Writing last wills in Lviv in the late Middle Ages: clerks, prices, circumstances
The last will, a document written down at the request of a dying person wishing to say goodbye to their relatives and to worldly things, also had a purely practical side. The words of the testator had to be recorded in set formulas in the presence of an official, signed and sealed. This procedure was often assisted by third parties — municipal clerks and notaries, skilled in writing. Their assistance had to be paid for and certain formalities had to be done to make the document valid. Lviv is particularly interesting as regards the ways and circumstances of writing last wills, due to its multiculturality and varied clerical procedures that were applied. The oldest testaments or traces of their existence come from the second half of the 14th century, when the Magdeburg Law was already well-entrenched. The oldest regulation concerning testaments is included in a 1360 statute of the city council and concerns the rules of dividing the estate among the heirs. Further regulations appear in the royal charters from 1422 and 1444. The latter document states the conditions that had to be fulfilled for the last will to be valid: it had to be written down in the presence of a vogt, town councillors and a clergyman, as well as a notary public (or a municipal clerk). Research on Lviv clerical records indicates that there were many ways to validate a testament. Until the middle of the 16th century it was possible to register a testament in city council books as well as in separate books of testaments and in consistory books; the document could be made as a notarial deed or written down in private. Lviv burghers employed municipal clerks and notaries to do it or wrote their last wills themselves. Mentions of privately-made testaments appear quite late, in the second half of the 16th century. Lviv was similar in this respect to many other big cities of the Kingdom of Poland. A particularly interesting issue is the language used in the testaments of members of German, Armenian, Ruthenian and Italian communities. It is difficult to establish whether their testaments were written down in their native languages and then translated in the city chancery or they were translated upon writing in the presence of the elders of the community. The fee for the assistance of a clerk in writing the last will was rather costly. Until the beginning of the 16th c. sources rarely mention a fee. After a new institution (lonheria) was established in 1522 and a separate register of weekly income was introduced, fees for testament writing started to be mentioned regularly. The fees were rather high, ranging from several to a hundred Polish zloties. Certainly, the clerk did not receive the whole sum, part of which was due to the municipal authorities. This was not a regular source of income for the city; in the last quarter of the 16th c. it vanished from the municipal account books and tended to be recorded in books of testaments, though not regularly. Municipal clerks were professionally prepared to write down all sorts of documents, including last wills. The importance of their role is visible in the opening formulas. In late-mediaeval testaments, which were usually not written down by testators themselves, it was the clerk that authored formulas about the necessity to part with this world and the testator’s sorrow; undoubtedly, every clerk wrote such formulas in his own hand and frequently. The role of notaries in writing last wills may have been much more significant than it was acknowledged.
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