Sources for studying the management of the country estates of the Gniezno convent of Poor Clares from the end of the 16th to the end of the 17th century

Abstract

The aim of the article is to present and analyse archival sources concerning the property  management of the Gniezno convent of the order of Poor Clares, in particular the condition and structure of their country estates from the end of the 16th to the end of the 17th c. The records  that after the dissolution of the convent were deposited in the Archive of the Metropolitan Chapter (now of the Gniezno Archdiocese) include unbound documents (several dozen originals, several hundred copies and authenticated excerpts from court books), accounts (10 manuscripts) and the major type of source, inventories, which were termed ‘revisions’. Inventories were written down by convent inspectors, Franciscan friars who visited the Poor Clares’ estates, often accompanied by convent clerks.Inventories include data on Poor Clares’ serfs, the structure and population of their vil-lages, feudal duties, farm buildings, livestock, crops, as well as on the convent itself and, as it was once described by Małgorzata Borkowska, on “how sisters played landladies”. The oldest inventory, from 1593, is a separate fifteen-leaf manuscript; the others have been compiled into one of the most intriguing Poor Clares manuscripts, the codex entitled “The books of all the affairs of the Gniezno Convent of St Clare Order. With a catalogue of all the sisters that entered this convent within human memory, living and deceased. Also, a catalogue of all the estates and privileges of the said convent when its Prioress was the most Reverend Mother Dorota Bro-mierska [...] made and diligently recorded AD 1609”. The manuscript records sixteen inventories (‘revisions’) of the sisters’ country estates and their town of Kostrzyn, from the years: 1610, 1615 (the most detailed one), 1624, 1627, 1631, 1632, 1648, 1650, 1651, 1667, 1667–1670, 1673, 1676, 1682, 1686, and 1689.An analysis of data from those sources indicates that the sisters’ estates prospered from the end of the 16th c. to the 1620s, but regressed in the middle of the 17th c due to war damage. Their economic potential was restored over the following twenty years, though never reaching the productivity level of the early-seventeenth-century boom.