the Poles sells any partimony of his, his heirs could redeem it later. But perhaps you Germans do not fully understand what a patrimony is. I will explain it to you so that you may understand it fully. If I possess something that my grandfather and father have left me in possession, that is my true patrimony. If I sell it to someone, my heirs have the right to demand [it] according to our law. But whatever possession the lord duke gives me for my service or by grace, that I can sell without my relatives' knowledge to whomever I want, because my heirs do not have the right to demand such a possession. And so for this reason let it be known and apparent that the said forest of Glebowice neither was nor is Stephen's patrimony, but the duke's gift, and so you can securely buy it freely and without fear, because none of Stephen's heirs has or will ever have any right to demand it after you [have acquired it for] your monastery—as long as there are or shall be in your monastery those who know how to defend themselves according to Polish law and this rationale. ¹⁷

In conjunction with the circumstances that preceded it, this monologue constituted the formal refutation of potential claims by Stephen's heirs that Abbot Peter had promised his monks earlier in his narrative. "Here, brothers," he added at this point, "note from the above treatise how you ought to answer the heirs of Stephen of Kobylaglowa." ¹⁸ Vincent's statement convinced Abbot Henry to go ahead with the purchase of Glebowice from Stephen; that purchase took place in a series of transactions that are the subject of the rest of Peter's story of Glebowice. From Peter's perspective, Vincent's assurance worked on two levels: in the past, as a source of security for Abbot Henry in 1234; and in the present, as the decisive proof for Peter and his fellow monks of the invalidity of any potential claims by Stephen's heirs.

      This segment of Abbot Peter's history is the most vivid medieval Polish record of the invocation of a norm—by which I mean a declaratory proposition that concerns right and wrong, or that directs particular outcomes or courses of action under particular circumstances. ¹⁹ Peter's invocation of the norm was explicit, in two senses: he stated that a norm existed; and he recited its substance. ²⁰ He invoked the norm, and drew conclusions from it, in the form of a proof, structured as a syllogism. ²¹ Although this invocation of a norm is unusually explicit and elaborate, it was merely one of the strategies adopted by Peter throughout his work to confront a recurrent problem: the difficulty of securing legal transactions, however licitly effected, from future contention and dispute.
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      The legal transaction that elicited the most serious apprehesion of subsequent conflict in thirteenth-century Poland was alienation of landed estates by lay persons to ecclesiastical recipients. Alienation of landed estates—whether by gift, sale, exchange, or conditional grant—confronted the alienors and the ecclesiastical recipients with the danger of subsequent claims by the alienors' descendants or other relatives, who were likely to claim the alienated lands as their inheritance. ²² As elsewhere in medieval Europe, no single approach, or set of approaches, guaranteed that legal transactions effected in the present would be secure from future challenge. ²³ Instead, the parties, their supporters, and other interested persons engaged in a wide variety of approaches, which they combined in different and apparently eclectic ways on different occasions, in order to perform legal transactions licitly and to enhance their future security. ²⁴
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      In this story, Abbot Peter sought to prevent dispute concerning alienation of a landed estate by invoking a norm that purported to place certain categories of alienated estates beyond the reach of possible inheritance claims altogether. The norm was a familiar medieval distinction between inheritances, or ancestral estates (which Peter called "patrimonies") ²⁵ and acquisitions. In Poland, as elsewhere, ancestral estates belonged in the first order to the possessor's family, while estates "acquired" through service, or as gift, or by purchase, or through conquest belonged more closely or exclusively to its possessor than to the family. ²⁶ The specific implications of this distinction varied across the Continent, depending on several factors: the strength of those property rights that the distinction qualified, including ideas of property in general, ²⁷ and practices of succession and alienation in particular; ²⁸ the presence and strength of lordship, especially the lord's control over devolution of inheritances or acquisitions; ²⁹ practices of succession and inheritance within families, which sometimes distinguished between inheritances and acquisitions; ³⁰ and a wide range of political, military, and demographic contexts that affected the relative importance of acquired and inherited estates in a given society or region. ³¹ According to Peter's interpretation, among the Poles the distinction affected specifically the relationship between a possessor and his family: alienation of ancestral, or "patrimonial," estates required familial consent, while acquired estates were freely alienable by the possessors at the expense of their heirs.
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      Perhaps because of its textbook clarity, scholars of medieval Polish law have treated the statement attributed to Vincent as a cornerstone exposition of the Polish rights in land and their tenurial modifications. ³² However, there are some indications that well into the thirteenth century there was far less practical certainty about the distinction between inheritances and acquisitions than would have been the case had the norm articulated by Vincent commanded general acceptance in his own time and over the subsequent generations. ³³ Abbot Peter's need to cite this distinction so long after the relevant transaction and his explicit concern with the monastery's vulnerability in his own present suggest a simmering ambiguity about the status of the forest long after Stephen had acquired it and then sold it to the monastery. Peter's history of Glebowice offers two reasons for that ambiguity: ignorance of the norm—that is, a failure by the parties in 1234, and by their successors in Peter's time, to understand the distinction between inheritances and acquisitions and its significance for alienability; and oblivion of several events and relationships among the parties that, properly reconstructed and understood, situated Stephen's acquisition of Glebowice from Duke Henry, and his subsequent sale of it to the monastery of Henryków, within the norm.
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      Through the statement attributed to Vincent, Abbot Peter explicitly identified the crucial problem as ignorance of the norm itself. Peter and his speaker clearly assumed that the norm was entirely transparent and unambiguous and that knowing it was therefore the crucial, and sufficient, remedy for the problem. Their explanation for that ignorance was ethnographic: the monks of Henryków did not understand the norm because they were Germans and therefore unfamiliar with the norm, which was part of "Polish law." Thus, Vincent's clarification for Abbot Henry in 1234 and Peter's reiteration of it for his fellow monks thirty years later were (among other things) individual moments in the mutual acculturation of Poles and Germans occasioned by the migration of German monks, duchesses, knights, and peasants into and within the Piast duchies during the preceding decades. ³⁴ By the mid-thirteenth century, one result was an explicit recognition of "German" and "Polish" "laws" as essentially comparable, and mutually adaptable, systems of status, lordship, and tenure. ³⁵ This section of Abbot Peter's treatise to the monks is an example of this, a lesson for a group of German monks in one specific substantive area of Polish law.
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      However, the circumstances Peter narrated about Glebowice taken in their entirety, as well as contemporary evidence from Silesia and the other Piast duchies, suggest that, throughout the thirteenth century and into Abbot Peter's own present, the Poles themselves did not uniformly understand the norm as Peter had articulated it through Vincent. Thus, despite Vincent's (or Peter's) assurances to the contrary, the uncertainties Peter attempted to lay to rest cut across lines of ethnicity. They also reveal a crucial substantive ambiguity concerning succession to acquisitions in Poland. Peter identified the nature of that ambiguity in the process of refuting it. The fear and circumspection with which both Prior Vincent and Abbot Henry had contemplated obtaining the forest clearly show that, in the natural or right course of things, and in the absence of further intervention, they had expected the forest to devolve upon particular recipients— the monks in Vincent's case, and, in Abbot Henry's, the natural successors of Stephen Kobylaglowa. In other words, each man had clearly expected the forest to descend to some other rightful possessors (and potential adversaries) as a matter of course; and one of them expected that those rightful possessors would be Stephen's heirs. ³⁶ The emphasis in Peter's remarks to his monks shows that, as late as the 1260s, this latter expectation of heritability needed to be overcome.
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      Thus, the distinction between inheritances and acquisitions was vulnerable because it modified but did not quite overcome a presumption of heritability. This hypothesis is supported by the broader context in which Peter wrote. First, in Poland, as elsewhere in Europe, acquisitions, once granted, tended to become inheritable over time—typically after succession across one generation, but, according to Peter, two. ³⁷ Second, in Poland acquisitions of all kinds created expectations of heritability right from the outset, that is, from the moment at which the recipients acquired the estates in question, and well before the moment of succession across two generations. Third, and most important, Peter and his contemporaries were aware of the tension between the heritability and the alienability of acquisitions and on occasion grappled with it. In the 1260s, therefore, Abbot Peter reflected on an important and controversial normative issue and sought to negotiate that issue to his monastery's advantage.
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      Historians and social anthropologists concerned with law approach the relationship of norms to social practice, or of tension among different norms, from three directions. The first attempts to conceptualize the genesis of norms—that is, the dynamics whereby they are formulated and recognized as authoritative, especially over time. ³⁸ The second assesses the degree of convergence between a norm and the social practices it purports to regulate. ³⁹ The third presumes that a norm is not, in the first order, a mandate for these practices, that it need not converge with practices in any particular way, and that it need not cohere with other norms—but that it is instead primarily a strategic resource in the legal process. ⁴⁰ According to this view, participants in legal transactions bring norms to bear on the legal process as part of a broader repertoire of acts, gestures, and (sometimes) rituals explicitly intended to prevent or resolve dispute. Invocation of a norm does not terminate the legal process—that is, it does not suffice to prevent a future dispute or to settle a current one; and its subsequent role does not consist in implementation and enforcement. Instead, it is a prelude to a period of negotiation within groups that include the parties and their supporters, which may or may not be coupled with other strategies of dispute prevention or settlement. These other strategies, jointly or individually, constitute resources in the legal process in the same sense. ⁴¹
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      Peter's invocation of the norm sheds light on all three approaches. First, the abbot attributed its origins, and its intrinsic force, to long usage and common acceptance "among our ancestors and fathers, since long ago." Second, he presumed that, at least among "the stock of the Poles," there was close convergence between the terms of the norm and the practices the norm purported to regulate. Third, and most important, he used the norm as a resource. He situated its invocation within a careful narration, and interpretation, of several circumstances, relationships, and formal legal issues. Above all, he was concerned with the provenance of the forest that had accrued to Stephen Kobylaglowa; the transactions by which Stephen obtained the forest; and the relationship between Stephen and Duke Henry, which these transactions reflected and strengthened. Underlying Peter's narration are several broader assumptions about heritability and alienability of landed estates, about the significance of service as a basis of interpersonal relationships and tenures, about the vulnerability of landed estates to economic pressure and other adverse circumstances, and about the permanence of the fear of conflict. Many of these assumptions were shared by Peter's thirteenth-century predecessors and contemporaries. ⁴² Thus, through his narrative about Glebowice, Peter responded to, and negotiated with, a common set of terms of reference that, when shrewdly adapted, offered him and his monks a plausible and persuasive context for invocation of the norm.
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Acquired Estates: A Collective Profile

Perhaps the basic issue on which Abbot Peter touched was the provenance of a particular estate. Clearly, it was crucial to Peter, as it had been to Prior Vincent and Abbot Henry, to identify the holding in question as a "gift" from the duke—whether in return "for service," or "by grace"—and to distinguish it from "something" that had been "left," as he put it, by "my father and grandfather." His contemporaries also identified the provenance of estates as acquired or inherited. Between 1202 and the 1260s, the Piast dukes repeatedly recalled that individual donors "had bought" particular holdings "from the heirs," or from other possessors, or that they had received them as gifts from dukes or from other donors. ⁴³
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      A series of documents records the provenance of estates ultimately granted to ecclesiastical recipients in terms that closely match Abbot Peter's taxonomy of estates. In 1185 or 1186, a palatine of Masovia named Zyra recorded that the estate that had been granted by his ancestors and by himself to a church in Plock ⁴⁴ consisted of the "villages with which the church has been endowed by [my] ancestors [a prioribus]," ⁴⁵ another group of villages "that I have acquired through the sweat of my service," and a single village with its church, "which my grandmother Dobromila had procured from [its] heirs for thirty marks of silver." ⁴⁶ Over the subsequent decades, several documents similarly classified estates into components that were "patrimonial," or "earned by service," or "acquired with money." ⁴⁷ On the other hand, at other times the dukes described particular estates in terms clearly intended to show that they were ancestral. Such descriptions could be terse and general, as when Wladyslaw Odonic noted in 1231 that an estate had "accrued" to its possessor "from his ancestors long ago." ⁴⁸ Or they could be emphatic and specific, as when Henry III recalled in 1257 that a knight named Godehard and his brother "had received [their holding] from their father, and grandfather, and great-grandfather," reiterating the fact of their succession from their father in two other clauses of the charter. ⁴⁹
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      In contrast to Abbot Peter, these sources do not explain the significance of the recorded provenance for alienability. Thus they do not shed light on its relevance to the ultimate recipients' possessory security. ⁵⁰ What the diplomatic record and Peter's story share is a common set of legal terms and concepts about the origins of, and succession to, landed estates. The elements in terms of which Zyra and the Polish dukes identified the provenance of estates—their descent through "ancestors," over a substantial time span, from father to son, or across three generations; their acquisition by the "sweat of service," or by purchase—correspond to the distinction between "patrimonies" and acquisitions that Peter expressed through Prior Vincent's speech to Abbot Henry. Thus, in the 1260s Abbot Peter crafted his argument to the monks in terms of a legal distinction that was indeed widely accepted and, in its formal elements, quite clear. If there was confusion in thirteenth-century Poland concerning the application of the norm he invoked, that confusion did not reflect an underlying ambiguity of the norm itself. This formal clarity of the norm helps explain Prior Vincent's, and Abbot Peter's, insistence that the source of safety for the monks was their knowledge of the norm.
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      A second issue Peter raised by means of the dialogue between Abbot Henry and Vincent was the status or position of the recipient of an estate, especially with respect to the duke. Although Peter focused primarily on one such recipient, Stephen Kobylaglowa, who was a "knight," the diplomas show a wide variety of recipients, identified variously (and often in conjunction) as the dukes' "faithful"--fideles, typically used as an adjective ⁵¹ —"knights" (milites), ⁵² "servitors," "servants" (servientes, serviciales, ministri, ministeriales), ⁵³ or as officials, agents, functionaries (palatini, camerarii, procuratores, balistarii, sculteti), ⁵⁴ or chaplains (capellani). ⁵⁵ These recipients varied considerably in their status and (sometimes) in the strength of their proprietary rights (or expectations) toward their estates. ⁵⁶ However, several categories among them shared two attributes in terms of which Abbot Peter defined Stephen's position and relationship with Duke Henry: knighthood and service. ⁵⁷
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      Despite considerable variation even among those categories, common to them was a particular type of relationship with the dukes (and, less frequently, with other grantors) that was explicitly ethical and extended over time. ⁵⁸ Service grants made to this subset of recipients were conceived of above all as rewards, usually for service performed in the past, sometimes for service continued at present or anticipated in the future. This conception of a service estate is quite explicit in the conversation Abbot Peter attributed to the knight Stephen and Duke Henry: Stephen requested a grant of an estate because he had always served the duke well and faithfully and because he hoped to continue to do so. Likewise, the charters associate grants, service, and reward. Sometimes this is laconic, as in Duke Henry the Bearded's brief note that a man named Godek had received a holding from Henry's father Boleslaw the Tall "for his service." ⁵⁹ Sometimes there are more substantial references to grants to particular recipients "for faithful service," "on account of the services ... performed for ourselves and for our predecessor," "having noted [the recipient's] fidelity toward ourselves, and having observed his obedience," and on occasion by means of extravagant and verbose acknowledgments of the recipients' "faithful and immeasurable obedience." ⁶⁰ The language of such formulations became increasingly elaborate in the course of the thirteenth century. Thus, by the 1260s Abbot Peter had at his disposal a rich rhetorical repertoire of phrases from which he could construct a conversation on this subject between a duke and his knight.
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      The Piast dukes consistently described possession of such estates in the future as continued reward. The purpose of the grants was to enable the recipients to continue to perform their past, current, or (sometimes) new functions; or to maintain their status, which had been earned through service; or simply to keep them well rewarded, without reference to any future actions in return by them at all. ⁶¹ Faithful "knights," "servitors," and others received estates from the Piast dukes so that "my liberty extending over their person[s] may not diminish, but grow," "that the blessings of our nobility may grow within them," that they would be able "to come to the defense of the land at their expense," and "repel enemy that much more forcefully," and that they would be "equip[ped] for the services to the monastery with that much more effect and fidelity." ⁶² The equation between additional reward and additional ability to serve was directly, and explicitly, proportional; the words of the Piast dukes to the effect that additional gifts would enable the recipients to perform service "that much more" successfully are echoed almost exactly by Abbot Peter in Stephen Kobylaglowa's declaration of concern at his ability to serve the duke in the future and his promise to "serve" Duke Henry "that much better" if he received an additional reward.
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      On occasion, the Piast dukes further implied that rewarding faithful service was a positive obligation on their part. Several preambles or narrations note that, in a well-governed duchy, "the diverse people who perform service" ought to receive a "faithful and fair compensation ... , in payment as a reward," in order that "their merits may not turn to dust," or "that they may receive from us a due compensation for their labor and services," or "that merits may happily be repaid with merits," or in order to repay their "fidelity, according to custom." ⁶³ The common, recurrent, implication of these rationales is the obligation of dukes to reward those who serve them. The result is an unexpected glimpse into what might be called the ethic of the relationship between the donors and the recipients. Abbot Peter clearly relied on that ethic in his image of Stephen Kobylaglowa's promise to serve Duke Henry faithfully as long as Stephen received an appropriate level of reward.
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      As imagined by Peter, the actors in the story of Glebowice relied upon, and strengthened, those relationships with Duke Henry that affected their tenures. Peter reconstructed the transactions between the "ducal peasants" and Duke Henry, and subsequently between Duke Henry and Stephen Kobylaglowa, with particular attention to service, "grace," and the recipients' subjection to ducal lordship. The actual events that make up the story are a series of transactions in the course of which his actors explicitly identified, strengthened, and used their relationships to one another and to the forest, and which Peter himself glossed in order to reinforce the messages he attributed to the actors. Thus, at the outset of the story, Peter recalled that the group of "ducal peasants" whom Stephen Kobylaglowa had initially encouraged to make a claim against the monastery had succeeded in regaining Glebowice from the monastery in part "because they were the duke's own [peasants]" and because "the duke believed them, as his own peasants." ⁶⁴ Although Peter did not explain the substantive details of the relationship between the duke and "his" peasants, he clearly implied that that relationship enabled them to raise their claim before the duke and—however fleetingly—to succeed in that claim.
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      After the peasants' brief appearance in his story, Peter portrayed Stephen's acquisition of Glebowice as part of another rapid sequence of acts through which Stephen relied upon, and strengthened, his own close relationship with the duke. In the dialogue between the knight and the duke during Stephen's initial gambit to acquire the forest, the two interlocutors explicitly associated the duke's grant of the forest to Stephen with Stephen's past, present, and future service. Thus, Abbot Peter used the dialogue to establish service as the grounds for Stephen's acquisition of Glebowice. Duke Henry explicitly indentifed himself as a beneficiary of Stephen's generosity, and he promised Stephen an unspecified, apparently open-ended reward. Stephen's response to the duke was essentially symmetrical; that is, Stephen promised to discharge for the duke a level of obligation that was proportional to that reward. As imagined by Peter, the relationship between Stephen and the duke in 1234 was one of an open-ended, bilateral debt and generosity, in which the obligations of each side had been in the past, and were to be in the future, proportional to the actions of the other. Peter's emphasis on bilateral debt, generosity, and well-earned reward over time corresponds directly to similar descriptions of relationships established through service in ducal charters.
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Acquired Estates: Heritability and Alienability

Abbot Peter's image of the dialogue between Stephen and Duke Henry, in conjunction with the language of the charters, strongly implies that the recipients' entitlement to estates acquired through service was to continue, in an open-ended fashion, into the future—that is, that it was to be, in a vague but powerful sense, permanent. The evidence raises the further question of succession to acquired estates, especially across generations. Interestingly, in his invocation of the norm by means of Vincent's speech, Abbot Peter evaded this question altogether. The pattern of succession he actually described concerned "patrimonies," that is, estates that had devolved upon their possessors across two generations. He said nothing about patterns of succession to acquisitions—except that any such patterns could be altered more easily than would be the case for "patrimonies." Thus, oddly absent from Vincent's statement is evidence of those Polish practices and expectations of succession to acquisitions that may have been the actual source of the monks' fears.
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      What were these practices and expectations? How did Peter's contemporaries view patterns of succession to acquired estates—especially to estates acquired through service, with which Peter was directly concerned in his story? When they made (or at least recorded) their grants to the recipients, the Piast dukes frequently spelled out the possible scenarios for future disposal of acquisitions by the recipients or their successors. When the recipients were "knights," or when they acquired estates clearly in connection with service, or both, their acquisitions were consistently intended to be heritable—that is, to devolve, in the normal course of events, ⁶⁵ upon the recipients' descendants, and perhaps other categories of heirs. Such estates were consistently granted "by hereditary right" ⁶⁶ or as "eternal inheritance"; ⁶⁷ or to the recipients and their "heirs" (heredes), ⁶⁸ their "descendants" (posteri), ⁶⁹ their "successors" (successores)," ⁷⁰ or otherwise defined descent groups. ⁷¹
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      In several cases, the plans for devolution of such estates were more specific, and the recipients were given a choice in the future disposal of the estates they acquired. A relatively early group of charters describes the choice in terms of three specific options: the recipients may pass the estates to their heirs; or they may sell, exchange, or otherwise alienate them presumably at the expense of the heirs; or they may bequeath them through a post-obit gift or a testament, also presumably at the expense of the heirs. ⁷² Later charters, issued around the middle of the century, describe that choice in a more open-ended fashion, as permission to the recipients to dispose of the estates "according to [their] will," or "for [their] own uses." ⁷³ This suggests, perhaps, an even more flexible and broader range of choices in the disposal of acquisitions over time. The element of choice must have been especially important because all the plans for devolution of this kind emphasize the recipients' "wish." In addition, some documents explicitly use it to define the acquired estates to which it pertained as held by "hereditary right," or by "eternal hereditary right." ⁷⁴ Clearly, the donors intended to grant the recipients broad and explicit proprietary rights. In this respect, the plans for future devolution echo the concern common to the ducal diplomas and Abbot Peter's narration: that faithful service ought to be rewarded generously, and that that reward constituted the basic ethical and political rationale of the creation of service tenures and acquired estates.
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      The choice of devolution was usually expressed in the dispositions of ducal charters and was therefore presumably formulated by the dukes. However, in a few instances the initial decision to pursue a similar range of options appears to have been made by the recipient's conjugal family (that is, by the recipient or by his wife) some time after the initial acquisitions from the dukes. In 1231, Duchess Grzymislawa of Little Poland recalled that a "lord" (dominus) named Goworysz had acquired the village of Mogilany by a "gift" from her late husband, Duke Leszek the White, "freely, that is, by hereditary right." After Goworysz died, his widow Miloslawa in turn "granted" the village to Palatine Theodore of Kraków, "to be possessed by him by hereditary right, or to be freely granted to some monastery for the benefit of his soul"—which, Grzymislawa added, had been the terms on which Goworysz himself had acquired Mogilany from Duke Leszek. ⁷⁵ In or shortly before 1234, a castellan named Clement received a village called Szyce from Duke Boleslaw of Sandomierz, as a reward for his "fidelity" and "obedience." Sometime "after that gift" he gave it to his wife, Raclawa, "in its entirety, so that she may have the complete ability to bequeath, sell, or do anything else with this village." ⁷⁶
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      According to these records, in each case the active agent in the devolution of the acquired estate was the recipient's wife. It was Miloslawa, the widow of the first recipient of Mogilany, whom the record credits with formulating the usual list of options available to its ultimate recipient, Theodore. It was Raclawa, the wife of the recipient of Szyce, to whom her husband had supposedly extrusted the implementation of those options. The subsequent devolution of Szyce is unknown, but the ultimate recipient of Mogilany, Theodore, indeed acted on the options outlined for him by Miloslawa and, sometime in or before 1243, in turn gave the village to the Cistercian monastery of Szczyrzyc. ⁷⁷ Thus, Miloslawa had disposed of her dead huband's acquired estate so as to enhance its alienability, and its subsequent recipient thereafter alienated it as she had intended. To be sure, it is impossible to assess the practical force of the two women's roles behind the narrations recorded in these sources. Raclawa and Miloslawa may have been executing earlier wishes of their husbands, with or without meaningful choice in doing so—as is indeed suggested by contemporary evidence of wives' involvement in the devolution of their husbands' ancestral estates in contemporary Poland. ⁷⁸ They may also have been responding to pressure by the dukes, by the ecclesiastical recipients of their husbands' estates, or by someone else. ⁷⁹ Nevertheless, whatever the real scope of their agency in the ultimate disposal of acquisitions, they were at least imagined as actors in that devolution and in strengthening the heritability of acquisitions over time.
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      Consistently with these plans, the recipients' sons and other close relatives were sometimes indeed involved in the disposal of acquired estates. The nature of such involvement varied, and it is difficult to grasp the strength of claims to succession that it expressed. On occasion, sons succeeded to their father's acquisitions, but for reasons that are not always clear. Thus, in 1208 Duke Henry recalled that his father, Boleslaw the Tall, had "granted to lord Bero" a village that, in Henry's own reign, was the possession of Bero's son. But he did not explain how Charles succeeded his father in possession of the village. ⁸⁰ A later succession from father to son was clearly an inheritance; sometime before 1266, Slawomir, a "knight" of Duke Boleslaw the Chaste of Little Poland, sold to a canon of Kraków part of a village, "which his father, Pancrace, had formerly acquired by a ducal gift, and which ... Slawomir received by paternal succession." ⁸¹
29

      At other times, sons and other close relatives consented to their fathers' alienations of acquisitions. In 1202, Duke Henry noted two instances of sons' consent to prior gifts of acquisitions by their fathers. In 1202, Emmeram, one of Henry's castellans, confirmed an earlier gift by his father Gniewomir to the monastery of Lubiay. This was an estate that Gniewomir had acquired from Duke Boleslaw the Tall. ⁸² In that same year, Duke Henry expected that Bogdan, son of a cleric named Bartholomew, would confirm his father's earlier gift to the same monastery of a village that had been purchased by his father. However, Bogdan refused to express that consent, which led to conflict between him and the Lubiay monastery. ⁸³ Duke Henry explained the conflict by recalling that, at some point in the past when Bartholomew had bequeathed a portion of his acquired village to the monks, the duke had "personally and many times requested" Bartholomew to leave "some portion" of the village to his son, but that Bartholomew ignored that request. ⁸⁴
30

      When, after Bartholomew's death, the monks attempted to obtain Bogdan's consent to his father's earlier gift, Bogdan contested the gift instead—a course of action the duke described as entirely expected and licit under the circumstances. Duke Henry's account of this story clearly presumes that Bogdan had some kind of claim to succeed to his father's acquisition, both at the time of his father's gift of the acquisition, when he had been entitled to receive a part of it, and subsequently, when he had been expected to consent to its alienation. The nature and the strength of that claim are difficult to assess. At the very least, it was strong enough for the duke to exert considerable effort to persuade Bartholomew to accommodate it and to imply that the father's failure to do so was an act of serious carelessness.
31

      Twenty-two years later, Duke Henry explained the consent of a son to an alienation of his father's acquisition in terms clearly implying that, in the normal course of events, the son would have succeeded to his father's estate but for the unusual circumstances of the father's liabilities. In one of his charters for the nuns of Trzebnica, he recalled that "I have given the ... monastery" a village " that I had [earlier] granted to lord Ruodbert, the chaplain." He added that he had made the gift to the monastery "with the consent of [Ruodbert's] son." He explained that he gave the village to the convent "because ... Ruodbert had died under the obligation, to myself and to the monastery, of a certain sum of money." ⁸⁵ Therefore, the transfer of the village to the nuns was a way to extinguish a debt owed by Ruodbert after his death. The son's consent to the alienation of the village suggests that, in the absence of the debt, the acquisition would have devolved on him. It also suggests that the liability of the debt itself would have devolved on the son, if he did not acquiesce in foregoing his expectations to inherit.
32

      A document issued in 1251 by Duke Boleslaw the Chaste of Little Poland and his mother Grzymislawa further reflects the involvement and the interests of close relatives in succession to acquisitions. The mother and son confirmed an earlier gift by Wierzgo (formerly castellan of Sacz) to the house of the canons regular of the Holy Sepulchre in Miechów. Wierzgo had given the canons a village called Lacko, which had been a portion of a large estate he had acquired over the preceding decades, at least in part through ducal gift and by service to the dukes. Boleslaw and Grzymislawa began their narration by identifying the provenance of Wierzgo's estate, in its entirety, as "all the inheritances he had acquired by the gift of ourselves, or of our father Duke Leszek, or by any other legitimate acquisition." In a subsequent clause, "in view of the faithful services [he] rendered to us," they "confirmed" that estate for Wierzgo, in terms matching the dispositions of other contemporary documents. They made the grant "for him and for all his successors," gave him "a free choice" of disposal of his holdings—that is, "to exchange them, leave them to [his] successors, or give them to the Church for the remedy of his soul," and they added that he might exercise that choice "without any disturbance by his sons or relations." ⁸⁶ In other words, however Wierzgo chose to dispose of his acquired estate, his heirs were prohibited from "disturbing" that choice and the resulting alienation. This prohibition clearly indicates that, despite the provenance of the estate, opposition by heirs to its alienation was conceivable, perhaps even expected.
33

      In fact, two relatives of Wierzgo did participate specifically in the alienation of Lacko. Boleslaw and Grzymislawa noted that in 1251 Wierzgo gave Lacko to the canons regular "with the favor and upon the appearance of his brother, Lord Gyto, and of his son, Lord Wojslaw," and that in return for the gift he received 300 marks from the monastery. ⁸⁷ Those transactions, however, did not terminate the interest of Wierzgo's family in Lacko. Boleslaw and Grzymislawa explicitly anticipated the possibility of further objections by Wierzgo's nephew, Wojslaw, and responded to that possibility by accommodating his interests: "If ... Wojslaw should wish to regain [Lacko] for his uses, he may regain it for his posterity, after he gives the ... house 300 marks of pure silver. Otherwise, the brothers of the house ... shall possess it forever, without fear of calumny." ⁸⁸ In this case, two close relatives of the alienor clearly enjoyed two kinds of interest with respect to an acquired estate: they personally participated in the alienation of one portion of it; and one of them, Wojslaw, was virtually assured of regaining that portion if he sought to pursue that interest against the monastery, on the condition that he repaid the canons the sum they had paid to his uncle. Ironically, this mode of resolving future conflict over Lacko was the diametric opposite of ensuring its final and secure alienation outside the family. On the contrary, it promised to restore both sides to their original positions prior to the alienation, as though it had never taken place. ⁸⁹ Although Boleslaw and Grzymislawa did not use this term, they were allowing the parties to solve a potential conflict over a transaction through an arrangement that voided the transaction.
34

      In their records, Duke Henry, Duke Boleslaw, or Duchess Grzymislawa did not identify any tension—let alone contradiction—implicit in their reconstructions of the provenance of these estates and in the roles (actual and potential) of the sons or other relatives in their devolution. ⁹⁰ Strictly speaking, these examples of succession of interest in acquired estates across one generation (and, less frequently, among other close relatives) are not inconsistent with the norm Peter enunciated through Vincent's monologue. First, Vincent's norm implies (though it does not actually state) that, as elsewhere in Europe, acquisitions turned into "patrimonies" when they devolved over a requisite number of generations—in Poland, according to Vincent, two. Thus, it is unsurprising to find that the possessor's sons, who are otherwise documented as the closest heirs in thirteenth-century Poland, ⁹¹ sometimes acted on that expectation early within that time span. Second, as Emily Tabuteau notes, this norm was usually permissive toward, not binding on, the alienating possessor—that is, it permitted the possessor of an acquired estate to pass it on to his heirs, or to associate the heirs in the act of its alienation if the possessor so chose; but it barred the heirs from interfering with the alienation if he did not. ⁹²
35

      Yet, ever since Duke Henry's irritation at Bartholomew's imprudent failure to provide a part of an acquisition for his son, some of their contemporaries at least implicitly recognized a tension between alienability of acquisitions on the one hand, and, on the other, familial expectations of succession to them as a matter of course. A handful of charters reflects hesitation or doubt about this issue and suggests that, despite the frequency of succession to acquired estates through inheritance, such succession was in principle problematic. These were the issues with which Abbot Peter had grappled in the 1260s, and with which Abbot Henry, Prior Vincent, and Stephen Kobylaglowa had been concerned in 1234. The remainder of this essay begins by examining three charters in which the authors appear to have wrestled with the tension between heritability and alienability of acquisitions and with some of their responses to that tension. It then returns to the history of Glebowice to note how Abbot Peter brought several of these approaches to bear on this problem—for the benefit of his monastic audience and for his own peace of mind.
36

Acquired Estates: Heritability as a Paradox?

In a document issued in 1252, Duke Henry III the White of Silesia narrated a history of an acquired estate, its recipient, and the recipient's gifts of parts of it that extended back to the 1230s, if not earlier. The recipient was a canon of Wroclaw named Zdzislaw, who had acquired two estates through a long period of service to three generations of dukes: Henry III's grandfather, Henry I the Bearded, his father Henry II the Pious, and Henry III himself. During the reigns of the first two Henrys, Zdzislaw had performed "distinguished service to both these dukes," and in return he "obtained" a village called Zórawina. ⁹³ Later, but still during the reigns of these two dukes, he granted Zórawina to the diocese of Wroclaw "for the remedy of his soul and of the souls of his ancestors." ⁹⁴ He continued in service to the third Henry, for which he received an additional reward: "Wishing to extend to him a more complete grace," Henry III gave him an estate that included "six holdings adjoining [Zórawina], which are a part of [a village called] Swiny." ⁹⁵ Thereafter, Zdzislaw added this additional acquisition to his earlier gift to the diocese of Wroclaw. Henry III issued his charter in 1252 specifically in order to record and explain that second gift.
37

      Henry noted that that gift presented a problem. He recalled that Zdzislaw had "received the consent to this [gift] from his brother, Strzesz the knight, and from all his relatives" and remarked that this step was unnecessary, perhaps even illicit: "However, they appear to have no right toward this village as strong as the right of succession to a patrimony would be." ⁹⁶ Despite an irreducible ambiguity of this reservation in the original Latin, it is relatively clear in three respects. The first is the strength of Henry's denial of proprietary "right" to the village on the part of Strzesz and the "relatives," expressed in the emphatic words nullum ius. The second is his use of "patrimony" as a benchmark of what that proprietary "right" would otherwise have been, thus making a clear distinction between a "patrimony" and this particular estate, acquired through service. The third is the tacit invocation of a norm that distinguished between "patrimonies" and this acquired estate for purposes of alienability and of familial involvement.
38

      What is not clear from this passage is the precise norm Duke Henry was invoking—that is, the proprietary consequences of the clearly drawn distinction. Perhaps Henry merely meant to state that the relatives' consent to the alienation did not imply that they had enjoyed any "right" to the holding. However, his juxtaposition at the end of the phrase of the strength of plausible familial interests in a "patrimony" and in the estate in question further implies that Strzesz and his "relatives" did have some such interests, but that, whatever they were, they were weaker than they would have been if that estate had been a "patrimony." In either case, Henry was responding to some measure of ambiguity, or doubt, about the nature and the force of the relatives' interests in this estate.
39

      Two other documents similarly reflect the tension between heritability and alienability of acqusitions and resolve that tension in rather complex ways, which include the invocation of norms. In the first document, issued in 1224, Duke Leszek the White of Little Poland confirmed his own prior grant of the village of Leczno to the monastery of Sulejów. ⁹⁷ The second document, issued in 1232, is a testament by which Pakoslaw the Elder, the palatine of Sandomierz, granted Udarz, one of the holdings that made up his estate, to the house of the canons regular at Miechów after his death. ⁹⁸ Both documents anchor the security of a grant in a narration of past circumstances or relationships, in tacit or explicit invocation of one or more norms, and in a curiously eclectic cumulation of factual, circumstantial, and normative rationales. Taken individually and in conjunction, these approaches converge, in important ways, with Abbot Peter's explanations to his monks of the legal security of the monastery's hold on Glebowice and with the elements of Polish service tenures reflected in diplomatic evidence.
40

      In 1224, Duke Leszek began by confirming his own gift of Leczno to the monastery at Sulejów. Then, "in order that no one may experience any anxiety of doubt about this gift of ours in the future," he inserted, for "all to know," a narration of the history of the holding. He recalled that "once upon a time, we have granted the inheritance [of] Leczno to Chociemir by our grace" and, elsewhere in the narration, that Chociemir had "received this inheritance from us for his services." ⁹⁹ Afterwards, Chociemir possessed Leczno "for a time," but "beset by a great need," he alienated it to the monastery of Sulejów "and had fully renounced every right that he might have had in the said inheritance," all in return for a substantial payment that he received from the abbot "by our permission and decree." ¹⁰⁰ The subsequent alienation of Leczno to the monastery took place in two steps, both of which involved the duke and Chociemir's two sons. First, Chociemir "came up in our presence, together with his sons Nicholas and Leonard, and voluntarily resigned the said inheritance into our hands—because," Leszek noted at this point, "it had been ducal from the beginning." ¹⁰¹ This step was accomplished by a ritual. Chociemir gave Leczno to the duke in the company of his sons, "after he drank the water of renunciation regarding this inheritance in our presence." ¹⁰² Thereafter, Leszek "assigned" the "inheritance" to the monastery, "to be possessed freely and forever," ¹⁰³ and issued the present charter.
41

      Duke Leszek narrated these events specifically in order to enhance the security of his gift to the monastery. What was he afraid of? The subjects and the transactions described in his narration suggest that he and the monks sought to sort out Leczno's proprietary history prior to Leszek's gift, especially the potential claims or expectations to the village by Chociemir and his sons. Leszek described Leczno as Chociemir's acquisition—as a reward for service in one clause and a ducal gift in another. This classification of Chociemir's estate closely resembles the typology of tenures Abbot Peter later invoked through Vincent's monologue. However, and contrary to Peter's assurances, despite the provenance, Chociemir's sons must have enjoyed substantial proprietary interests in the village, since Leszek carefully noted their participation in its alienation and in the ceremony that expressed that alienation. Although it is nearly impossible to evaluate the details or the force of the ritual drinking of "the water of renunciation," what little Leszek says here surely suggests that it was an important, highly articulated moment in the transfer of title. ¹⁰⁴ In another clause, the duke again obliquely raised the possibility that Chociemir "might have" had some right (ius) to Leczno and noted that, whatever it may have been, he had renounced it.
42

      The roles of Chociemir, Leonard, and Nicholas suggest that one source of the "anxiety of doubt" with which Leszek prefaced his narration was the strength of the sons' proprietary interest in their father's acquisition. As in some other cases, it is difficult to specify what that proprietary interest was. Nevertheless, it clearly involved the recipient's sons and is therefore consistent with contemporary evidence of succession to acquisitions well within the genealogical time span of the two full generations that Abbot Peter considered as the benchmark of heritability. What is distinctive about Leszek's narration are three circumstantial arguments tending to show that that interest had been terminated. First, Chociemir had been economically vulnerable and had "willingly" decided to relinquish the village. Second, he had possessed the village "for a time," which, while inexact, suggests a limited period. The emphasis on Chociemir's economic vulnerability and of its significance resembles Abbot Peter's portrayal of the circumstances that prompted Stephen Kobylaglowa to sell Glebowice. Third, Chociemir had returned the village to the duke "because it had been ducal from" (or "at") "the beginning." Leszek here secured his gift to the monks by reiterating his own initial proprietary interests in the village that comprised that gift. In conjunction, these circumstances appear to emphasize the vulnerability, limitation, and ultimate termination of Chociemir's proprietary interests in Leczno.
43

      In his will of 1232, Palatine Pakoslaw explored the relationship between service or gift and alienability in ways that sharply differed from the norm articulated by Abbot Peter and Prior Vincent and (to a degree) accepted by Duke Leszek. Pakoslaw recalled that, after he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he bequeathed a village called Udarz to the Hospitaler house in Miechów, and he offered a legal explanation of why his heirs were barred from claiming that village in the future. "The village I gave to the [monastery of the] Holy Sepulchre," he noted, "is not service [land], which ought to devolve on me by intestate succession." Instead, "I have gained possession of this village as if by accident, not by paternal inheritance. This is why it is not to be transferred to its heirs." ¹⁰⁵ Although this passage is difficult and opaque, some elements of Pakoslaw's rationale seem clear. First, he clearly sought security for his gift to the canons in its provenance; he identified Udarz as an estate that he had not received through inheritance ("intestate succession") and that was therefore not heritable by his own heirs. Second, in the process of specifying what Udarz was not, he identified two kinds of clearly heritable estate. He said that Udarz was not a "paternal inheritance," by which he presumably meant an ancestral estate of the kind Abbot Peter would have classified as a "patrimony"; nor was it what he called a terra obnoxialis. Clearly (if oddly), Pakoslaw thought that if he had possessed Udarz as a terra obnoxialis, it would devolve on his heirs by intestate succession. But since in fact he possessed Udarz as neither an inheritance nor a terra obnoxialis, his heirs were barred from claiming it after his death.
44

      Pakoslaw sought to secure his gift to the monastery by explicitly invoking two norms. The first stated that "service lands" (terrae obnoxiales) were heritable. On its face, this norm seems squarely inconsistent with the norm Abbot Peter invoked through Vincent's monologue of 1234. According to Vincent, an estate acquired through service was freely alienable by its recipients; Pakoslaw seems to be saying the opposite. To be sure, this apparent discrepancy might be explicable by details of Pakoslaw's norm that are inaccessible from the evidence; above all, neither Pakoslaw nor any other Polish source otherwise mention the terra obnoxialis, let alone shed light on its meaning. ¹⁰⁶ However, the apparent discrepancy is at least consistent with the contemporary evidence of patterns of succession to acquisitions by sons and by other close relatives. That evidence may explain why Pakoslaw invoked the second norm—the proposition that estates acquired "as if by accident" were freely alienable. Substantively, this norm was quite different from any of the norms on the subject of devolution of acquisitions invoked implicitly or explicitly by his contemporaries. In his explanation of the security of the gift from familial claims, Pakoslaw did not contrast Udarz with an acquisition at all. Instead, he described it as virtually "accidental." Whatever he may have meant by terra obnoxialis, his own tenure in Udarz was something less than that. In other words, his possession of Udarz had been transient and hence presumably too fleeting to justify any claims by potential heirs. That impermanence was the central, decisive anchor that secured its alienation to the monastery at Miechów.
45

      Pakoslaw's turn to the issue of impermanence of possession reveals an underlying logic in the invocation of apparently inconsistent norms during transactions concerning acquisitions in thirteenth-century Poland. On their face, the norms invoked by Vincent, by Duke Leszek, and by Pakoslaw were in conflict. But in the context of the surrounding circumstances, the norms cohere logically on a different level in a way that suggests a common reliance on an underlying norm that none of the participants actually invoked explicitly. Pakoslaw's close attention to his "accidental" possession of Udarz matches the actual circumstances of the histories of the holdings at issue (Leczno and Glebowice) on which the parties engaged in their alienations (Chociemir, Duke Leszek, Abbot Henry, and Prior Vincent) reflected, and which Duke Leszek and Abbot Peter recorded with considerable care. All the participants recalled that Chociemir's hold on Leczno, and the series of controversial possessions of Glebowice after it was shrewdly removed from the monks' estate, were in some sense or another short-lived.
46

      However, as with any other source of security, even for Pakoslaw, this kind of exercise was not quite enough. Despite his assurances to posterity that Udarz was not heritable, elsewhere in his charter Pakoslaw treated the village precisely as if it were. He noted in two different passages that he had designated the Miechów monastery as heir to Udarz. He stated that "I have instituted the provost of Miechów as heir [of Udarz] in the name of the Church of Jerusalem," and he reiterated in the sanction that "anyone ... wishing to infringe on this pious deed [i.e., the alienation of Udarz] ... should know that he seeks not to disinherit a man, but the Lord himself, whom I have instituted as heir by means of his servants [i.e., the monks]." ¹⁰⁷ Pakoslaw may have doubted that his portrayal of the tenure as "accidental" would in the future be convincing to potential claimants to the village and to their respondents. So he turned to an alternate, and independently adequate, strategy that clearly implied that in the absence of the designation the village would have devolved elsewhere by intestate succession. Thus, he subjected the same piece of land to two different strategies of alienation from which he expected the same favorable outcome in the face of tenurial ambiguity. The tension with which he grappled survived the exercise. In these respects, his account resembles Duke Leszek's eclectic approach toward securing Chociemir's alienation of Leczno in 1224. In the 1260s, Abbot Peter closed the troublesome matter of Glebowice by a similarly eclectic set of approaches, which he skillfully integrated into his narrative.
47

Abbot Peter's Eclectic Approach to Norm and Practice

The transactions between Abbot Henry, Duke Henry, and Stephen Kobylaglowa did not end with the speech by Prior Vincent and the abbot's decision to go ahead with the purchase. Abbot Peter continued his argument to the monks throughout the remainder of the story of the monastery's repossession of Glebowice. He recalled that Abbot Henry's initial decision had been clinched by another series of events, and he further strengthened it by his own narration to the monks. The first sequence of events took place immediately after the the abbot's conversation with Prior Vincent and his decision to go ahead with the purchase. At an assembly held a few days later before Duke Henry the Bearded, "[i]n the presence of many nobles," Abbot Henry returned the purchase price of the forest to Stephen Kobylaglowa, and Stephen returned the forest to Abbot Henry. Abbot Peter recalled that "the duke, a very circumspect and cautious man, said to Stephen, 'I wish this deed to be firm for the monastery in the future. Know, then, that [Glebowice] had earlier been my gift [to the monastery], and [I command you to] come and resign it to the monastery to which it had earlier belonged before me and my barons.'" In the same statement, the duke stipulated that in exchange "the lord abbot ... shall restore to you your horse in the amount of money at which it had been assessed, that is, 28 marks." Finally, the duke turned to the assembly and bid them to "know that Stephen resigned and restored his forest of Glebowice ... for the monastery of Henryków, which he had held by our gift, yet unjustly, because it had earlier belonged to the monastery." ¹⁰⁸
48

      Over the subsequent days, Duke Henry followed up these transactions with an important act and with an equally significant omission; he perambulated Glebowice, but did not confirm its grant to the monastery with a charter. Abbot Peter noted that "on the abbot's petition, during the following week the duke personally perambulated the said forest after it was returned to the monastery." At this point in his narration, the abbot again interjected to his fellow monks an assurance that they could now "answer the heirs of Stephen of Kobylaglowa if they ever make a claim against you concerning the said forest." ¹⁰⁹ Ducal perambulation was an important moment in securing the forest from familial claims. ¹¹⁰ Reflecting on these acts, the abbot noted that "a charter was neither sought nor granted about this" because "in the days when the glorious dukes, Henry the Elder and his son Henry, ... reigned in this land, their actions were so firm and stable that seldom did anyone care to receive a charter from anyone concerning any action." ¹¹¹ At this point, Abbot Peter invoked an image that recurs throughout his history and that endowed the events of 1234 with a desirable meaning. The image was one of a generalized state of justice and mutual trust, which distinguished the past from his own present, and of which, in Peter's carefully constructed view, the events of 1234 were an aspect. Like many of his medieval contemporaries, Peter imagined that happy past as a time when binding transactions were effectuated through reliable promise, veracity, and ritual, rather than through written documents. ¹¹²
49

      Abbot Peter's approach to securing his monastery's possession of Glebowice bears a curious resemblance to the strategies of his thirteenth-century predecessors. First, despite his earlier assurance to the monks that the norm he had enunciated through Vincent disposed of the matter, in the remainder of the story Peter seems oddly insecure about the norm's status or force. As imagined by Peter, in 1234 Duke Henry did not himself invoke or affirm the same norm. Instead he sought to terminate the very relationship with Stephen that fell within the norm and that Vincent and Abbot Henry took as a source of comfort. In the events that immediately followed Abbot Henry's decision to buy the forest from Stephen, Duke Henry used his entire monologue to void all the transactions that had disturbed the original monastic possession of that holding—by retracing and literally un-doing each of the changes of possession, by admitting that his own role in these transfers had been unjust, and by subjecting the monastery to considerable expense. This image of a duke taking comfort in the act of voiding a relationship covered by a norm, instead of relying on the norm itself, directly echoes one of the approaches the Piast dukes envisioned as a potential solution for the same problem in Peter's own present. ¹¹³
50

      Second, Peter enhanced security through an invocation of the past and of events and relationships that were integral aspects of the past and took their meaning from it. He anchored the security of monastic possession in a carefully constructed context of a just past social and legal order, as a part, or an aspect, of a general state of transcendent justice and trust, temporarily disequilibriated by the shrewdness of Stephen Kobylaglowa. He portrayed the other participants in the relevant events as personally and temperamentally well suited to that imaginary past; Abbot Henry, Duke Henry, and Prior Vincent are imagined as cautious, circumspect, just, and devout. Peter specifically noted that at the assembly that followed Duke Henry's initial confirmation of the purchase of Glebowice, Abbot Henry took comfort in precisely those same personal traits that had earlier prompted him toward fear; he "considered the deeds of the princes always to remain in a good state and inviolate" because he was "a simple and God-fearing man." ¹¹⁴ Through the statements by Duke Henry to Stephen and the assembly, Abbot Peter affirmed the time of the monastery's original possession of the holding as the primeval, just, legal state of affairs and voided its cumulative aftermath while affirming those elements he considered serviceable for his monastery—including the suspiciously lucid restatement of the Polish law of acquisitions