Village court records and peasant credit in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Poland

Abstract

ABSTRACT In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Poland, village courts facilitated the registration of a variety of private transactions among peasants. This article uses the surviving court books of this period to explore the courts' development and functions, and to analyse the numerous peasant credit contracts found in their records. The aim of the article is to show that in late medieval and early modern Poland the village courts provided a well-established system for registering peasant transactions, and that this played an important role in the development of credit and land markets.