Meat at town markets in the Crown of Poland lands in the seventeenth century. Selected issues

Abstract

The picture of the provisioning in the Crown of Poland townships arising from earlier research is general and incomplete; in addition, it mostly pertains to large cities (e.g. Warsaw or Cracow). In order to make it more complete, the author resorts to archival
records generated by town authorities and guilds, and chiefly to a source until now rarely used in scholarship, namely tariffs regulating the prices of commodities and services as issued by voivodes. On their basis, it has proved possible to reconstruct the assortment of meats obtained from cattle, poultry and game offered by the city butchers
and stall vendors. In the case of the most popular types of meat, i.e. beef and veal, the prices of specific parts of the carcass are compared. As a rule, butchers had on offer
also mutton, pork and goat meat. Trade in poultry, wildfowl and game was the domain of stall vendors. The collected data pertains also to medium and small town centres.
The assortment of meats available in towns corresponded to the requirements of cuisine as practised in burgher and small-nobleman households, with the exception of game,
the selection of which as available in towns was smaller.