Community, memory and law in medieval Poland

Piotr Gorecki

pp. 15-26

in: Stanislav J. Kirschbaum (ed), Historical reflections on central Europe, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

One of the interesting issues in recent historiography is the formation and functions of social groups in the legal system of medieval society, espe-cially in the establishment and maintenance of memory relevant to law and dispute.¹ In the context of early medieval Poland, these areas of interest have until recently focused on the "neighbourhood", that elusive social and settlement grouping attested in the written sources as the vicinia or the opole, and presumed to have constituted the most local unit of royal, ducal and seigneurial authority.² In general, Polish historians have portrayed the "neighbourhood", and other units of territory and settlement, as essentially aspects of the history of early statecraft. This rather formalist approach has tended to deflect attention from several informal but important features of the "neighbourhood" and other settlement groups, including their formation and recruitment, and their possible functions as communities of memory.³ More generally, emphasis on formal statecraft has deflected attention from the significance of collective memory, local and otherwise, in the legal system of medieval Poland in the early thirteenth century.⁴ In this chapter, I shall use a few case studies to reconstruct some of the groups that participated in the legal process, examine their recruitment and composition, and assess their possible significance as communities of legal memory.