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 expressed through the words of Vincent.
51

Conclusion

Shortly after the mid-thirteenth century, Abbot Peter of Henryków recorded the history of the landed estate of his monastery with some concern. He feared the prospect of inheritance claims to the monastery's holdings by descendants of their past alienors; and he secured the monastery from a claim to one of these holdings, a forest called Glebowice, by invocation of a norm. He invoked the norm by a clear statement of its content, by his own assertion of its dispositive force, and by situating its articulation within a complicated narrative. In these approaches, he engaged with, and negotiated, several issues in terms of which his ancestors and contemporaries evaluated notions of property, succession, alienability, and service. That engagement, and that negotiation, shed light on the logic and the force of his invocation of this particular norm, within this particular work, shortly after the mid-thirteenth century.
52

      The central premise of Peter's argument concerning Glebowice was the need to refute a plausible claim to succession by Stephen's heirs that had threatened the monks for several decades. What made that claim plausible? Contrary to the substance of Peter's norm, and to the assurances he based on that substance, the danger, in addition to the oblivion or ignorance of the norm, appears to have been a strong presumption, or expectation, of heritability of acquisitions in thirteenth-century Poland. Within the society on which Peter was reflecting, acquisitions of all kinds, whether procured through ducal service, ducal gift, or purchase, appear to have been heritable—that is, they were expected to pass to their recipients' natural successors as a matter of course—both at the time of their creation and thereafter. Although in some instances the nature and the strength of this presumption, or expectation, is difficult to gauge, in a cumulative sense it is clear that Abbot Henry, his monks, and their successors in the 1260s had good reason to be confused by this area of Polish law.
53

      In what sense was Abbot Peter helping them by invoking the norm in the 1260s? Substantively, his norm reduced one area of ambiguity, namely the time span whose passage determined the onset of heritability. According to the norm, an estate was clearly heritable—that is, it was a "patrimony"—after it succeeded to its possessor across two generations of lineal ascendants, that is, his grandfather and father. Abbot Peter's indentification of two full generations as the decisive criterion for distinguishing ancestral from acquired estates corresponds to contemporary legal categories, especially around the mid-century. It is consistent with (though not identical to) Duke Henry III's indentification of an ancestral estate in terms of past successions from great-grandfather to father to son, and from grandfather to father to son, ¹¹⁵ and with other (fleeting but suggestive) evidence of use of similarly extended genealogical spans as a criterion of ancient and legitimate usage in succession to property and in other elements of the legal order. ¹¹⁶ Peter's test of heritability was a part of what Steven White might call the discourse of inheritance in thirteenth-century Poland, and his articulation of that test situates the norm he invoked within that discourse. ¹¹⁷ Peter's interpretation of the relevant time span was surely self-serving, but, given that contemporary context, highly plausible.
54

      Although the conceptual clarity of Peter's two-generation rule may satisfy the legal historian, it cannot have satisfied Peter or his contemporaries, since acquisitions were clearly subject to inheritance interests and expectations long before they descended across two generations. ¹¹⁸ Peter and his contemporaries occasionally identified such interests and expectations, especially on the part of the recipients' sons, as an issue and responded to that issue in several ways. One response was the wide choice granted to the recipients in the future devolution of their acquisitions early on in the process, that is, either at the time an acquisition was first created or at some later point during the life cycle of the recipient or his wife. By the middle of the thirteenth century, documents with such clauses began to identify this free choice of devolution as an element of a very privileged tenure—that is, as full property rights, somewhat paradoxically described as rights of "inheritance" while attached specifically and explicitly to acquisitions. ¹¹⁹ Therefore, by the time Peter began to write his history, he had at his disposal a clear scenario that allowed a recipient to do exactly what he wanted to imagine Stephen Kobylaglowa as having done: namely, to give away, at will, an acquired estate to an ecclesiastical institution. Quite possibly, the norm he invoked was a direct application of that range of options, simplified in one direction within that range.
55

      The narrative within which Peter situated the invocation of the norm, and his evaluations of the events described by that narrative, also corresponds quite closely to contemporary legal concepts and categories, above all to the formation and significance of knightly service tenures and the criteria of their heritability and alienability. Peter used the dialogue between Stephen Kobylaglowa and Duke Henry the Bearded to associate service, fidelity, reward, and the resulting bilateral relationship between donor and recipient in terms that very closely resemble the statements on the same subjects in the preambles, narrations, and dispositions of those ducal (and, less often, episcopal) diplomas that describe acquisitions throughout the first half of the thirteenth century. Common to Peter's dialogue of 1234 and the diplomatic evidence is a strong emphasis on a recipient's entitlement to a gift from the duke as a reward for past service, or as a source of support for present and future service; the sense of proportionality of the gift to the service; and a general ethical sense of bilateral debt between the two parties. Peter's emphasis on the reality, solidity, and potential permanence of the relationship between duke, knight, and forest matches the contemporary evidence that acquired estates elicited strong proprietary expectations (including succession) right at the time they were granted. In other words—again to borrow White's useful expression—Peter situated the relationship between Stephen, Duke Henry, and the forest within the discourse of honorable service tenure that was increasingly commonplace in medieval Poland at the time he presumably composed his work.
56

      In his narration of the events that followed Stephen's acquisition, Peter likewise engaged with contemporary understandings—but, at this stage of the story, with factors that tended to weaken attachment to land, and expectations of succession, in thirteenth-century Poland. His portrayal of Stephen as economically vulnerable, careless, and ultimately transient resembles Duke Leszek's recollection of Chociemir's economic distress as a possessor of Leczno before 1224 and Palatine Pakoslaw's odd emphasis in 1232 on the "accidental" nature of his tenure in Udarz. Common to these rationales for alienability of acquisitions is a reference to a norm that no one had actually invoked. According to that norm, what affected the alienability of an acquired estate was the transience of its possession by the recipient, especially under circumstances that appeared, in retrospect, to explain that transience.
57

      Peter strengthened his explanation with a more general economic gloss. He recalled that, at the time in the past when the events and relationships relevant to Stephen's tenure arose, the early possessors had been weakly attached to their landed estates. He repeated this point in other stories and so used an image of a primeval indifference to land and resources as a narrative context for the formation of the monastic estate. In this grounding of the specific circumstances of Glebowice within a broader image of the early regional economy of the Henryków region, Peter reinforced the desired implications of economic vulnerability with a broader image of primeval transience and underuse of resources characteristic of Cistercian historiography, especially in its East-Central European adaptations. ¹²⁰
58

      Despite the substance and the intended meaning of his norm, Peter as well as his contemporaries combined several strategies that, on their face, assume that acquisitions were heritable—that is, subject to succession by the recipients' sons, brothers, and other relatives as a matter of course. Thus, Duke Leszek stressed the importance of the consent of Chociemir's sons to the alienation of Leczno while also emphasizing the relatively short duration and the vulnerability of Chociemir's tenure and (perhaps) minimizing Chociemir's proprietary interests in Leczno altogether; Palatine Pakoslaw designated the canons regular of Miechów as the "heirs" to Udarz, a holding that he elsewhere described as having belonged to him merely by "accident" and thus not heritable; and Abbot Peter relied, in the same narrative attributed to the speech of the same duke, Henry the Bearded, on the validity and on the voidness of Henry's service relationship with Stephen Kobylaglowa. In these instances, an integral part of an invocation of a norm in order to enhance security was a parallel strategy that accommodated doubt about its efficacy. As in other medieval societies, Peter and his contemporaries maximized security by what Hudson calls "piling up" of several approaches, which, in conjunction, reflected diametrically different, and (to us) logically inconsistent, sets of assumptions about property interests in acquisitions, especially over time. ¹²¹
59

      Were they troubled by this practice? Or is my perception of tension, even of a paradox or contradiction, between alienability and heritability of acquisitions, a twentieth-century anachronism? At the very least, Dukes Henry I, his namesake Henry III, and Leszek the White, Prior Vincent, Palatine Pakoslaw, and Abbot Peter all paused to reflect, in different ways, on the necessity, adviseability, prudence, wisdom, or otherwise, of involvement by the recipient's heirs in the alienation of acquisitions. The phenomenon attracted their attention and sometimes elicited fear. That fear was not intellectual but pragmatic. Unlike academic lawyers of their own time or of ours, they were not (at least apparently) concerned by the issue as a logical quandary, or as an inconsistency in substantive law. They were concerned with the inconsistency of the patterns of succession to acquisitions in their society and with the particular implications of that inconsistency for the security of legal transactions involving acquisitions. This is the tension, paradox, or contradiction with which Peter and his contemporaries were in fact concerned.
60

      Finally, it is important to distinguish between Peter's apparent strategies and his own explicit categories and intentions. He presented his norm not as merely plausible, but as self-evidently clear and dispositive, through a crisp and simple syllogism. To be sure, he, like his contemporaries, fretted about the future, "piled up" strategies, and aimed for plausibility and convergence—but his Vincent projected the certainty of aged wisdom, accurate knowledge, and plain truth. ¹²² Through his recollection of Vincent and his speech, Peter passed the norm on to his monks in the form of a rhetorical exercise in legal oratory and of a desirable, highly partisan legal paradigm. ¹²³ In this context, Peter's use of direct speech points to yet another domain of convergence between his own work and the broader processes underway in thirteenth-century Poland. He used Vincent's speech to express his norm as a legal rule—that is, a clarified, explicit, formalized, and, above all, written variant, endowed (in this story, at least) with an unquestioned authority. ¹²⁴
61

      In turn, this translation of a norm into a rule is an example of the dramatic expansion during the first half of the century of the production and use of the written record, especially of all kinds of rules, concerning, among many other subjects, the Poles, the Germans, and their "laws"; monastic, rural, and urban liberties; knighthood and its privileges; inheritance and succession; peasant status; and much else. ¹²⁵ Although a full description of this context requires a separate (and much longer) treatment, within this general context Peter therefore positioned himself toward his monks as a translator of norms into rules—and in that sense, as one of their sources of law. The issue of the subsequent effectiveness of his exercise in achieving the security he clearly desired raises the familiar quandaries about the meaning and significance of norms and their invocation with which I began this essay. However, that issue is distinct from the contexts and the logic of the exercise itself.
62

APPENDIX

Source

a. Facsimile: K.H., after p. 225, fol. xvi^{r^-}xviii^r.

b. Editions: K.H., chaps. 85-90, pp. 135-37; Stenzel, Liber Fundationis, pp. 42-45.

c. Translations: K.H., pp. 34-37 (Polish); Piotr Górecki, A Local Society in Transition: The Henryków Book and Related Documents (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000), pp. (forthcoming) (English).

Notes to the Texts

a. The Latin text is transcribed from the fascimile of the original codex, appended in excellent copy to the 1991 edition of the K.H., but not from the codex itself. I have not yet obtained access to the codex.

b. Italicized portions are indicated in the codex in red ink, but are of the same letter size as the rest of the text. Following, as in my earlier work, the judgment of the editors and translators, I interpret the entire text relevant to this article as the work of a single author, Abbot Peter (Matuszewski and Matuszewski, K.H., pp. xiv-xv; Grodecki, K.H., p. xxxiv; Matuszewski, Najstarsze, pp. 13, 21-29).

c. The chapter numbers are supplied by Grodecki and are not a part of the Latin text. I nevertheless add them to the Latin text, in brackets, for the reader's convenience.

Latin

[85] In diebus antiqui ducis Heinrici sedebat non longe ab ipsa silua quidam miles Stephanus nomine cognomine uero Cobylaglova. Hic idem Stephanus post mortem domini Nycolai incitauit quosdam rusticos qui uocabantur tunc temporis Pyrosovizci ut a domino dvce peterent sibi siluam Glambowiz. Sed quia hii rustici erant proprii ducis et diuites et erant heredes de Cenkowitz, dixerunt ad ducem, Domine hec silua est nobis per potentiam notarii tui domini Nycolai uiolenter ablata. Nos autem si est gratia tua iure hereditario tenemur eam possidere. Quia antiquus Glambo erat uterinus frater aui nostri Pyrosonis. Quibus dux ut suis propriis rusticis credidit abstulit siluam tunc claustro et dedit eam eisdem rusticis. Videns autem prefatus Stephanus de Cobylaglova suam astuciam in eisdem rusticis preualuisse accessit ad ducem offerens ei dextrarium qui tunc coram duce computabatur pro uiginti et viii^o marcis argenti. Quem equum dominus dux lete suscipiens dixit ad Stephanum, Pro hac gratia et tuo munimine si quicquam rogaueris inpetrabis. Quod audiens Stephanus reuerenter et lete accessit ad ducem dicens, Domine tu scis quia tibi libentissime seruio sed habeo modicas possessiones. Vnde rogo ut tibi domino meo tanto melius ualeam seruire mihi siluam que tibi modo cessit digneris conferre. Hiis auditis dominus dux uocatisque dictis rusticis contulit eidem Stephano iam sepedicto siluam. [86] Ecce ratio quare filii et heredes eiusdem Stephani minantur eximere a claustro eandem siluam. Sed insequentibus ostendemus qualiter dicta silua sit claustro postmodum in perpetuam possessionem confirmata, et quod filii Stephani et ipsorum heredes in praefata silua nullam habent iurisdictionem requirendi uel redimendi.

      Hec silua prescripto modo perdita est primo anno post mortem domini Nycolai. Sed cum sepedictus Stephanus hanc siluam modico tempore tenuisset prebuit eam diuersis personis uenalem ea uidelicet ratione quia indigens erat et illo in tempore mimime curabatur de aliqua deserta possessione. Erat autem in diebus illis in Camenz quidam prepositus Vincentius nomine qui prepositus erat uir nobilis patruus uidelicet comitis Mrozkonis et erat fundator illius claustri de Camenz. Huic preposito prebita est a Stephano dicta silua Glambowiz aliquociens uenalis. Sed idem prepositus sicut erat uir grandeuus et ualde timoratus noluit nostum claustrum hac silua priuari. Misit ydoneum nuncium domino H. huius loci abbati suadens ei ut dictam siluam suo claustro quocumque modo posset redimeret. Quod audiens dominus abbas propria persona adibat prepositum, dicens ei, Si hanc siluam emero heredes Stephani postmodum iure Polonico requirent.

      Ad quod prepositus respondens dixit, Nequaquam. Sed scire debetis Domine abbas quod aput attauos nostros et patres ex antiquo statutum est, ut si quisquam de genere Polonorum uendiderit quodlibet patrimonium suum eius heredes postmodum poterunt redimere. Sed forte uos Teuthonici non plene intelligitis quid sit patrimonium. Vt ergo plenarie intelligatis uobis exponam. Si quicquam possideo quod auus meus et pater michi in possessionem reliquerunt hoc est meum uerum patrimonium. Hoc si cuiquam uendidero heredes mei habent potestatem iure nostro requirendi. Sed quamcumque possessionem mihi dominus dux pro meo seruicio uel gratia donauerit illam uendo etiam inuitis amicis meis cuicumque uoluero quia in tali possessione non habent heredes mei ius requirendi. Vnde quia scitur et constat quod iam dicta silua Glambovicz non erat nec est patrimonium Stephani sed donacio ducis, [unde] [word crossed out] libere et absque timore potestis eam emere secure. Quia nullus heredum Stephani habet nec umquam habebit in ea aliquod ius requirendi, si sunt uel erunt in claustro uestro qui sciant se iure Polonico et had ratione defendere. Ecce fratres ex prescripto tractatu considerate qualiter heredibus Stephani de Cobylaglova respondere debeatis.

      [87] Hic nunc incipit ratio empcionis eiusdem silue. Auditis hiis uerbis dominus abbas a preposito emit a Stephano de Cobylaglova supradictam siluam pro uiginti et octo marcis argenti huic claustro inperpetuam possessionem. Quam cum emisset et coram duce Stephanus clavstro resignasset Dominus dux sicut erat princeps ualde circumspectus et timoratus dixit ad Stephanum, Volo ut hoc factum decetero sit claustro firmum. Vnde scias quia prius erat mea donatione domini Nycolai qui omnes suas possessiones mea auctoritate claustro de Heinrichov confirmauit. Veni et resigna coram me et meis baronibus claustro quod prius suum fuerat. Et dominus abbas de Heinrichow restituat tibi equum tuum in ea summa pecunie sicut tunc fuerat taxatus uidelicet xx et viii^o marcas pro eo. Quam summam pecunie cum Stephanus de Cobylaglova ibidem accepisset, Dixit iterum dominus dux, Vos domini barones et omnes qui nunc presentes adestis sciatis quod Stephanus pro suis peccatis nunc resignauit et restituit claustro de Heinrichow siluam suam Glambovicz, quam licet nostra donatione tamen iniuste tenuit. Quia prius fuerat claustri. [88] Hec emptio et restitutio facta est coram dicto domino duce Heinrico antiquo in Nemchi multis nobilibus ibidem tunc coram duce existentibus, Anno Domini mococo xxxo iiiio, sed not est tunc petitum nec datum super hoc priuilegium. Quare hoc acciderit in sequentibus dicemus. Quod idem dominus dux eandem siluam sequenti septimana personaliter certis metis limitando claustro circuiuit.

      [89] Primo hic dicemus quare non est ibi tunc de prescripto facto petitum priuilegium. In diebus illis cum illi gloriosi duces Heinricus uidelicet antiquus et filius suus etiam H. postmodum a paganis occisus in hac terra regnarent erant facta eorum tam rata et stabilia ut raro quisquam curaret de aliquo facto accipere priuilegium. Preterea dominus Heinricus abbas huius claustri primus erat homo simplex et timens Deum putabat facta principum semper in bono statu et inuiolata persistere. Cum dicta silua esset iam prescripta ratione claustro reddita sequenti septimana rogatu abbatis dominus dux dictam siluam personaliter circuiuit et addidit ad hoc quod a Stephano fuerat redemptum, de sua silua octo mansos magnos claustro huic inperpetuum possidendos. Et tunc mutatum est uocabulum silue Glambovitz in aliud uocabulum sicut hodierna die dicitur aput Polonos Bucuwin. Sed sors illa ubi nunc claustri curia constitit uocatur Glambovicz ratione heredum illius antiqui rustici qui hoc nomine appellabantur, quia heredes sui in monte aput curiam antiquitus sedebant. Ecce fratres exposita est uobis ratio lucidissime qua potestis heredibus Stephani de Cobylaglova si uos umquam de ipsa silua inpecierint respondere.

      [90] Quomodo dominus dux Heinricus iunior defuncto patre suo ante paganos dictam siluam nunciis suis circuiuit et claustro huic confirmauit. In diebus illis cum iam dominus H. dux defuncto patre in regno esset confirmatus rogatu domini Bodonis huius loci secundi abbatis etiam eandem siluam per Comitem Buguzlaum de Strelin et tunc castellanum in Rezcen circuiuit et isdem limitibus quibus pater eius antea huic claustro confirmauit. Super quo datum est tunc a duce priuilegium. Sed quia in fuga paganorum est perditum ratione prescripta cunctis aduersariis de hac silua respondeatur.

English

[85] In the days of the old Duke Henry, a certain knight by the name of Stephen, and by the nickname of Kobylaglowa, held [land] not far from this forest. After Lord Nicholas's death, Stephen incited certain peasants who were at that time called Piroszowice to demand the forest of Glebowice for themselves. Since these peasants were the duke's own [peasants], were rich, and were the heirs of Cienkowice, they said to the duke, "Lord, this forest had been illicitly seized from us by the power of your notary Nicholas. But, if this be your grace, we ought to possess it by hereditary right, because the old Glab had been the uterine brother of our grandfather Pirosz."

      The duke believed them as his own peasants, then took the forest away from the monastery, and gave it to the peasants. Upon noting that through [the action of] these peasants his shrewdness had prevailed, Stephen Kobylaglowa came up to the duke and offered him a warhorse which was then appraised at 28 silver marks before the duke. The lord duke happily accepted the horse, and said to Stephen, "For this favor and your gift, if you ask me for something, you will get it."

      After he heard this, Stephen reverently and happily came up to the duke, and said, "My lord, 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 which has now reverted to you."

      After he heard these words, the duke summoned the said peasants and granted the forest to Stephen.

      [86] Here is the reason why Stephen's sons and heirs threaten to take away this forest from the cloister. But in the following [account] we shall show how the said forest was later granted to the cloister in eternal possession, and that Stephen's sons and their heirs have no right to demand or to redeem the said forest.

      This forest was lost in the said manner in the first year after Nicholas's death. But after Stephen held this forest for a modest length of time, he offered it for sale to diverse persons, because he was poor, and because at that time hardly anyone cared for a deserted holding [around here].

      In those days, there was a certain prior in Kamieniec by the name of Vincent. This prior was a noble man, paternal uncle of Lord Mroczko, and founder of the cloister of Kamieniec. Several times, Stephen offered the forest of Glebowice to this prior for sale. But the prior was a very old and cautious man, and he refused to deprive our monastery of this forest. He sent a suitable emissary to Lord Henry, abbot of this place, and advised him to redeem the said forest for his monastery in any way he could. After he heard this, the lord abbot came up to the prior in person, and told him, "If I buy this forest, Stephen's heirs will later demand it according to Polish law."

      To which the prior answered, "Not at all. You should know, lord abbot, that it has been held among our ancestors and fathers since long ago that if anyone from the stock of the Poles sells any patrimony 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."

      Here, brothers, note from the above treatise how you may answer the heirs of Stephen of Kobylaglowa.

      [87] Here now begins the account of the purchase of this forest. After he heard these words from the prior, the abbot bought the forest from Stephen of Kobylaglowa for 28 silver marks for this cloister, in eternal possession. Right after he bought it, and Stephen resigned it in favor of the cloister before the duke, the duke—who was a very circumspect and cautious prince—said to Stephen,

      "I wish this deed to be firm for the monastery in the future. Know, then, that earlier [the forest] had belonged to Nicholas, by my gift, and he [later] confirmed all his possessions for the cloister of Henryków, by my authority. Come before me and my barons, and resign to the cloister what belonged to it earlier; and let the lord abbot restore to you [the value of] your horse, in that same sum of money at which it was then appraised, that is, [you will get] 28 marks for it." ¹²⁶

      After Stephen of Kobylaglowa accepted this sum of money right there, the lord duke spoke again, "You, lord barons, and all who have now come here, should know that Stephen resigned from and restored his forest of Glebowice to the cloister of Henryków for [the remedy of] his sins. Although he held it by our gift, yet he held it unjustly, because it had earlier belonged to the monastery."

      [88] This purchase and restitution was effected before Duke Henry the elder in Niemcza, in the presence of many nobles who were there before the duke, in the year of the Lord 1234. But a privilege was not requested or given about this at the time. Why this happened, we shall state in the following [account, where we also note] that the following week the duke personally performed a circuit around this forest in order to fix certain boundaries for the cloister.

      [89] First, we shall state why a privilege concerning the said deed was not requested then and there. In the days when those glorious dukes, Henry the elder, and his son also Henry, later killed by the pagans, reigned in this land, their deeds were so fixed and stable that seldom did anyone care to receive a privilege concerning any deed. Furthermore, Lord Henry, the first abbot of this place, was a simple and God-fearing man, and he considered the princes' deeds always to remain good and inviolate.

      After the said forest was returned to the monastery for the reason just described, in the course of the following week the lord duke personally performed a circuit around the said forest on the abbot's request, and he added for this cloister eight large hides from his own forest to that which had been redeemed from Stephen, to be possessed forever. At that time, the name of the forest, Glebowice, was changed to another name, Bukowina, and it is so called by the Poles today. And the holding where the cloister's farmstead now stands is called Glebowice on account of the heirs of the ancient peasant who was called by that name, because his heirs had held [land] on the mountain next to the farmstead long ago.

      Here, brothers, has most clearly been shown to you the reason whereby you can answer the heirs of Stephen of Kobylaglowa if they ever make a claim against you about this forest.

      [90] How after his father's death, but before the pagans, Duke Henry the younger performed a circuit around the said forest through his emissaries, and confirmed it for this cloister. In the days when Lord Henry, the [younger] duke, had just been confirmed in the reign after his father's death [in 1238], on the request of Bodo, the second abbot of this place, he likewise performed a circuit around the forest, through [his representative] Lord Boguslaw of Strzelin, then castellan of Ryczyn; and he confirmed this monastery within the [same] boundaries which his father had [traced out] earlier. The duke then issued a privilege about this. But since it was lost in the flight from the pagans, all adversaries regarding this forest may be answered according to the account recorded above.

Piotr Górecki is associate professor in the department of history at the University of California, Riverside. He thanks Robert Bartlett, Warren Brown, Patrick Geary, Richard Godbeer, Grzegorz Mysliwski, Susan Reynolds, and the anonymous readers of the Law and History Review for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of the article. One such version was presented at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Legal History in Seattle, and the author is equally grateful to the comments made on that occasion by the colleagues present, especially Emily Tabuteau and Charles Donahue. The excerpt of the Henryków Book reproduced in the Appendix appears by permission of Cistercian Publications, publishers of the English translation by Piotr Górecki, A Local Society in Transition: The Henryków Book and Related Documents (Kalamazoo, 2000), for which special thanks are due to Dr. E. Rozanne Elder, Editorial Director.

Notes

      1. The history is edited in Roman Grodecki, ed. and trans., Ksiega henrykowska. Liber Fundationis claustri sancte Marie Virginis in Heinrichow (Poznan� and Wroclaw: Instytut Zachodni, 1949), reissued with a new preface by Józef Matuszewski and Jacek Matuszewski as Liber Fundationis claustri sancte Marie Virginis in Heinrichow, czyli Ksiega henrykowska (Wroclaw: Muzeum Archidiecezjalne we Wroclawiu, 1991) [hereafter K.H., with page references to the 1991 edition], and translated into English by Piotr Górecki, A Local Society in Transition: The Henryków Book and Related Documents (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000), from which the Appendix is excerpted by permission. For the contexts of this document, see Józef Matuszewski, Najstarsze polskie zdanie prozaiczne: zdanie henrykowskie i jego tlo historyczne [The oldest Polish sentence in prose: the sentence of Henryków and its historical background] (Wroclaw: Ossolineum, 1981); Heinrich Grüger, Heinrichau: Geschichte eines schlesischen Zisterzienserklosters, 1227-1977 (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1978); Grüger, "Das Patronatsrecht von Heinrichau," Cîteaux 28 (1977): 26-47; Grüger, "Das Volkstum der Bevölkerung in den Dörfern des Zisterzienserklosters Heinrichau um mittelschlesischen Vorgebirgslande vom 13.-15. Jahrhundert," Zeitschrift für Ostforschung 27 (1978): 241-61; Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 139-40, 154-55; Jerzy Mularczyk, "Ze studiów nad prawem patronatu na Slasku w wiekach srednich" [Studies on the law of patronage in Silesia in the Middle Ages], Sobótka 32 (1977): 133-47; R. Aubert, "Henryków," in Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques, vol. 23, fasc. 136-37, col. 1279-85; Piotr Górecki, "Ad Controversiam Reprimendam: Family Groups and Dispute Prevention in Medieval Poland, c. 1200," Law and History Review 14 (1996): 213-43, at 220; Górecki, "Rhetoric, Memory, and Use of the Past: Abbot Peter of Henryków as Historian and Advocate," Cîteaux 48 (1997): 261-93; and Górecki, "Communities of Legal Memory in Medieval Poland, c. 1200-1240," Journal of Medieval History 24 (1998): 127-54, at 139 (n. 18), 140-46.

      2. The detailed treatments of the structure of the source are Matuszewski, Najstarsze, 13-14, and Górecki, "Rhetoric," 261-62, 265, 268.

      3. Regrettably, our knowledge of Peter himself is limited to his own work and his continuator's identification of him as the author. The author was almost certainly the monastery's cellarer, or "monk," by the same name, an important actor in his history during the 1240s, 1250s, and the early 1260s; Matuszewski, Najstarsze, 21-36, 83-84, 120-21. In conjunction, these identifications suggest the following biographical elements: (1) Peter was a German, familiar with, and strongly interested in, the Polish and German vernaculars of the population that interacted with his monastery; (2) he was relatively well-educated; and (3) he had played a succession of important roles within, and on behalf of, his monastic community before becoming abbot. In earlier work, I erroneously identify him as the fourth abbot of the monastery. Even though the succession of the earliest abbots is obscure, Peter is the third in that group actually identified by name. See Matuszewski, Najstarsze, 22.

      4. Matuszewski, Najstarsze, 81-82; Górecki, "Rhetoric," 266-68; Górecki, "Ad Controversiam," 220-21.

      5. Górecki, "Ad Controversiam," 221, n. 34.

      6. Abbot Peter's history of this holding in its entirety is at K.H., chaps. 82-93, pp. 133-38; see Matuszewski, Najstarsze, 62-64; Kazimierz Kolanczyk, Najdawniejsze polskie prawo spadkowe [The earliest Polish law of inheritance] (Poznan: Poznanskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciól Nauk, 1939), 89; Piotr Górecki, "Viator to Ascriptitius: Rural Economy, Lordship, and the Origins of Serfdom in Medieval Poland," Slavic Review 42 (1983): 14-35, at 22-25; Górecki, "Communities," 144-46; Górecki, "Local Society and Legal Knowledge: A Case Study from the Henryków Region," in Christianitas et Cultura Europae: Ksiega Jubileuszowa Profesora Jerzego Kloczowskiego—Czesc I [Christianitas et Cultura Europae: Festschrift for Professor Jerzy Kloczowski—Part 1], ed. Henryk Gapski (Lublin: Instytut Europy Srodkowo-Wschodniej, 1998), 544-50, at 548-49.

      7. K.H., chaps. 84-89, pp. 135-36.

      8. K.H., chap. 85, p. 135; for the texts in Latin and English of chaps. 85-90, relevant to the discussion below, please see the Appendix.

      9. Or "ancestor" (avus)—ibid.

      10. Ibid.

      11. Ibid., chap. 86, p. 135.

      12. Ibid.

      13. Ibid.; that monastery is described in Matuszewski, Najstarsze, 45, and Piotr Górecki, Economy, Society, and Lordship in Medieval Poland, 1100-1250 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1992), 16.

      14. K.H., chap. 86, pp. 135-36.

      15. Ibid., p. 136.

      16. Ibid.

      17. Ibid.

      18. Ibid.

      19. This working definition of a "norm" is adapted from John Hudson, John Comaroff, Simon Roberts, and Stephen White—so as to best accommodate the evidence and the range of issues that are most pertinent to thirteenth-century Poland; see Hudson, Land, Law, and Lordship in Anglo-Norman England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 9-10; John Comaroff and Simon Roberts, Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 70-106; Comaroff and Roberts, "The Invocation of Norms in Dispute Settlement: The Tswana Case," in Social Anthropology and Law, ed. Ian Hamnett (London: Academic Press, 1977); Stephen D. White, Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to Saints: The Laudatio Parentum in Western France, 1050-1150 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 13-14, 16, and passim. In insisting on the importance of a declaratory proposition, I follow Comaroff and Roberts; otherwise, "norms" as a phenomenon are difficult to distinguish conceptually from nondeclaratory but meaningful expressions of right and wrong, such as custom, acculturation, basic patterns of thought, and other shorthands for a vague but powerful sense of right and wrong in a given society—in Land, Law, and Lordship, Hudson indeed appears to use "norm" interchangeably with these phenomena.

      20. In contrast, an implicit or tacit invocation of a norm takes the form of a narration, argument, or conclusion that relies on the norm as an underlying assumption; these definitions are adapted from Comaroff and Roberts, Rules and Processes, 95-96, 262 (n. 19), and Stephen D. White, "Inheritances and Legal Arguments in Western France, 1050-1150," Traditio 43 (1987): 55-103, at 79.

      21. This formal schema of Peter's reasoning is one of the teasing glimpses, scattered throughout his work, of his learning, in this case in logic or dialectic; see Górecki, "Rhetoric," 268-69, 271; Matuszewski, Najstarsze, 83, 87; and above all Krzysztof Stopka, Szkoly katedralne metropolii gnieznienskiej w sredniowieczu: Studia nad ksztalceniem kleru polskiego w wiekach srednich [Cathedral schools in the metropolitan province of Gniezno in the Middle Ages: Studies on the education of the Polish clergy in the medieval period] (Kraków: Polska Akademia Umiejetnosci, 1994), 158-59.

      22. Górecki, "Ad Controversiam," 220-21.

      23. For the recurrence of the problem of inadequacy of any one particular approach, or of any one specific combination of approaches, in securing legal transactions, see Emily Z. Tabuteau, Transfers of Property in Eleventh-Century Norman Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 113-15, 334 (n. 1); White, Custom, 82-83; Barbara Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny's Property, 909-1049 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 58-59; Patrick Geary, "Vivre en conflit dans une France sans état: Typologie des méchanismes de règlement des conflits, 1050-1200," Annales E. S. C. 41 (1986): 1107-33, translated as "Living with Conflicts in Stateless France: A Typology of Conflict Management Mechanisms," in Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 125-60, at 139; Constance Brittain Bouchard, Holy Entrepreneurs: Cistercians, Knights, and Economic Exchange in Twelfth-Century Burgundy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 139; Górecki, "Ad Controversiam," 214-15.

      24. John Hudson labels this approach the "piling up of methods of securing a gift" and implies an absence of an overarching or systematic pattern of their applications; Hudson, Land, Law, and Lordship, 157-72, and this phrase at 229, 240. The phrase describes the Polish evidence exactly, despite the dramatic differences in the social and political realities between the two regions of Europe with which he and I are concerned. I am especially indebted to Tabuteau, Transfers, 113-210, and to her remarks as commentator on a version of this article in a panel at the 1998 A.S.L.H. meeting in Seattle. I have outlined several such approaches in earlier work: Górecki, "Ad Controversiam," 215-17, 221-23, 226, 229-31, 234-42; "Rhetoric," 274-78; "Communities," 132-33, 137, 143-44, 146-51.

      25. The terminology of inheritance and its modifications in thirteenth-century Polish documents require a treatment fuller than is possible within the context of this essay and than I have thus far carried out in "Ad Controversiam," 215 (n. 10), 227-29. This essay rests on the following distinctions and working definitions of the expressions "inheritance" and "patrimony." (1) I use the words interchangeably, to mean estates clearly identified by the documents as heritable. (2) However, Abbot Peter and his contemporaries used them in more complicated ways. (a) Patrimonium is rare, and used to connote the clearest possible heritability, as in Vincent's speech; for similar usage in Anglo-Norman England, see J. C. Holt, "Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England: II. Notions of Patrimony," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 33 (1983): 193-220, at 198. (b) Usually, hereditas means the same thing, but with two important exceptions: a hereditas granted as an acquired estate may remain heritable by the grantor and does not necessarily become heritable by the recipient; and hereditas is sometimes a general term for any estate, regardless of provenance. (3) Therefore, we sometimes have identifications of acquired estates as hereditates, which is confusing when rendered in English—as in several cases cited below. In order to match contemporary meanings in particular cases, I sometimes further identify clearly heritable holdings as "ancestral estates."

      26. John P. Dawson, Gifts and Promises: Continental and American Law Compared (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 30-31, 34-35; Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 107; White, "Inheritances," 90-91; White, Custom, 54-55, 71, 119, 147; Tabuteau, Transfers, 101-2; Tabuteau, "The Role of Law in the Succession to Normandy and England, 1087," Haskins Society Journal 6 (1996): 141-69, at 155-61; Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 76, 105, 400-402, 421-22; for Poland, Juliusz Bardach, Historia panstwa i prawa Polski [History of the state and law in Poland] (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1964), 290, 296-97, and, briefly, Górecki, "Ad Controversiam," 215 (n. 10), 225.

      27. As reflected in a kind of culturally based ontology of the relationship between people and land, classically described by Aron Gurevich, "Représentations et attitudes à l'égard de la propriété pendant le haut moyen åge," Annales E. S. C. 27 (1972): 523-47; or in "feelings of attachment" to land, noted by Hudson, Land, Law, and Lordship, 150-51; or in the adoption of toponymic surnames by possessors of estates, described by Holt, "Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England: I. The Revolution of 1066," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 32 (1982): 193-212, at 200-202, and Holt, What's in a Name? Family Nomenclature and the Norman Conquest (Reading: University of Reading, 1982); or, on the other hand, in the derivations of toponyms from personal names of possessors, and its significance over time, described by Górecki, "Communities," 140-46, and Górecki, "Local Society."

      28. These considerations make up the patterns of heritability and alienability of estates in a particular society; examples include: J. C. Holt, "Politics and Property in Early Medieval England," Past and Present, no. 57 (Nov., 1972): 3-44, reprinted in Landlords, Peasants and Politics in Medieval England, ed. T. H. Aston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 65-114, at 99; Stephen White, "Debate: Politics and Property in Early Medieval England—Succession to Fiefs in Early Medieval England," Past and Present, no. 65 (Nov., 1974): 118-27, reprinted in Aston, ed., Landlords, 123-32; Holt, "The Revolution of 1066," 195-99, 200-202; Holt, "Notions of Patrimony," especially 193-96, 198-200, 204-6, 215-16; Hudson, Land, Law, and Lordship, 66-85, 93-97, 103-31, 150-51; Hudson, "La interpretación de disputas y resoluciones: El caso inglés, 1066-1135," Hispania: Revista Española de Historia 57 (1997): 885-916; White, "Inheritances," 58 (n. 10), 61-63, 89-96; White, "The Discourse of Inheritance in Twelfth-Century France: Alternative Models of the Fief in 'Raoul de Cambrai,'" in Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy: Essays in Honour of Sir James Holt, ed. George Garnett and John Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 173-97.

      29. Holt, "Notions of Patrimony," 207-8; Hudson, Land, Law, and Lordship, 60, 151, 209-10, 220, 224; Hudson, The Formation of the English Common Law: Law and Society in England from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta (London: Longman, 1996), 101. The presence and strength of lordship is perhaps the central issue affecting heritability and alienability of estates in Anglo-Norman England (as White notes in "Inheritances," 58, n. 10, and Hudson throughout Land, Law, and Lordship), less central in Normandy and elsewhere in France, where familial constraints were somewhat more important (White, "Inheritances," 90, n. 156, and throughout his Custom)—while in Poland comparison in this area requires a separate inquiry into several types of lordship, especially into ducal power as a variant of lordship.

      30. For examples, see Holt, "Politics and Property," 71-80, 82-83; Hudson, Land, Law, and Lordship, 11, 110, 182-83; Janet Nelson, "The Wary Widow," in Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 82-113, at 87.

      31. See Holt and Tabuteau on the significance of the Norman Conquest for the distinction between acquisitions and inheritances in Anglo-Norman England: Holt, "Politics and Property," 80-83, "The Revolution of 1066," 197-98, 204-06; and "Notions of Patrimony," 213-14; Tabuteau, "Role of Law," 156-57.

      32. Bardach, Historia, 290, 296-97, 306; Juliusz Bardach, Boguslaw Lesnodorski, and Michal Pietrzak, Historia panstwa i prawa polskiego [History of the Polish state and law] (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1979), 142.

      33. In general, here I agree with Jerzy Mularczyk, Wladza ksiayeca na Slasku w XIII wieku [Ducal power in Silesia in the thirteenth century] (Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego, 1984), 45-52. Although I share Mularczyk's skepticism about the normative force of the rule Abbot Peter articulated through Vincent, I think the critique of Peter's monastic history within which he situates his skepticism is so sharp that it borders on dismissing this source.

      34. Richard C. Hoffmann, Land, Liberties, and Lordship in a Late Medieval Countryside: Agrarian Structures and Change in the Duchy of Wroclaw (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 61-109; Bartlett, Making, 30-39, 106-66; Paul Knoll, "The Urban Development of Medieval Poland, with Particular Reference to Kraków," in Urban Society of Eastern Europe in Premodern Times, ed. Barira Krekic (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 63-136, at 70-76; Górecki, Economy, 193-282.

      35. The mid-century was, among other things, an early period of adaptation of "German law," as an abstract and learned system, in a number of directions, and of recognition of "German" and "Polish" laws as substantively analogous systems; see Górecki, Economy, 275-82.

      36. For the working definition of heritability as a strong expectation of succession as a matter of course, and for the types of evidence used (and questions asked) in assessing heritability, I am especially indebted to Hudson, Land, Law, and Lordship, 69-153.

      37. Reynolds, Fiefs, 105, 401; Holt, "Politics and Property," 75, 77.

      38. Such dynamics include law making, or law finding, and one straightforward approach to them is to examine the "sources of law" in a positive sense—that is, legislation or other authoritative compilations—for which see Daniel Kaiser, The Growth of the Law in Medieval Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 18-61. However, use of authoritative texts as "sources" is difficult for those societies that did not produce (or retain) such texts, and so historians and anthropologists have looked to "sources" of norms outside texts, and within practice over time, within a framework largely indebted to Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu; see Comaroff and Roberts, "Tswana Case," 86-87; White, "Discourse," 177-78, nn. 9, 12.

      39. The most straightforward, but currently rather traditional, approach to this issue is to inquire into the degree to which the norms as articulated on their face are implemented, or enforced; for a critique of the "positivist" variant of this approach, and for more complex approaches, see most recently Hudson, "La interpretación," especially 903-13.

      40. The use of norm as a strategic resource is most recently treated in an important article by Warren Brown, "The Use of Norms in Disputes in Early Medieval Bavaria," Viator 30 (1999): 15-40; this approach emerges, ultimately, from the literature on the "processual" and the "normative" paradigms toward the study of law in past societies, for which see Simon Roberts, "The Study of Dispute: Anthropological Perspectives," in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1-24; Comaroff and Roberts, "Tswana Case," 86-87, 105-9; Comaroff and Roberts, Rules and Processes, 84-106, 216-42; White, Custom, 73, 145-49. I am very grateful to Warren Brown for making his article available to me before its publication.

      41. Tabuteau, Transfers, 114-15; White, Custom, 80-81; Górecki, "Ad Controversiam," 215-16 (n. 11); perhaps best summarized by Dominique Barthélémy, La société dans le comté de Vendôme de l'an mil au XIVe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1993), 653: "le rappel à la loi, à des fragments de loi, n'est pas sans effet: simplement, il n'est que le prélude à un travail de conciliation"—though the last point may perhaps be a bit optimistic. In some recent reflections, the intrinsic significance of norms (substantive and procedural) appears to be minimized in favor of the strategic, processual, or consensus-driven; Davies and Fouracre, eds., Property and Power, 2; Stephen White, "Proposing the Ordeal and Avoiding It: Strategy and Power in Western French Litigation, 1050-1100," in Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Thomas Bisson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 89-123.

      42. Making up what Stephen White might call the discourse of property, succession, and inheritance in thirteenth-century Poland. See White, "Discourse," and for discourse in the context of social control (more explicitly indebted to Foucault), see White, "Proposing the Ordeal," 90-91.

      43. Schlesisches Urkundenbuch, ed. Heinrich Appelt and Winfried Irgang, 6 vols. (Graz and Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1963-98) [hereafter S.U.], 1: no. 83 (1202-3), p. 55; 2: no. 196 (1240), p. 124; no. 265 (1244), p. 160; no. 388 (1250), p. 246; no. 409 (1250), pp. 256-57; 3: no. 127 (1254), pp. 91-92; no. 267 (1258), pp. 176-77; no. 327 (1260), pp. 215-16; Kodeks dyplomatyczny Malopolski, ed. Franciszek Piekosinski, 2 vols. (Kraków: Akademia Umiejetnosci, 1876-86, repr. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1965) [hereafter K.Mp.], 2: no. 456 (1260), pp. 111-12; S.U., 3: no. 490 (1264), p. 316; 4: no. 1 (1267), p. 1.

      44. Codex diplomaticus et commemorationum Masoviae. Zbiór ogólny przywilejów i spominków mazowieckich, ed. Jan Konrad Korwin-Kochanowski (Warsaw: Towarzystwo Naukowe Warszawskie, 1919) [hereafter K.Maz.], no. 117 (1185-86), pp. 112-13; on this document, see Kolanczyk, Najdawniejsze, 83; and Wladyslaw Abraham, Zawarcie malyenstwa w pierwotnem prawie polskiem [Entrance into marriage under the earliest Polish law] (Lwów: Towarzystwo Naukowe, 1925), 23, n. 2.

      45. K.Maz., no. 117 (1185-86), p. 112, lines 25-26.

      46. Ibid., p. 113, lines 2-7: "offero igitur et offerendo confirmo ... villas quas sudore servicii mei acquisivi videlicet Partici, Psonina, Cransi, Dransowo ... hiis etiam Shupno cum ecclesia quam avia mea Drobromila ab heredibus XXX marcis argenti comparavit, adiungere curavi."

      47. K.Mp., 2: no. 436 (1252), pp. 85-86 (in 1252, Duke Boleslaw the Chaste of Little Poland and his mother Grzymislawa extend immunity over omnes hereditates supradicti comitis Clementis patrimoniales, deseruite et pecunia comparate); no. 456 (1260), pp. 111-12 (medietatem hereditatis que Vsua nuncupatur quam ... de bonis meis comparaui confero eidem filie mee cum omnibus utilitatibus possidentam); S.U., 3: no. 327 (1260), pp. 215-16 (quam villam comes Iohannes ... a Berwico sua pecunia comparaverat).

      48. Kodeks dyplomatyczny Wielkopolski, ed. Ignacy Zakrzewski and Franciszek Piekosinski, 4 vols. (Poznan: Poznanskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciól Nauk, 1877-1908), vol. 1 [hereafter K.Wp.], no. 130 (1231), p. 117.

      49. S.U., 3: no. 230 (1257), p. 154, lines 31-35, 38: an exchange by Godehardu[s] mil[es] ... et ... frater eius of a heredita[s] ipsorum quam a patre et ab auuo necnon ab attavo eorum possidebant pro alia hereditate mutarent, subsequently identified as [p]redicti ... militis ... et fratris sui hereditas et patris eorum et avi, as heredita[s] quam a patre eorum possidebant, and as eorum heredita[s] quam a patre retinebant.

      50. Only Palatine Zyra explicitly addressed the issue of security of the monastery's possession of the recorded estates, but in thoroughly conventional and general terms, without reference to what he said about provenance; K.Maz., no. 117 (1185-86), p. 112, lines 21-24.

      51. E.g., S.U., 1: no. 291 (1228), p. 215: cum comite Clemente meo fideli tunc palatino.

      52. K.Maz., no. 450 (1244), p. 540, lines 23-24, 36, 28 (milites nostros Henricum, Martinum et Woynonem); S.U., 2: no. 311 (1246), p. 186, line 39 (Zbroslaw and Matthew, barones nostri); no. 352 (1248), p. 222, line 31 (Wróciwój, miles noster); no. 380 (1249), p. 240, line 46 (Smil, noster miles); 3: no. 25 (1251), p. 30, line 39 (sons of Wojciech, milites nostri); Kodeks dyplomatyczny katedry krakowskiej s. Waclawa, ed. Franciszek Piekosinski (Kraków: Akademia Umiejetnosci, 1875, repr. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1965) [hereafter K.K.Kr.], no. 63 (1262), p. 85 (Dzieryykraj, miles fidelis noster).

      53. S.U., 1: no. 167 (1217), p. 119 (servientium hominibus); no. 255 (1225), pp. 186-87 (John, minister noster); K.Maz., no. 448 (1244), p. 538, lines 26, 32-33, 35 (Ratiborium et Albertum bonos meos seruitores ... , predictos seruitores Ratiborium et albertum ... , [d]o eciam seruitoribus meis); no. 450 (1244), p. 540, lines 23-24, 36, 28 (milites nostros Henricum, Martinum et Woynonem ... , iam dictis seruitoribus meis ... , hijdem seruitores mei); S.U., 3: no. 55 (1253), p. 47, line 5 (Siegfried, noster famulus); no. 192 (1256), p. 130, lines 42-43 (Jasso, ministerialis noster); 4: no. 18 (1267), p. 25, line (Albert, noster balistarius et minister); no. 34 (1267), p. 34, line 35 (Cursicus, serviens noster).

      54. S.U., 1: no. 291 (1228), p. 215 (cum comite Clemente meo fideli tunc palatino); 2: no. 257 (1243), p. 154, line 48 (Arnold, providus vir ... , scultetus et familiaris noster); S.U., 3: no. 247 (1257), p. 164, lines 17-18 (Otto, notarius curie nostre); no. 440 (1263), p. 290, lines 7, 11, 18 (Peter, procurator noster; villicus; scultetus); 4: no. 17 (1267), p. 24, line 40 (Henry, clypeator noster); no. 18 (1267), p. 25, line 16 (Albert, noster balistarius et minister).

      55. Ibid., 1: no. 167 (1217), p. 119; no. 247 (1224), p. 181.

      56. The populations designated by these epithets can be subdivided into four groups: (1) the "knights" (milites), or the holders of "knightly law" (ius militare); (2) several kinds of people who performed specified service for the dukes and for other important lords, and whose status was defined in terms of that function; (3) seigneurial managers of landed estates, including above all German settlement entrepreneurs (sculteti and advocati); and (4) clergy. For these groups, see Górecki, Economy, 24-25, 69-71, 73-78, 80-85, 105-8, 151, 181-86, 196, 208-30; Górecki, Parishes, Tithes and Society in Earlier Medieval Poland, c. 1100-1250 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1993), 102-3, 105-15, 122; for group (1), see Górecki, "Words, Concepts, and Phenomena: Knighthood, Lordship, and the Early Polish Nobility, c. 1100-c. 1350," in Nobles and Nobility in Medieval Europe: Concepts, Origins, Transformations, ed. Anne Duggan (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2000), 115-55, and the literature cited at 115-16, n. 2.

      57. The remainder refers to a wide range of specific functions performed by the recipients for the duke, including what has been called the "service" population of several kinds, of which the classic treatment is Karol Modzelewski, "La division autarchique du travail à l'échelle d'un état: l'organisation 'ministériale' en Pologne médiévale," Annales E. S. C. 19 (1964): 1125-38. Perhaps the "ducal peasants" to whom Abbot Peter referred in the story of Glebowice (and in other passages of his history), who had briefly regained Glebowice from the monastery, had been one such group of inhabitants in a fairly distant past; see Górecki, "Viator to Ascriptitius," 24.

      58. For what follows concerning the populations identified in terms of knighthood and service—especially in matters of proprietary, ethical, and political balance between donors and recipients—see, briefly, Górecki, Economy, 185-86, and, at more length, Górecki, "Words," 134-43.

      59. S.U., 1: no. 77 (1202), p. 50: "Godek ... servicialis patris mei villam que Godcouo dicitur a patre meo pro suo sibi datam servicio cum assensu eiusdem in Lubens contulit."

      60. Ibid., 2: no. 79 (1234), p. 51, line 24 (fidelitatis ipsius erga nos intuitu et obsequii respectu); no. 311 (1246), p. 186, line 39 (pro fideli servicio dilectorum baronum nostrorum); no. 352 (1248), p. 222, lines 31-32 (Vrocowoyo militi nostro respectu servitiorum que fecit nobis et antecessori nostro); 3: no. 32 (1252), p. 34, line 17 (perspectis eiusdem obsequiis fidelibus et immensis); no. 213 (1257), p. 144, lines 4-6 (conspicientes fidele obsequium comitis Ianusii).

      61. Very few documents described estates acquired through service as possessions conditional on the possessors' performance of future service to the donor, or indeed otherwise associated with any obligation by the possessor to the donor. The emphasis of the documents is on the recipient's entitlement, not future obligation.

      62. S.U., 1: no. 167 (1217), p. 119 ("Ut autem libertas mea circa personam predicti domini Sebastiani capellani et fratris eius Gregorii non stringatur sed amplificetur, concedo et dono ipsis Milowanow et Virk in perpetuum"); K.Mp., 1: no. 79 (1270), p. 96 (inclinati fidelitate continua meritorum eorumdem H. et P.... , cupiendo beneficia nostre nobilitatis crescere in eisdem [Boleslaw supplements the grant]); S.U., 2: no. 37 (1233), p. 25, lines 37-38 ([i]n defensione ... terre [the settlers], ut eo validius hostilis incursio reprimatur, propriis sumptibus adesse tenentur); no. 86 (1234), p. 57, lines 8-9 ("Contulimus ... sculteto tabernam in ville predicta ... ut eo studiosius et fidelius sit claustro servitiis preparatus").

      63. S.U., 1: no. 167 (1217), p. 119; K.Mp., 2: no. 425 (1244), p. 73 (nos qui ex officio suscepti regiminis nostri tenemur merita meritis preuenire et dignam dignis seruiciis reddere recompensam, ideo pro fidelibus suis seruiciis [Boleslaw makes the grant]); similar formulas in no. 436 (1252), p. 86; K.K.Kr., no. 63 (1262), p. 85; K.Mp., 1: no. 79 (1270), p. 95; S.U., 3: no. 55 (1273), p. 47, lines 5-6 (ut sui laboris et servicii recipiant a nobis debitam recompensacionem).

      64. K.H., chap. 85, p. 135; for the Latin text, see Appendix, 519.

      65. That is, without intervening steps in the process of succession—comparable, perhaps, to the renewals of homage and fealty in the context of succession to fiefs, for which see Hudson, Land, Law, and Lordship.

      66. S.U., 2: no. 245 (1243), p. 148, lines 17-20 (grant of the village of Biala to Janusz, sibi heredibusque suis iure contulimus hereditario possidendam); no. 311 (1246), p. 186, lines 38-44 (grant of three sortes for Zbroslaw and Matthew et posteris eorum iure hereditario possidentes); 3: no. 32 (1252), p. 34, lines 15-17 (village granted to Paul hereditarie possidendam); no. 55 (1253), p. 47, lines 4-10 (several localities to Bethold iure hereditario conferimus perpetuo possidendas sum suis pertinenciis unversis); no. 105 (1253), p. 78, lines 15-18 (Olric, the knight, receives in an exchange Otok, ei suisque pueris liberis hereditarie possidendam); no. 142 (1254), p. 100, lines 26-29 (grant of town to be settled/expanded to Henry et suis posteris iure hereditario in perpetuum possidendam); no. 213 (1257), p. 144, lines 4-7 (grant to Janusz of a village, tam ab ipso quam a suis successoribus iure hereditario inperpetuum possidendam concessimus et donamus); S.U., 3: no. 351 (1261), p. 229, line 16 (grant of a village and German law, to Drzesko, sibi et suis heredibus iure hereditario possidenda); K.K.Kr., no. 63 (1262), pp. 85-86 (grant to Dzieryykraj and Vison of a forest, which "ipsisque eorum liberis heredibus et legittimis successoribus conferimus, damus, tradimus et confirmamus, ... iure perpetuo hereditarie possidendam," and another locality ipsis eorumque posteritati); K.Mp., 1: no. 79 (1270), p. 96 (a grant of Bojków to Hensir and Peter iure hereditario pacifice ac quiete in perpetuum possidendum, and of Bojków, Dubie, rights to recruit settlers, and liberty, similiter iure hereditario donamus).

      67. S.U., 3: no. 204 (1256), p. 138, line 42-p. 139, line 5 (exchange of a village with Goslaw the knight and his nephews, eis et eorum heredibus ... ut sit eis in perpetuam hereditatem).

      68. S.U., 2: no. 245 (1243), p. 148, lines 17-20; no. 380 (1249), p. 240, line 45-p. 241, line 1 (grant of a village and German law to the knight Smilo sibi et suis heredibus perpetuo possidendam eiusdem ville plenum dominium habens); 3: no. 127 (1254), p. 91, lines 37-46 (sale of a village to Nicholas, ipsi et suis heredibus sive successoribus); no. 204 (1256), p. 138, line 42-p. 139, line 5 (exchange of a village with Goslaw the knight and his nephews, eis et eorum heredibus ... ut sit eis in perpetuam hereditatem); no. 351 (1261), p. 229, line 16; K.K.Kr., no. 63 (1262), pp. 85-86; S.U., 4: no. 2 (1251-62), p. 15, lines 28-30 (grant of a village and German law, to Godyslaw, knight: dedimus ei et suis heredibus villam nostram).

      69. S.U., 2: no. 224 (1241), p. 136, line 23 (grant of estate with German law comitis Mrochconi et suis posteris); no. 311 (1246), p. 186, lines 38-44; 3: no. 142 (1254), p. 100, lines 26-29.

      70. S.U., 1: no. 255 (1225), pp. 186-87 (area of arable for John and [q]uicunque successor eius fuerit); 3: no. 127 (1254), p. 91, lines 37-46; no. 213 (1257), p. 144, lines 4-7; K.K.Kr., no. 63 (1262), pp. 85-86; S.U., 4: no. 66 (1268), p. 58, lines 14-15 (grant of arable to Albert: in perpetuum dedimus sibi et suis successoribus possidendos).

      71. S.U., 2: no. 136 (1237), p. 89, lines 18-19 (an estate to be cleared in a forest granted to Conrad vel eius linea de ipso progrediens legitima); no. 352 (1248), p. 222, lines 31-33 (grant of revenue from a village Vrociwoyo militi nostro ... ut eius et filiorum suorum sit census); 3: no. 105 (1253), p. 78, lines 15-18; K.K.Kr., no. 63 (1262), p. 86.

      72. S.U., 1: no. 210 (1221), p. 154 (grant of village of Budzów and liberty to Menold, ipsi et heredibus suis vel cuicumque in posterum vendere voluerit); similar formulas in: no. 255 (1225), p. 187 ([q]uicumque successor eius fuerit sive ab eo emerit); 2: no. 380 (1249), p. 241, lines 5-8; 3: no. 55 (1253), p. 47, lines 8-10 ("ipsis iure hereditario conferimus perpetuo possidendas cum suis pertinenciis universis ita quod tam in vita quam in morte possint de predictis hereditatibus libere disponere vendendo vel dando pro sue beneplacito voluntatis").

      73. S.U., 3: no. 55 (1253), p. 47, lines 8-10; no. 105 (1253), p. 78, lines 16-18; see also no. 127 (1254), p. 91, lines 42-44; no. 436 (1263), p. 288, lines 1-3; no. 490 (1264), p. 316, lines 9-11; 4: no. 66 (1268), p. 58, lines 14-19; K.Mp., 1: no. 79 (1270), p. 96.

      74. S.U., 2: no. 49 (1233), p. 33; 3: no. 48 (1252), p. 43, lines 22-23 ("suisque heredibus seu cuicumque in posterum vendere voluerint hereditario iure perpetuo libere possidendum").

      75. K.Mp., 1: no. 13 (1231), p. 20.

      76. S.U., 2: no. 79 (1234), p. 51, lines 25, 28-29.

      77. K.Mp., 1: no. 26 (1243), p. 32.

      78. Slight and circumstantial, to be sure; see Górecki, "Ad Controversiam," 232-33 (Bronisz and his wife), 235-38 (Dzieryko's case).

      79. For uncertainties and ambiguities of agency in such cases, see Pauline Stafford, "Women and the Norman Conquest," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 4 (1994): 221-49; Nelson, "Wary Widow," 93, 95-101; Górecki, "Ad Controversiam," 231-43. Earlier in this century, Lesinski and Abraham have usefully discussed several instances of acquisitions by women, but did not explore the issues of agency and power of more current interest; Bogdan Lesinski, Stanowisko kobiety w polskim prawie ziemskim do polowy XV wieku [The position of the woman in Polish common law until the mid-fifteenth century] (Wroclaw: Ossolineum, 1956), 38-40, and Abraham, Zawarcie, 23, n. 2.

      80. S.U., 1: no. 115 (1208), p. 81.

      81. K.K.Kr., no. 65 (1266), p. 90.

      82. S.U., 1: no. 77 (1202), p. 50.

      83. Ibid.; on this controversy and its basis, see Górecki, "Ad Controversiam," 223-26, and Kolanczyk, Najdawniejsze, 36-37, 41-42, 76-77.

      84. S.U., 1: no. 77 (1202), p. 50.

      85. Ibid., no. 247 (1224), p. 181; for a brief summary of this case, see Kolanczyk, Najdawniejsze, 38.

      86. K.Mp., 2: no. 434 (1251), p. 84: "omnes hereditates quas donacione nostra uel patris nostri bone memorie ducis Lestkonis seu qualibet legitima taxacione acquisiuit, sibi omnibusque successoribus suis confirmamus, dantes ei liberum arbitrium commutare, posteris relinquere, seu pro remedio anime sue ecclesie donare, nulla obstante filiorum uel consanguineorum suorum contradiccione." Please note that here and in Chociemir's case, discussed below (Latin text below, at nn. 99-100, 102-3), omnes hereditates seems to refer to all components of a recipient's estate, regardless of provenance, as explained in the brief comments in the terminology of inheritance and its modifications in Poland, at n. 25 above.

      87. Ibid.: "Prefatus ... Wierzgo zelo caritatis inductus in nostra presencia et cum nostro consensu et fauore fauente et adstante fratre ipsius comite Gytone nec non et filio eius comite Woyzlao unam de suis hereditatibus quam tempore patris nostri pacifice et sine impedimento possedit fratribus sancti Sepulchri ... pro summe pecunie CCC marcarum puri argenti contulit, hereditario iure possidendam."

      88. Ibid.: "Quod si filius eius Woyzlaus predictus eam ad suos usus reuocare uoluerit datis CCC marcis puri argenti prefate domui nominata hereditate suam dotabit posteritatem; alioquin fratres dicte domus ... sine omni strepitu calumnie eandem in perpetuum possidebunt."

      89. This provision seems to be a clear example of yet another expression of familial interest in the alienation of estates (in addition to the patterns of familial involvement I discussed in "Ad Controversiam," i.e., consent, partition, and interspousal gifts)—namely, the rétrait lignager, allowing one or more family members a right to repurchase the alienated estate or some portion of it, typically within a specified period, and under specified circumstances; White, Custom, 179. Despite the clarity of this instance, this type of familial involvement is recorded very infrequently; significantly, on this occasion it was used in the context of alienation of acquisitions, rather than ancestral estates. I am grateful to one of the anonymous readers of this essay for alerting me to this connection.

      90. Long ago, Kolanczyk (Najdawniejsze, 78-79) thought that this document reflected an actual tension, but his perception may have been an artifact of his own formal legal reasoning. Whether the contemporaries actually recognized this tension, and, if so, in what ways, is a concern of the rest of this essay.

      91. Górecki, "Ad Controversiam," 222.

      92. Tabuteau, "Role of Law," 156-57.

      93. S.U., 3: no. 50 (1252), p. 44, lines 13-17: "dominus Zdislaus custos ecclesie Wratislauiensis olim sub temporibus avi nostri Henrici bone memorie ducis Slesie et eciam sub temporibus pie recordacionis Henrici patris nostri filii supradicti ducis contulit villam suam Zarouinam ecclesie beat Iohannis in Wratislauia quam adeptus est suo honesto servicio apud ambos duces memoratos."

      94. Ibid., lines 17-18.

      95. Ibid., lines 19-21.

      96. Ibid., lines 21-24: "quas eciam addidit ecclesie sepedicte coram nobis accedente super hoc fratris sui Strese militis consensu et omnium consanguineorum suorum qui tamen nullum ius in eadem villa habere quoad successionem patrimonio debitam dinoscuntur."

      97. K.Mp., 2: no. 389 (1224), p. 33; there are two brief summaries of this case in Kolanczyk, Najdawniejsze, 38, 64-65.

      98. K.Mp., 2: no. 404 (1232), p. 50; for useful sketches of this case—which, however, do not resolve the substantive idiosyncrasies of Pakoslaw's words—see Benedykt Zientara, Henryk Brodaty i jego czasy [Henry the Bearded and his times], 2nd ed. (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo TRIO, 1997), 308, and Kolanczyk, Najdawniejsze, 78.

      99. K.Mp., 2: no. 389 (1224), p. 32: "ne cuiquam super hac nostra donacione dubietatis scrupulus remaneat in futurum, nouerint uniuersi quod noverint universi quod cum dictam hereditatem Lan. Chocemiro olim de nostra gracia contulissemus ... quam pro suis seruiciis a nobis acceperat."

      100. Ibid., pp. 32-33: "eam pro tempore possedisset, idem Chocemirus graui quadam necessitate constrictus loco eiusdem hereditatis quam pro suis seruiciis a nobis acceperat de nostra permissione et ordinacione recepit ab abbate ... octoginta marcas ... argenti et quinque Erfordienses ... omni iuri suo quod habere poterat in predicta hereditate penitus renunciando."

      101. Or, possibly, "at the beginning"; please see Latin original immediately below.

      102. Ibid., p. 33: "Insuper cum in nostra presencia super eadem heretitate aquam abrenunciacionis bibisset accedens huna [sic] cum filiis suis Nicolao et Leonardo sepedictam hereditatem in manus nostras prenominatus Chocemir, quia ab inicio ducalis fuerat, voluntarie resignavit."

      103. Ibid.: "Nos autem ... hereditatem Lanchina prefato abbati et eius monasterio appropriamus libere et perpetuo possidendam."

      104. Józef Matuszewski, "Aqua abrenuntiationis: studium z sredniowiecznego prawa prywatnego" [The aqua abrenuntiationis: a study in medieval private law], Czasopismo Prawno-Historyczne 4 (1952): 164-237 (French summary, 234-37); Jan Adamus, "Wzdanie a symbol aqua abrenuntiationis" [The conveyance and the symbol of the aqua abrenuntiationis], Czasopismo Prawno-Historyczne 7 (1955): 409-19; Bardach, Historia, 301, n. 47.

      105. K.Mp., 2: no. 404 (1232), p. 50: "uilla data per me sancto Sepulchro non est obnoxialis que mihi ab intestato succederet, possessio enim dicte uille deuenit ad me tamquam aduenticia, non ad me perueniens ex paterna hereditate et ob hoc ad suos non transferetur heredes."

      106. In his work of 1939, Kolanczyk maintained, not very helpfully, that Pakoslaw's entire rationale was borrowed from "Roman law," but did not explain what that meant (Najdawniejsze, 78).

      107. K.Mp., 2: no. 404 (1232), p. 50: "dedi uillam in subsidium sancte terre Vdorz nomine et prepositum de Miechow ... nomine ecclesie Hierosolymitane heredem institui.... Quisquis igitur hoc pium factum conatus fuerit infringere, Dei omnipotentis indignacionem incurrat et sciat se non hominem uelle exhereditare sed ipsum Dominum quem in suis ministris heredem institui."

      108. K.H., chap. 87, p. 136.

      109. Ibid., chap. 89, p. 137.

      110. On the ceremony and significance of boundary perambulation, see Grzegorz Mysliwski, "Boundary Delimitation in Medieval Poland," in Historical Reflections on Central Europe: Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, 1995, ed. Stanislav Kirschbaum (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999), 27-36, and Górecki, "Communities," 132-33, 146-51.

      111. K.H., chap. 88-89, p. 137.

      112. I have examined Peter's uses of the past, including his division between the past and the present in legal and ethical terms, in Górecki, "Rhetoric," especially 266, 277-78, with particular debt to Janet Coleman, "Memory and Its Uses: The Relationship between a Theory of Memory and Twelfth-Century Historiography," in Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 274-324, Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307, 2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), and Clanchy, "Remembering the Past and the Good Old Law," History 55 (1970): 165-76.

      113. See the case of Wierzgo and his estate of Lacko, at nn. 87-88 above.

      114. K.H., chap. 90, p. 137.

      115. S.U., 3: no. 230 (1257), p. 154, cited in n. 49 above.

      116. Górecki, Economy, 168-69 (peasant status ascertained back to the generations of "grandfathers and great-grandfathers" [avi et attavi]), 179-80 (legitimacy of a punishment ascertained in terms of the past two generations of dukes); see also the statement Peter attributed to a group of peasants, concerning their avus, cited above at n. 9. I am especially indebted to Grzegorz Mysliwski for his remarks, in a private communication, on the significance of two generations, going back to ego's grandfather, as a benchmark of property rights in medieval Poland.

      117. White, "Discourse."

      118. As Reynolds notes in connection with another medieval society, "[a]fter acquired property had been inherited once it must have been liable to be absorbed in the rest of the inheritance so that heirs would resent being deprived of it" (Fiefs, 105). The question posed by the medieval Polish evidence concerns the meaning and the dynamics of that "liability," "absorption," and "resentment," to and among the contemporaries.

      119. Compare the later medieval adaptation—to be sure, in the very different context of academic law—of what was on its face a somewhat limited tenure, the feudum, into an estate most closely corresponding to what might be called full property, described in Reynolds, Fiefs, 68-70, 207-40, 256-57, 295-322, 353-85.

      120. For primeval emptiness in contemporary Poland as a political construct, especially in the context of Cistercian ideology, see Górecki, Economy, 8, 34-35 (n. 32), 272-74. For the broader ideological significance, and patterns of interpretation, of European frontier phenomena, see Bartlett, Making, 84-105, 154-55, and Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146-1223 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 158-210.

      121. Hudson, Land, Law, and Lordship, 229, 240.

      122. For more on Peter's categories of truth, plausibility, verisimilitude, and their uses, see Górecki, "Rhetoric," 267, n. 34.

      123. Comaroff and Roberts, "Tswana Case," 86-87.

      124. Although it differs from it, this definition of "norm," "rule," and the relationship among them is indebted to Hudson, Land, Law, and Lordship, 10. In the context of Abbot Peter's reality, a "norm" could hardly become a "rule" when it was "regularly enforced by superior authority," because that "superior authority" was largely absent; instead, Peter sought to endow his norm with the status of a "rule" by presenting it as if it commanded the kind of authority Hudson used in his definition.

      125. "German law" and its impact are only one example, though an especially important one; much of my Economy concerns the other broad areas, though I have yet to situate the change in the conceptual context of the expansion of literacy.

      126. Please note that one part of the circumstances narrated here is more complex in the original than in the paraphrase in my own text, at note 108 above—namely, the role of Nicholas, to whom I have not referred in the present article. This person was a significant bene-factor of the monastery on the eve of its foundation and earlier in the history of the holding of Glebowice. His role affects the proprietary history of that holding prior to the transactions in which Stephen Kobylaglowa was involved, but not (at least in any demonstrable way) Stephen's title to that holding between 1227 and 1234, and thus the core point of departure for the present essay. I have examined the roles of Nicholas, and other elements of the regional history before 1227 of which Nicholas was a part, in several of my articles cited above.

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