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Social and Cultural Relations in
the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was one of the largest and most
linguistically, ethnically and religiously diverse polities in late medieval
and early modern Europe. In the mid-1380s the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania entered into a long process of union with the Kingdom of
Poland. Since the destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
in 1795, the history and memory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania have
been much contested among its successor nations. This volume aims to
excavate a level below their largely incompatible narratives. Instead,
in an encounter with freshly discovered or long neglected sources, the
authors of this book seek new understanding of the Grand Duchy, its
citizens and inhabitants in ‘microhistories’. Emphasizing urban and rural
spaces, families, communities, networks and travels, this book presents
fresh research by established and emerging scholars.
Richard Butterwick is Professor of Polish-Lithuanian History at UCL-SSEES
and holds the European Civilization Chair at the College of Europe, Natolin,
Warsaw.
Wioletta Pawlikowska is Researcher at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute
of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.

Routledge Research in Early Modern History
The English Chartered Trading Companies, 1688–1763
Guns, Money and Lawyers
Michael Wagner
Enlightenment in Scotland and France
Studies in Political Thought
Mark Hulliung
The School of Salamanca in the Affairs of the Indies
Barbarism and the Political Order
Natsuko Matsumori
Criminal Justice During the Long Eighteenth Century
Theatre, Representation and Emotion
Edited by David Lemmings and Allyson N. May
The English Woollen Industry, c.1200—c.1560
John Oldland
Incombustible Lutheran Books in Early Modern Germany
Avner Shamir
The Peace of Augsburg and the Meckhart Confession
Moderate Religion in an Age of Militancy
Adam Glen Hough
Social and Cultural Relations in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
Microhistories
Edited by Richard Butterwick and Wioletta Pawlikowska
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Research-in-Early-Modern-History/book-series/RREMH

Social and Cultural Relations
in the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania
Microhistories
Edited by Richard Butterwick and
Wioletta Pawlikowska

First published 2019
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Richard Butterwick and Wioletta Pawlikowska
to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of
the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-20666-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-26280-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For the Wróblewski Library
of the
Lithuanian Academy of Sciences
in Vilnius

List of Figures x
List of Tables xi
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction 1
WIOLETTA PAWLIKOWSKA AND RICHARD BUTTERWICK
PART I
Urban Spaces and Communities 11
1 What’s in a Name? Conflict and the Common
Weal, Unity and Diversity in the Early Modern City 13
DAVID FRICK
2 A History of One House: The Microcosm of the Jurydyka
of the Vilna Cathedral Chapter in the Sixteenth and Early

Seventeenth Centuries
28
WIOLETTA PAWLIKOWSKA
3 The Poor and the Community: The Lutheran Charitable System in Eighteenth-Century Wilna
47
MARTYNAS JAKULIS
4 A Town After a Fire: Losses and Behaviour of Jewish Communities
62
JURGITA ŠIAUČIŪNAITĖ-VERBICKIENĖ
5 The Attempts of the Bernardines to Influence the Society of Kowno in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century: The Case of a Miraculous Image
75
VAIDA KAMUNTAVIČIENĖ
Contents

viii Contents
PART II
Families and Networks 89
6 Noble Names: Changes in Lithuanian Aristocratic
Name-Giving During the Late Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Centuries
91
RIMVYDAS PETRAUSKAS
7 The Sphragistics and Heraldry of Three Representatives of the Radziwiłł Family
105
AGNĖ RAILAITĖ-BARDĖ
8 Noblemen’s Familia : The Life of Unfree People on
Manors in the Sixteenth Century and the First Half of the Seventeenth Century
120
NERINGA DAMBRAUSKAITĖ
9 Noble Community and Local Politics in the Wiłkomierz District During the Reign of Sigismund Vasa (1587–1632)
132
ARTŪRAS VASILIAUSKAS
10 From Clientage Structure to a New Social Group: The Formation of the Group of Public Servants in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the Late Eighteenth Century
148
RAMUNĖ ŠMIGELSKYTĖ-STUKIENĖ
PART III
Texts and Travels 167
11 ‘An Earnest Gospeller’ and ‘A Dignified Martyr’: Networks of Textual Exchange Between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and England, 1560s–1580s
169
HANNA MAZHEIKA
12 Terrible Reality? Cannibalism in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and in Livonia in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries—Between Chroniclers’ Invective and the Findings of Cultural Anthropology
183
ALEH DZIARNOVICH

Contents ix
13 A Lithuanian Nobleman’s Mapping of Poland: The
Itinerary of a Peregrination
by Stanisław Samuel
Szemiot (1680)
205
JAKUB NIEDŹWIEDŹ
14 Propaganda in the Parishes: Local Communication During the Insurrection of 1794
217
RICHARD BUTTERWICK
15 The Route Map of Dean Szymon Waraxa’s Courier 235
MICHAŁ GOCHNA
Appendix 238
List of Contributors 239
Index 242

3.1 The number of poor and patients admitted to the
almshouse and hospital (1723–99) 50
3.2 General income of the almshouse and the donations of
the community (1750–92) 57
5.1 Supposedly miraculous painting of the Mother of
God. From Laima Šinkūnaitė, Kauno pranciškonų
(bernardinų) Šv. Jurgio bažnyčia
, Kaunas: Kauno
arkivyskupijos muziejus, 2008, p. 26
77
7.1 Scheme 1: Typical Radziwiłł coats of arms 107
7.2 Marshalled coat of arms of Janusz Radzwiłł (1629).
Albuminscriptie/van Janusz Radziwill (1612–55), hertog van Birze en Dubinki, voor Johann Alberts (1600–80),

Album amicorum van Johann Alberts, Leipzig, 1629. Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek: 133 C 14—A, fol. 3.1r.109
7.3 Seal of Karol Stanisław Radziwiłł (1698). Wróblewski Library
of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, MS F273–2106 111
7.4 Scheme 2: The marshalled coat of arms of Karol
Stanisław Radziwiłł 111
7.5 Reconstructed seal of Karol Stanisław Radziwiłł (1712)
by Rolandas Rimkūnas 112
7.6 Scheme 3: The marshalled coats of arms of Karol
Stanisław Radziwiłł 113
7.7 Fragment of Voyszundus I. Christianus Radvila’s
portrait by Herszek Leybowicz (1758). V
ilnius
University Library, sign. LeyH IC-1
114
12.1 Augsburg single-leaf (1571) ‘A frightening but true
dreadful famine and pestilential plague that occurred in the land of Rus´ and Lithuania in the year 1571’
185
14.1a and 14.1b ‘Letter to confrères about the arrival of
proclamations from Wilno “of both highest authorities” ’.
Wróblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, MS F43–26934
218
15.1 The route map of Dean Szymon Waraxa’s Courier
(scale 1:275,000) 236
Figures

2.1 Possessors of the house on Bernardine Street, Vilna,
1533–1620 41
3.1 The clientele of Lutheran charitable institutions 52
9.1 Group 14 (ten sejmik attendances and two elections) 135
9.2 Rajecki, Podlecki and Komorowski in local politics 136
9.3 Group 14 continuity in the Wiłkomierz district 138
Tables

This volume originated in a conference held on 21 March 2015, organized
by the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College
London, with the generous support of the Embassy of the Republic of
Lithuania in the United Kingdom, the Embassy of the Republic of Poland
in the United Kingdom, the Polish Cultural Institute in London, Vilnius
University and the late Count Andrzej Ciechanowiecki—the Patron of the
Anglo-Belarusian Society. Particular thanks are due to the then Director
of SSEES, Jan Kubik, who has been an inexhaustible source of interdisci-
plinary inspiration both during the proceedings and during the long road
to publication. Thirteen of the eighteen speakers have revised or altered
their papers for this book; an additional chapter has been contributed by
Rimvydas Petrauskas. The editors also wish to offer their thanks to the
staff at Routledge, with whom it has been a pleasure to work.
Permission to reproduce illustrative material has been kindly granted
by St George’s Convent, Kaunas; the Wróblewski Library of the Lithua-
nian Academy of Sciences, Vilnius; Vilnius University Library; Den Haag,
Koninklijke Bibliotheek and Rolandas Rimkūnas.
Acknowledgements

The first mention of Lithuania is in the early twelfth-century annals of
Quedlinburg Abbey. It locates the martyrdom of St Bruno of Querfurt
in 1009 ‘in confinio Lituae et Rusciae’. This linkage proved significant.
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania emerged out of the Baltic forests in the
mid-thirteenth century, just as the Teutonic Order was moving in. As it
extended its sway across Rus´, Europe’s last pagan polity soon became
its largest. It expanded still further, briefly stretching from the shores of
the Black Sea to the Baltic, after its rulers adopted Christianity in the
1380s. Their conversion inaugurated an evolving union with the King-
dom of Poland, which became much closer with the formation in 1569
of a joint political community or Commonwealth (Respublica, Rzeczpos-
polita). Despite its sixteenth-century territorial losses, the Grand Duchy
of Lithuania remained one of the largest and most diverse polities in early
modern Europe. Here eastern and western Christendom overlapped, the
Protestant Reformation made significant inroads, one of the most numer-
ous Jewish communities in the world grew to maturity, while Muslims,
Karaites, Old Believers and others found their niches. Integrated into a
predominantly agrarian and boreal economy and society were several
hundred urban communities, many of whom flourished for centuries.
1
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania ultimately lost the long contest for
hegemony in eastern Europe to Muscovy—transformed into the Russian
Empire by Peter the Great. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was
partitioned for the third and final time in 1795. During a long nineteenth
century under foreign rule, the Commonwealth’s ‘Two Nations, Polish
and Lithuanian’, were transformed. Poland and Lithuania regained inde-
pendence as separate nation-states in 1918, but neither their union, nor
the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were restored. During the two centuries
that followed the dismemberment, the common past became a store of
contested memories and myths among the Grand Duchy’s successor na-
tions. These include modern Lithuanians, Belarusians, Poles, Ukrainians,
Tatars, Latvians, Russians, Germans and Israelis. Many historians hail-
ing from the region sought to write the history of the Grand Duchy in
such a way as to justify the claims to successorship of their own state,
Introduction
Wioletta Pawlikowska and
Richard Butterwick

2 W. Pawlikowska and R. Butterwick
nation or nation-state.
2
This still applies to much Belarusian, Lithuanian,
Polish and Russian historiography—if no longer to German. Sometimes
a residual resentment against foreigners who presume to write ‘our his-
tory’ is voiced. It is certainly apparent in the region’s entangled politics of
history, memory and culture, which in the last few years have once again
become more antagonistic.
However, an increasing number of historians from these and other
countries, taking their cue from poets such as Czesław Miłosz and Tomas
Venclova,
3
have cast themselves in the role of rebels against nationalist
narratives. They have instead tended to evoke a multicultural, multicon-
fessional, multilingual world, characterized by multiple identities, mutual
tolerance and civic patriotism. While not all interpretations have been ro-
seate in hue, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania has become a rather alluring
imagined community, one still more pluralist than the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth as a whole (largely because of the relative dilution of
its ‘Polish’ component).
4
This ‘vanished kingdom’ has been contrasted
favourably with the increasingly homogenized ethno-linguistic nation-
states of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
5
Certainly a grow-
ing number of ‘western’ scholars have been fascinated by the history,
culture and legacies of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania—especially in its
cities.
6
The challenge they face, however, is to refrain from casting them-
selves as lofty arbiters between the conflicting and clamouring claims of
exotic, ‘Eastern European’ nationalists.
In a Europe whose elites aspire to a post-national condition, few themes
are as widely acceptable as that of ‘borderland’. It abounds in the titles
of conferences and collective volumes; so do variants on ‘between East
and West’. For these purposes the Grand Duchy of Lithuania is ideal.
Convivial gatherings of scholars from the Grand Duchy’s successor-
states and beyond have done much to break down barriers. The region’s
early modernists have (for the most part) avoided the emotive confron-
tations familiar to historians specializing in the rawer twentieth-century
past. However, these well-intentioned efforts often suffer from compart-
mentalization into separate contributions on ethnic and confessional
communities—the Jews, the Tatars, the Scots; the Orthodox, the Cath-
olics, the Lutherans, and so forth. They are also flooded by synthetic
reports on given problems in ‘national historiographies’—as if most
historians could accurately be pigeon-holed thus. Moreover, the charac-
teristic overload of under-prepared and hurriedly delivered papers, and
the chronic shortage of time for discussion reduce the opportunities and
incentives for cross-fertilization. As a result, almost two decades into the
twenty-first century, national and nationalist prisms continue to frame
the field, even as they are denounced and renounced, deconstructed and
reconstructed. It is still difficult to study the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
on its own terms and in its own times.

Introduction 3
At this point it may be as well to explain the approach adopted by the
editors to the vexatious problem of how to render personal and place
names. In historical sources most of these have been variously recorded
in different languages, which only rarely correspond to the orthographi-
cally approved versions current in the several states which now encompass
lands which at some time were part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. To
take the most prominent example, the name of its capital city—Vilnius in
Lithuanian—is encountered as Vilna in Latin, Wilna in German, Wilno
in Polish, ווילנע (Vilne) in Yiddish, Вільно (Vil´no) in Ukrainian, Вiльня
(Vil´nia) in Belarusian, and Вильна (Vil´na) in older Ruthenian and Russian
sources—not to mention variant spellings. Given that acceptable English
versions are extremely rare for this part of the world, we have striven
here to get as close as possible to the languages of the sources. This could
be Chancery Ruthenian (the legal language of the Grand Duchy until
1697), Latin (widely used for scholarly, ecclesiastical and artistic pur-
poses), Polish (increasingly the preferred language of the Grand Duchy’s
noble and urban elites) or German (used, for example, by the Luther-
ans of Wilna). Without doubt, the unfortunate casualty of our approach
is the language most commonly spoken by most of the population in the
north-western parts of the Grand Duchy—Lithuanian—which was only
rarely written down between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. We
have reproduced archaic spellings where these appear with any regularity.
Modern alternative versions of place and personal names have however
been provided on first mention, whenever it has seemed appropriate to the
editors. Transliteration from the Cyrillic alphabet is according to a sim-
plified version of the Library of Congress system, except for the phonetic
preference for ‘h’ rather than ‘g’ to represent ‘г ’ in Ruthenian, Belarusian
and Ukrainian. Complete consistency has eluded us, but we do not en-
dorse the policy of least resistance—rendering everything in the version
officially approved by the state currently in possession. Adopting such a
policy would have led to a welter of anachronisms (of which perhaps the
worst would be transforming Königsberg into Kaliningrad). Our purpose
is to enable the reader to get as close to the past as the sources permit, and
we accept full responsibility for this decision.
The critical remarks made thus far are in no way intended to dimin-
ish the considerable achievements of the numerous historians who have
delved deep into the records left by the rulers, institutions, citizens, com-
munities and observers of Grand Duchy of Lithuania. They are however
intended to draw attention to the centrality of sources to the advance-
ment of historical knowledge and understanding. This volume aims to
excavate a level below national or anti-national grand narratives, striving
to leave to one side these ongoing arguments. Instead, the authors of
this book seek different perspectives on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
and its inhabitants in more intimate encounters with hitherto neglected

4 W. Pawlikowska and R. Butterwick
sources. In this respect, the last two or three decades have been fruitful
indeed. Since the downfall of the Soviet Union, it has become incompara-
bly easier for scholars freely to study unpublished documents held in the
collections of Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and (at least until very
recently) Russia. Archives and libraries in these countries have welcomed
foreign researchers in unprecedented numbers, while locally based histo-
rians are no longer obliged to confine their research to permitted topics
within ideologically approved paradigms.
This volume contains fifteen chapters which explore social and cultural
relations in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from a variety of perspectives.
The first of its three parts deals with towns and cities. It is opened by
David Frick, whose reconstruction of social, religious and cultural bonds
between and within families and their spatial context in seventeenth-
century Wilno has raised the bar for early modern urban history.
7
Here
he reflects on his experience of research in the archives of Vilnius and
ponders the forms which a larger comparative study of cities might take.
He concludes that the practice of early modern urban history depends
chiefly on two interacting factors—the nature of the available sources
and the temperament of the researcher. The physical environment is in
the sights of Wioletta Pawlikowska, who traces the fortunes over almost
a century of a single house and its remarkable possessors through sources
created by the Cathedral Chapter of Vilna, thereby capturing the factors
which weighed upon corporate decision-making. Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-
Verbickienė reaches her striking conclusions on relative mobility and im-
mobility within Jewish and Christian communities respectively from the
analysis of later eighteenth-century censuses and data on the fires that
afflicted towns in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in this period. Con-
fessional and social history intersect in Martynas Jakulis’s study of the
scrupulously well documented ways in which Wilna’s Lutheran commu-
nity took care of its own poor and sick—not least to protect them from
conversion to Catholicism. The competitiveness induced by cramped
urban space even affected those of the same confession and calling: the
canons and prelates of Vilna argued over the use and abuse of property;
Bernardine friars and Jesuits argued over the use and abuse of miracles
in Kowno (Kaunas). The latter, recorded in a ‘Relation about the mi-
raculous image’, now in Vilnius University Library, are contextualized
by Vaida Kamuntavičienė within responses to everyday challenges, such
as disease and floods, in the decades following the Muscovite occupation
of the city in 1655–61.
The second part of the book deals with families and networks. Rim-
vydas Petrauskas probes the relatively scarce surviving sources from the
long fifteenth century for evidence of naming strategies in elite families,
formerly pagan and now Catholic. It transpires that via patronymics, in-
dividual names from the pagan era were transformed into family sur-
names. One of these was Radivil, better known as Radziwiłł (Radvila).

Introduction 5
The elaborate coats of arms of two notable seventeenth-century princes of
this family are subjected to close analysis and connected with their legend-
ary protoplast by Agnė Railaitė-Bardė. However, the carefully fashioned
image of a Prince Radziwiłł could sometimes collide with the expecta-
tions of his more substantial clients. Artūras Vasiliauskas’s research on
correspondence preserved in the Radziwiłł archive and the records of
the district-level parliamentary assembly of Wiłkomierz (Vilkmergė vel
Ukmergė) has unearthed complex interrelationships of neighbourhood,
kinship, friendship, economic and political cooperation at local level.
This challenges long-standing assumptions that Lithuanian politics were
oligarchic in character: a classic example of a small key opening a large
door.
8
Looking towards the other end of the social scale, many inventories
and court verdicts record unfree persons on noble-owned manors in vari-
ous parts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the sixteenth century.
Neringa Dambrauskaitė shows how they retained their specific place in
noble households and families, even as their status was transformed into
that of serfs or employees at the end of the century. Towards the end of
the existence of the Polish-Lithuanian state, a new social group began to
emerge—professional officials—shaped by the requirements of bureau-
cratic procedure while not yet free from older patron-client relationships.
Ramunė Šmigelskytė-Stukienė has trawled Lithuanian Treasury records
to reveal the career paths and working conditions of junior public ser-
vants, men who were often recruited from the poorer nobility.
The third part of the volume concerns texts and travels. Religious
refugees and martyrological tracts alike came to the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania from England in the late sixteenth century. Tracing these net-
works, Hanna Mazheika argues that given the lack of local martyrs for
their faith, the executions of both Protestants and Catholics in England
could fuel confessional polemics in the Commonwealth. Still grislier pas-
sages circulated regarding the incidence of cannibalism during the wars
fought by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the late sixteenth century
onwards. Aleh Dziarnovich blends anthropologists’ observations with
classical source criticism in a close reading of such texts. The last three
chapters trace actual journeys made. Jakub Niedźwiedź reads a noble-
man’s travel diary with the eye of a literary scholar, and in doing so
takes us beyond the borders of the Grand Duchy in order to reflect on
what made its author Lithuanian. From this neighbourly perspective, the
Kingdom of Poland is seen as a foreign country through a lens compa-
rable to that of contemporary cartographers. Samuel Szemiot was not
the last Lithuanian to gaze with fascination on the Tatra Mountains—so
high, that the clouds touched the earth. Finally, a document found in
the Wróblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, triangu-
lated with ecclesiastical visitation acts and Prussian military maps, allows
Richard Butterwick to explore the ease and speed of communication
amidst the lakes, hills and forests of what is now the Polish-Lithuanian

6 W. Pawlikowska and R. Butterwick
borderland—the Suwalszczyzna/Suvalkija. Following the distribution of
propaganda in 1794 also casts light on insurrectionary discourse and the
perennial problem of residence and plural benefices among the diocesan
clergy. This chapter is complemented by the work of the historical geog-
rapher Michał Gochna, who has reconstructed a map of the route taken
by the courier(s).
Most of these investigations could in some respects be called micro-
histories. Microhistory can be simply and aptly defined as ‘the intensive
historical investigation of a relatively well defined smaller object, most
often a single event, or a village community, a group of families, even an
individual person’,
9
but like many a good idea, it can be made far more
complicated. Microstoria congealed as a recognizable approach in Italy
in the later 1970s, and soon aroused interest in France, Germany and the
Anglophone world, where it encountered the slightly earlier turn towards
historical anthropology. Since microhistory hit the heights of fashion in
the early 1990s, it has spawned a profusion of commentaries, published
in historiographical collections and periodicals, and served up to students
in anthologies. Definitions multiply, irrespective of whether or not they
are applied. So do works claiming the label. As Ewa Domańska acidly
remarks: ‘the employment in a book’s title or description of the term “mi-
crohistory” has become an advertising trick to increase its sales, when the
work itself has nothing in common with genuine microhistory’.
10
It is equally salutary to recall that the classics of microhistory were
assigned to the canon retrospectively. When Natalie Zemon Davis was
asked: ‘In what way do you distinguish your book on Martin Guerre
from the other important microhistories written by Ginzburg and Le
Roy Ladurie?’, she replied: ‘I don’t mind being categorized as a micro-
historian, although when I came to the project I was thinking of myself
as an anthropologist who goes to a village and is interested not only in
ethnography but also in performance’.
11
Matti Peltonen observes that
Carlo Ginzburg’s 1979 essay on ‘Clues’ (Spie: radici di un paragigma
indiziario), often read as a founding text of the genre, does not contain
the word ‘microhistory’ at all.
12
By his own account, Ginzburg, on first
hearing the term from Giovanni Levi, was content ‘with the reference to
the reduced scale suggested by the prefix micro’. Well after Microstorie,
the series he edited with Levi and Simona Cerutti, had become seminal,
he discovered several earlier uses of the term, which had not caught on.
13

For Levi himself, microhistory is more practice than theory.
14
As for Em-
manuel Le Roy Ladurie, his introduction to the bestselling Montaillou:
village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (1975) is far from being a programmatic
statement of methodology, micro-historical or otherwise. His largely im-
plicit methods have been much debated.
15
It is doubtless much rarer now than it was a generation ago for an
experienced scholar to discover that she or he has been a micro-historian
all along, in the manner of Molière’s Jourdain: ‘Par ma foi, il y a plus de

Introduction 7
quarante ans que je dis de la prose, sans que j’en susse rien’. And this
despite all his expensive lessons.
16
Nonetheless, the implication remains
subversive: the elaboration of a method(ology) may not have much im-
pact on its practice. Indeed, the theoretical discourse of microhistory may
even buttress the kind of ‘power relations’ it claims to undermine. The
dense encryption of questions about knowledge in self-referential code
keeps uninitiated ingénues out of swathes of academe just as effectively as
elaborate etiquette guarded respectable Victorian society from the ‘great
unwashed’. The long-standing divide between those academics who in
writing about methodology seldom trouble themselves with primary
sources, and those who pore over sources without bothering much with
theory, retains much currency.
Subject to such caveats and cautions, a reduced scale of investigation
offers the historian significant advantages. These include a stronger sense
of historical reality, a closer approach to the meanings of lived experi-
ence, and the opportunity to consider multiple contexts from a single
viewpoint and thereby approach a more rounded, perhaps even total
view of history. All these advantages have their concomitant dangers. If
God is in the details, so is the Devil. One of the principal lines of division
is between those who believe that in minutely investigating a drop, we
are also exploring the ocean, and those who deny that the detailed study
of a single event or individual can have any meaning beyond the story
the historian is able to tell. The latter is sometimes referred to as ‘inci-
dent analysis’. Although such ‘microhistories’ offer no grand narratives
of their own, their advocates nevertheless argue that they help to expose
flaws in existing metanarratives. Put slightly differently, some micro-
historians incline more towards cultural history and postmodernist ap-
proaches to narration, with the historian at the epicentre of the process.
Others, especially in Italy, cleave to an older tradition of empirical and
structural social history, not eschewing quantitative data, while striving
‘to be a remedy for de-humanised social and structural history’, as To-
masz Wiślicz puts it. Most, but not all practitioners espouse the cause of
‘history from below’. Perhaps most temptingly and perilously, historians
persuaded by Clio to embrace microhistory may seek to seduce a wider
public—especially if their tales involve sex, violence and alcohol.
17
In our view the point of departure should be the survival of sources
and the possibility of analysing and interpreting them. The key is not
the type of source per se, but the level of detail in the information
they contain. Choosing the micro-historical approach offers a closer
encounter with the sources—our thick, uneven and scratched lenses into
the past. That said, for source-focused historians who tailor their studies
according to the available material, the understanding and description
of past realities, formed by human beings, things and places, may come
only when the effort is made to place the observed information in wider
contexts, and when it is compared to other extant sources which bear on

8 W. Pawlikowska and R. Butterwick
the problem. The essential conditions for accurate contextualization—
whether we are dealing with a person, a place or an event—are the
accurate reading of the relevant sources and critical reflection upon them.
Micro-historical analysis is not therefore limited to those marginalized
by ‘History’, important as efforts to recover ‘silent voices’ can be.
Microscopic analysis can also yield new insights into supposedly well-
researched ‘great events’, ‘great men’ and ‘great women’. The results of
such research may even change ‘grand narratives’. The approach, not the
subject, is what matters here.
The reader may judge whether and to what extent the present vol-
ume fulfils its claim to offer microhistories. Probably no chapter meets
each and every criterion demanded of the genre. David Frick’s con-
tribution is a reflection on the ‘intensive cultivation’ of urban history
rather than a case study itself. Other chapters are directly based on the
analysis of primary sources, but the methods employed include those
of literary studies, martyrology, mirabilia, cultural anthropology, to-
pography, cartography, prosopography, onomastics and sphragistics.
The scale of investigation varies—whether in time, space or the num-
ber of persons concerned. These persons’ social status varies from
princes through junior officials to unfree persons. Surely no account
of human misery could surpass tales of cannibalism. Besides hunger,
some authors seek to understand how particular communities coped
with challenges: fire, indigence, sickness, precedence and the common
weal. This variety testifies to the wide range of approaches that can
be comprehended within the term microhistory, including intensive
studies of political participation and political communication.
18
It is
also a taste of ongoing, multinational research on the diverse social
and cultural history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, much of it
conducted at local level. The growing closeness between local history
and microhistory as practised globally is also making its mark on the
historiography of the Grand Duchy.
19
It is tempting to assume that the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, at least
as much as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a whole, was sui
generis among European polities. It was certainly distinctive—but not
least in the ways in which it blended features also found in neighbour-
ing countries. As the chapters in this book show, the lived experience of
diverse citizens and inhabitants of Lithuania included tendencies ranging
from Baroque religiosity to the bureaucratizing impulse which were also
familiar elsewhere. This openness to the four winds might perhaps be
expected from one of Europe’s lowest continental watersheds—between
the Baltic and Black Seas. But then every town or village has its own char-
acter, and micro-historians are concerned with specificity as well with
wider patterns. It is clear, however, that religious, intellectual, political
and other groups and individuals within the Grand Duchy participated
in much larger networks and communities, extending right across the
Commonwealth and far beyond. Many more of these connections remain

Introduction 9
to be explored in the sources left both by visitors to the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania, and by its inhabitants and citizens.
Notes
1. The history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its union with the King-
dom of
Poland may be approached via, inter alia, Darius Baronas and
S. C. Rowell, The Conversion of Lithuania: From Pagan Barbarians to Late
Medieval Christians, Vilnius: The Institute of Lithuanian Literature and
Folklore, 2015; Robert Frost, The Oxford History of Poland-Lithuania,
vol. 1, The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, 1385–1569, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015; Daniel Stone, The Polish-Lithuanian State,
1386–1795, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2001; Zigmantas
Kiaupa, The History of Lithuania, 2nd edn, Vilnius: baltos lankos, 2004.
2. Robert Frost, ‘Ordering the Kaleidoscope: The Construction of Identities in the Lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since 1569’, in Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer (eds.), Power and the Nation in European His- tory
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 212–31.
3. Inter alia: Tomas Venclova, Vilnius: A Personal History, Riverdale-on-
Hudson, NY: The Sheep Meadow Press, 2009; Czesław Miłosz, Szukanie ojczyczny, Cracow: Znak, 1992; see Viktorija Daujotytė and Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, Litewskie konteksty Czesława Miłosza, Sejny: Pogranicze,
2014.
4. E.g. Alfredas Bumblauskas, Senosios Lietuvos istorija. 1009–1795, V ilnius:
R. Paknio leidykla, 2005; idem, Wielkie Księstwo Litewskie: Wspólna historia, podzielona pamięć, Warsaw: Bellona, 2013; Andrzej Sulima Kamiński, Rzec- zpospolita wielu narodów, Lublin: Instytut Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej, 2000; Jakub Niedźwiedź, Kultura Literacka Wilna (1323–1655), Cracow: Universitas, 2012; Michał Kopczyński and Wojciech Tygielski (eds.), Under a Common Sky: Ethnic Groups of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithu- ania, Warsaw: Museum of Polish History, 2017.
5. Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten
Europe
, London: Allen Lane, 2011, pp. 229–308 (ch. 5: ‘Litva: A Grand
Duchy with Kings (1253–1795)’). 6. Eg. Stefan Rohdewald, ‘Vom Polocker V enedig’: kollektives Handeln sozi-
aler Gruppen einer Stadt zwischen Ost- und Mitteleuropa (Mittelalter, frühe Neuzeit, 19. Jh. bis 1914), Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005; Christoph v. Werdt, Stadt und Gemeindebildung in Ruthenien. Okzidentalizierung der Ukraine und Weißrusslands in Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Verlag, 2006; Matthias Niendorf, Das Großfürsten- tum Litauen 1569–1795: Studien zur Nationsbildung in der Frühen Neuzeit, 2nd edn, Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Verlag, 2010; David Frick, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth-Century Wilno, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013; Theodore R. Weeks, Vilnius Between Nations, 1795–2000, DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2015.
7. Frick, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors.
8. This metaphor was used in the excellent guide issued to research students in the Modern History Faculty at the University of Oxford in the early 1990s.
9. Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and István M. Szijártó, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice, London: Routledge, 2013, p. 4.
10. Peter Burke, What Is Cultural History? Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004,
pp.
43–6; Ewa Domańska, ‘Posłowie’, in Natalie Zemon Davis (ed.), Powrót
Martina Guerre’a, Poznań: Zysk i S-ka Wydawnictwo, 2011, p. 195.

10 W. Pawlikowska and R. Butterwick
11. Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, ‘Natalie Zemon Davis’ in eadem, The New
History: Confessions and Conversations, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002,
pp.
50–79 (pp. 67–8). Cf. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin
Guerre, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
12. Matti Peltonen, ‘What Is Micro in Microhistory?’ in Hans Renders and Binne De Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory and Life Writing
, Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill,
2014, pp. 103–18 (p. 105); cf. Carlo Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues, London: Hutchinson Press, 1989.
13. Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know About It’,
Critical Inquiry, 20, 1993, 1, pp. 10–35 (pp. 10–15).
14. Giovanni Levi, ‘On Microhistory’, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing
, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001, pp. 97–119
(pp. 97, 99).
15. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294–1324
, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980, p. vii–xvii. Cf. ‘Storia
totale fra ricerca e divulgazione: il Montaillou di Le Roy Ladurie’, Quaderni storici, 40, 1979, pp. 205–27; it was also criticized by Susan Stuard (‘An Unfortunate Construct: A Comment on Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Mon- taillou’, Journal of Social History, 15, 1981, 1, pp. 152–5) for maintaining a
view of women as a commodity of exchange.
16. Molière, Le bourgeois gentilhomme [1671], act 2, scene 4, www.toutmoliere.
net/acte-2,405364.html, accessed 16 October
2018. This quotation was
often used by Zbysław Wojtkowiak to illustrate the idea of becoming con- scious of the apparently obvious, during classes in source criticism at the History Institute of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań in the early 2000s.
17. István Szijarto, ‘Four Arguments for Microhistory’, Rethinking History, 6, 2002, 2, pp.
209–15; see also Magnússon and Szijártó, What Is Microhis-
tory? pp. 5–8; John Brewer, ‘Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life’, Cultural and Social History, 7, 2010, 1, pp. 87–109; Filippo De Vivo,
‘Prospect or Refuge? Microhistory, History on the Large Scale: A Response’, Cultural and Social History, 7, 2010, 3, pp. 387–97; Ewa Domańska, Mik- rohistorie: spotkania w międzyświatach, 2nd edn, Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2005, pp. 62–3; Burke, What Is Cultural History? pp. 112–16; Tomasz Wiślicz, Love in the Fields: Relationships and Marriage in Rural Poland in the Early Modern Age: Social Imagery and Personal Experience, Warsaw: Instytut Historii PAN, 2018, p. 9. Cf. Wioletta Pawlikowska, ‘Sex, Violence and Alcohol in Sixteenth-Century Vilnius: Cases from the Acts of the Cathedral Chapter’, Tiltas: Journal of the British-Lithuanian Society, 11, 2011, 2, pp. 20–4.
18. Cf. De Vivo, ‘Prospect or Refuge?’ pp. 393–4.
19. Rita Regina Trimonienė, ‘Mikroistorijos ir lokalinės istorijos taksoskyros problematika’, in Ramunė Šmigelskytė-Stukienė (ed.), Miestas—dvaras— kaimas: Lietuvos Didžiojoje Kunigaikštytėje ir Lenkijos Karalystėje XVI- XVIII a. Lokalinės istorijos problemos
, Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos institutas,
2018, pp. 27–45.

Part I
Urban Spaces and
Communities

1 What’s in a Name?
Conflict and the Common Weal,
Unity and Diversity in the Early
Modern City
1
David Frick
‘All happy cities are alike; each unhappy city is unhappy in its own way’.
With due apologies to Tolstoy, does this famous dictum apply to a com-
parative study of such larger ‘families’, in this case, the early modern
European city (and perhaps more generally)? My interest here is limited
to those cities that were, at some point, ‘mixed’. Perhaps all of them were
mixed with regard to estate, wealth and profession, but I am particularly
concerned with those that were also confessionally, religiously, ethnically
and culturally diverse.
If the definition of a ‘happy city’ is not necessarily the mono-
confessional, mono-cultural one (which often had come into being after
much unhappiness), it was rather the one that was successful, in some
measure, by some means, in meeting the various challenges, threats
and opportunities presented by its diversity. If the second is the case we
might, in fact, imagine of a broad continuum of ‘solutions’ to the ques-
tions posed by co-existence within municipal walls of more than one
confession. This continuum might begin with cities that, in the name of
the common weal, made the stark choice to eradicate or expel certain
undesirable groups, or to force them into hiding. One thinks of decrees
de non tolerandis Iudaeis, or the eradication, persecution and/or banish-
ment of Christian ‘others’, such as Anabaptists, Antitrinitarians, Menno-
nites, etc. Or the ‘toleration’ of ‘crypto-churches’: these might be simply
some number of individual believers known ‘only’ to each other, who
gathered in some neighbouring extramural places that offered them open
worship (a practice known as Auslauf); or they might be the ‘hidden’
intramural spaces in which they gathered for services, what the Dutch
called schiulkerken, ‘clandestine churches’ (of which, in 1700, Amster -
dam alone boasted twenty Roman Catholic, six Mennonite and at least
one each of four other confessions).
2
At the other end of our continuum of ‘happy cities’, we might find so-
lutions that found means and methods to allow relatively peaceful open
co-existence of two or several more groups otherwise thought to exist
in some sort of disharmony, what the Confederacy of Warsaw of 1573
termed, neutrally at first, dissidentes in religione. Perhaps the best known

14 D. Frick
of such arrangements would be the so-called parity cities of the Holy
Roman Empire that had elaborated various systems of equilibrium be-
tween two confessions in one city (typically Roman Catholic and either
Lutheran or Calvinist). They followed patterns that would be worked
out through the negotiations of everyday life in the period after the Peace
of Augsburg (1555), which had introduced a rather different, mono-
confessional ‘solution’—that of cuius regio, eius religio—which is to say,
freedom of conscience for the local prince and his co-confessionals, and
freedom for the dissenters to move with house and goods to the next
welcoming principality. Individual local attempts to temper the principle
of cuius regio would be severely challenged during the Thirty Years’ War;
but for a select number of cities, the modus vivendi toward which prog-
ress had been made between 1555 and shortly after 1618 would be writ-
ten into law by the Westphalian settlement in 1648. And there we finally
find the quite specific legal provisions for the open co-existence of two
confessions in one city.
3
This being so, what will be the definition of an ‘unhappy’ city? If it
is one that had to face the challenges posed by the open presence of
multiple communities, and that had limited success in bringing all those
groups into some sort of harmony, then we might assign places all along
that same continuum to almost all of them. That is to say, most of these
cities will find their spots on both lists. Reacting to the Tolstoyan dictum
leads us to suspect that the binary distinction hides a set of gradations,
and that while all cities share some things, that they are all in some way
comparable, nonetheless, each one poses its own questions, demands its
own interpretative and descriptive strategies, and struggled toward its
own solution to the ‘problem’ (or ‘presence’) of diversity, one that would
be more or less inclusive or exclusive. Or as Brian Pullan put it in his
study of ‘Catholics and the Poor in Early Modern Europe’: ‘The conclu-
sions of every local study are clouded by the suspicion that its people
were acting, not as Catholics, but as Parisians, or Lyonnais, or Venetians’
(or, we might add, Vilnans, etc.).
4
This chapter arose as a preliminary attempt to answer a question that
invariably arose in the questions and answers section of presentations
related to my book Kith, Kin, and Neighbors.
5
My constant answer was
a helpless shrug of the shoulders and a direct confession: ‘I just don’t
know’. It is also a suggestion of a new comparative project that will
attempt to provide a few answers. Its topic (title?) will come from the
constantly changing forms of ‘dissidentes in religione’, and it will range
between, and insist on the crucial difference between ‘toleration’ and ‘tol-
erance’, which has been elided in some recent works.
6
This sense of a seemingly infinite variability, which, nonetheless, also
manifests itself in what may be seen as a rather fixed set of parameters—
of a ‘unity and variety’, or ‘unity in diversity’—is reflected in the ease
with which students of quite disparate cities find mutual topics of interest.

What’s in a Name? 15
That said, what interests me here are the constants and variables across
the spectrum of mixed cities in Europe (and, where possible, beyond);
in a Europe both East and West, but in particular of the early modern
period: from the advent of the Reformation to the beginning of the En-
lightenment; in other words, some of the laboratories of the day-to-day
toleration that would eventually become (be replaced by? merged with?
enter into some dialogue with?) the precursors of the proponents of the
tolerance of the Enlightenment, and their sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century precursors, many with roots in Poland-Lithuania and East-
Central Europe in general.
Those who work more specifically on the cities of the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania, or, more generally, on those of the Polish-Lithuanian Com-
monwealth (themselves huge polities at the time), are well aware of the
great variety of ethno-confessional mixes, types of city charters, modes of
co-existence, their success and failures over the course of their individual
histories. Cities were the property of kings and/or their consorts, also of
bishops, of magnates and nobles. Some had grants of Magdeburg Law;
some did not. The ‘same’ law often functioned in somewhat different
ways in different cities: did, for example, a royal city with Magdeburg
Law receive its wójt (Vogt, advocatus—here the overlord of a city) as a
royal appointee, or did a (semi-)autonomous Magistracy play roles in
the selection and presentation of their wójt for royal approval? Did the
burghers have a privilege de non tolerandis Iudaeis, or did the Jews have
a privilege from the city’s owner for residence within the walls? Or did
the two groups have mutually exclusive privileges and find practical so-
lutions for the absurdities of the unworkability of the privileges? Where
did Jews (and Christian minorities, such as Mennonites) live in cities that
accepted them; and where did they live in relation to cities that had ex-
pelled them, but nonetheless quite clearly wanted them nearby; where
did they live in ‘cities where they weren’t?’ Was their place of habita-
tion in any way limited (by law, by customs, by architecture, by gates,
etc?), or were they simply to be found in some preponderance in certain
places, or did they (also?) live in many discontiguous parts of the city?
Or all of these things? Were there restrictions on appearance in public?
With regard to time, place, behaviour, dress? These and countless other
questions of modes of co-existence, as well as the answers to them, were
everywhere the same and everywhere different. Similar results often had
different contextual meanings. All of them are worth charting in an at-
tempt to draw a map of the practice of toleration (or its opposite) and
the search for the common weal in the cities and towns of early modern
Poland-Lithuania, and in Europe in general (and further abroad into the
Ottoman Empire, for example).
It is not at all the case, for example, that a particularly ardent Catho-
lic noble would necessarily impose his faith on his city. Catholic nobles
(and nobles of other confessions) were economic and political actors, and

16 D. Frick
there were often reasons—reasons of every sort—to tolerate, even en-
courage, the presence of Jews, Mennonites, Lutherans, Calvinists, Tatars,
Armenians, Scots, Italians (radical heretics and strict Roman Catholics)
among others. The question then became: how to make the presence of
all these diverse citizens and non-citizens contribute to a ‘common weal’,
from which some siginificant number would reap some benefit?
Nor was it the case that quite different ‘solutions’ produced radically
different results. One telling example: beginning around 1400, in the
wake of anti-Jewish riots, Cracow’s Jews began resettling and/or being
resettled to the walled suburb of Kazimierz, a royal town on the other
side of what was then a small branch of the River Vistula—now, since
the nineteenth century, paved over as the Planty Dietlowskie, one part
of Cracow’s Ring. (The Jews—all of them?—lived within their own walls
as a separate neighbourhood of otherwise Christian Kazimierz.) At this
point (circa 1400), the University began acquiring much of the previous
intramural Jewish settlement in its renovation of the Studium Generale,
in and around St Anne’s Street. In this case, what was to become a privi-
lege of non tolerandis Iudaeis would seem to have had the ‘expected’
results. Jews did not live legally outside their own ‘sub-suburban walls’.
7
In the second capital of the Commonwealth, the burghers of Wilno
(Vilna, Vil'nia, Vilne, Vilnius), were able, on rare occasions, to obtain
such an exclusionary privilege—mostly symbolic—but the Jews there
were much more successful in obtaining and implementing their own
royal privileges for intramural residence, worship, ritual (including bath-
houses) and commerce. They were to remain concentrated in the centre
of the city until the mass deportations and murders of the Second World
War; throughout the seventeenth century, they lived in some concentra-
tion in a ‘Jewish triangle’ of Jewish, Meat Shop and German Streets, but,
in spite of bilateral segregationist ‘real estate initiatives’, they also lived
in Christian streets and with Christians in Christian houses, often quite
far afield from the ‘neighbourhood’, and yet still within the walls. And
Christians continued to live and own houses within a ‘Jewish ghetto’ that
was no ghetto. For the seventeenth century we have detailed proof of this
phenomenon from as late as 1690.
8
The point here is that two antithetical ‘solutions’—banishment of Jews
from within the walls, versus establishment of a ‘Jewish neighbourhood’
in the centre of the city, but with extremely porous limits—led to two
roughly similar results: thriving Jewish and Christian life of every sort,
side by side, with relatively few recorded ‘tumults’ (and those records
ought to have survived). The question that remains to be examined (and
this applies for all these mixed cities and for all the various groups within
them) is the ‘side-by-sidedness’. How did it work? Do we again find ‘va-
riety in unity’?
How were mixed cities of the age of confessional strife able (or un-
able) to facilitate, ensure or impose the relatively peaceful and successful

What’s in a Name? 17
co-existence of more than one confession or religion, within one relatively
compact polity; a co-existence that fostered something like a striving for
a common weal (‘weal-er’, as always, for some more than for others)?
This is not a story of some sixteenth- or seventeenth-century precocious
tolerance. The discussion of tolerance before the Age of Enlightenment—
and it was mostly just that, a discussion—was conducted in the rarified
realm of a select few intellectuals: some of them, at the beginning of our
period, Erasmians; some of them, for obvious reasons, from the more
radical margins—Antitrinitarians, Anabaptists, pacifistic ‘communists’.
As Joseph Lecler pointed out so long ago, and so gently and reasonably,
the Church (Churches) produced elite protagonists of tolerance, and in-
deed, on occasion practised a kind of everyday toleration, when it felt
threatened; once the threat disappeared, the discussion (and the practice)
then often died down in the newly dominant party.
9
But I am not dealing foremost with the intellectuals. The relationship
of theoretical and polemical writings about tolerance to the daily prac-
tice of toleration in the early modern cities will largely remain under the
sign of a question mark, a topic to be worked out on the margins, in the
process of our investigations. This is rather the story of toleration, of
finding a set of practices—some of them implicated in violence or at least
in adversarial relationships—that allowed individuals and communities
to coexist, sometimes cheek by jowl, with people who were hated or
at the very least considered incorrigibly wrong-minded.
10
As Benjamin
Kaplan has written in his study of ‘religious conflict and the practice of
toleration’, for the non-elites ‘tolerance had a very concrete, mundane di-
mension. It was not just a concept of policy but a form of behavior [. . .]
a pragmatic move, a grudging acceptance of unpleasant realities, not a
positive virtue’. This attitude, he writes, was Janus-faced: in it tolerance
and intolerance were ‘dialectically and symbolically linked’. By the act
of tolerating, those who allowed others to live among them, whatever
the rules set out for their behaviour, ‘made powerful, if implicit, claims
about the truth of their own religion and the false, deviant character of
others’.
11
What would the ‘ideal’ model of the day-to-day practice of ‘toleration
in the early modern city’ look like? What sources would we like to have
in its elucidation? What can we do in the face of what are always defec-
tive document bases?
There are, of course, myriad ways to describe how a city is shaped
and how its inhabitants lived with each other within its confines: per-
haps as many as there are cities, and—looking from the outside in—as
many as are the individual archives that provide us windows onto part
of them, and as many as are the scholars sitting in the often drafty read-
ing rooms. At the outset of my work on Wilno—I now realize—I was
feeling my way toward one ‘maximalist’ variant. My goal at some early
point in my research—and the goal and strategies changed constantly in

18 D. Frick
response to growing knowledge of what those archives have (and do not
have) to offer—was to address something like this cluster of questions:
to what extent did Vilnans live in neighbourhoods and form human net-
works (through marriage, choice of guardians and other legal represen-
tatives, enlistment of godparents and witnesses, creation of professional
associations, etc.) that were confessionally and culturally bounded? In
what circumstances did they cross those boundaries? What sorts of cross-
confessional constellations were more likely than others, and under what
circumstances? How did they work out in practice?
It is important to recall that—in early modern Wilno—this was not a
situation of ‘two confessions in one city’ (the aforementioned title of Paul
Warmbrunn’s now classic study of four ‘imperial parity cities’). In Wilno
we find five Christian confessions—Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Cal-
vinists (all of them, the ‘Romans’, the Protestants from the 1550s) and
Ruthenian Orthodox and Ruthenian Uniates (both of them, the ‘Greeks’,
the Orthodox before the official conversion of Lithuanian, the Uniates
since 1596), who shared power across the city’s secular sodalities in simi-
lar parity arrangements under those two rubrics. And we find three re-
ligions: Christians, Jews (living in mono-religious neighbourhoods, but
also widely dispersed, within the walls); further—Muslims (living side by
side with each other, but also with Christians, without the walls).
What I sought to uncover were the human networks that individuals
and families gathered around themselves at key moments in the life cycle;
among them: birth and baptism, godparenting, education, courtship and
marriage, separation and divorce, the work place, times of need, sickness
and death. An early encounter with one particularly rich source—a sur-
vey of each intramural dwelling, that had been conducted in preparation
for a visit by the king and his entourage in 1636—suggested making it the
foundation of the building and society I was constructing.
12
I therefore
began my study—to shift the metaphor slightly—with the backdrops and
stage props for the chapters in the life-dramas I hoped to evoke: in this
case, primarily, with a laying out of social and confessional topographies,
and of overarching rules for behaviour in public and more private spaces.
In other words, this became a project based on maps and small dramas,
in which my goal became that of situating my various human dramas in
space and time.
Again, we encounter a primary problem with comparative studies:
every investigator of the history of any given city is utterly at the mercy of
the archives. Some encounter an embarrassment of riches and are forced
to develop strategies of selection, of searching for ways to find the forest
among all those trees. Others (most of us who work in this, the eastern,
part of early modern Europe) deal with spotty archives (a word I shall
often have recourse to here, but one that sometimes puts things most
mildly) and are forced to develop strategies for connecting wildly dispa-
rate data into something like a whole. In general, the former situation

What’s in a Name? 19
(the embarrassment of riches) is the case the closer the focus is on the
present, and the latter holds for more distant times; but there is also a
general gradation of cultural geography in early modern Europe, from
west (with a thicker source base) to east (where the record is often much
more fragmented). And this is for a variety of reasons. Two key factors
are: first, how quickly top-down directives from the Churches and secu-
lar polities to keep specific types of records (baptisms, marriages, deaths,
tax rolls of various sorts, etc.) were put in place in given territories (and
how present and effective were the servants of that Centre—assuming
there was one); and second, what sorts of interruptions (war, fire, deluge,
theft, plague, locusts, vegetarians,
13
etc.) the given city’s record-keeping
had been subject to and how well prepared this keeper of the archives
was to protect the documents (including the drawing up of evacuation
plans). Both sets of issues put historians of the early modern European
east at a disadvantage—which itself can become the mother of invention.
All cities are alike, but each city is different. More crucial for us, each
archival base is different. A wider comparative reading of existing city
studies for early modern Europe makes students of places with sparser
document bases envious; but this reading also offers, when taken in ag-
gregate, something like the image of an ideal set of materials for the study
of any city in that larger community. And that wider reading may sug-
gest questions not otherwise immediately obvious from the local, limited
archival base.
What would an ideal wish-list look like? (Just to mention some of
the items.) Above all, complete Church registers (baptisms, marriages,
communion-taking, financial offerings, episcopal visitations, last wills
and testaments, etc.) for the entire period under scrutiny—something
that would allow a reasonably confident recreation of family structures,
histories, genealogies, etc. Second, inventories or surveys, carried out by
secular and ecclesiastical authorities for various reasons, among which
might be: to establish ownership of real estate; to assess taxes (based, for
instance, on the number of ‘smokes’, that is, hearths—an approximate
indicator of numbers of some sort of family units; or on declared wealth
or income; or however the authorities decide to assess tax burdens); to
settle questions of inheritance; to survey houses by the various jurisdic-
tions to which they, and their inhabitants, were subject. Above all, sur-
veys that allow us to put names of householders and renters on a map,
assess wealth confession(s), and give a sense—often surprisingly detailed
of the physical topography of the city (often including the basements).
In addition to these registers, inventories and surveys of people, of
records of crucial moments in their lives (some of which establish kinship
relations and suggest other networks), and of their properties in their
urban context, our wish-list would include a complete set of the acta for
all the local legal jurisdictions, secular and ecclesiastical. These will give
us, among other things, litigation among city dwellers, their financial

20 D. Frick
transactions, last wills and testaments—all of which, if read carefully will
occasionally offer additional information on place of residence, mem-
bership in family and other personal networks, and other biographical
details. Further, it would be useful to have private and public letters,
diaries, city chronicles, funeral sermons, accounts of public processions,
festivals and other ceremonial events, memoirs, descriptions of the city,
contemporary maps, birds-eye-view representations, horizontal city pan-
oramas, and so on.
No city I know of possesses such a complete array of sources for the
study of its early modern history. But here, again, there is a consider-
able range of difference between the cities of western Europe (especially
northern Italy and the entire north-west) and those of the east. Those
who work with a richer document base usually list the gaps in any of
these registers, lamenting the fact that complete family reconstruction
is not possible, or that it is not completely possible for some aspects of
the period under examination. But then they must make a decision to
base their study on one document or rich series of documents, with the
others serving ancillary roles, in an effort to bring the unruly wealth of
materials under control. Those of us who work on cities where the record
is exponentially more spotty are forced—I would say, more positively,
invited, encouraged—to use more imagination in finding ways to make
connections between more disparate types of documents; in short, we
must accept anecdotes, pieced-together stories, and more and less hap-
hazard lists, in creating what slender histories we are able to weave.
Allow me, once again, to use seventeenth-century Wilno as an ex-
ample. It bears repeating: the scholar is always and everywhere at the
mercy of the archive. But in our part of the world this means spending
some time finding out just how dispersed, due to the vagaries of history,
that putative archive has become, and just what losses it has survived,
or might conceivably have survived. (A judicious use of the ‘argument
from silence’ cannot be ignored in our strategies here.) The case of Wilno
requires some travel: the significant core is still to be found locally, in
Vilnius—chiefly in the Lithuanian State Historical Archive, Vilnius Uni-
versity Library, the Wróblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of
Sciences, and the Martynas Mažvydas Lithuanian National Library—far
away enough for many of us. But there are also important collections of
manuscripts and printed books in various Polish centres (the National
Library, the University Library and the Central Archive of Old Records
(AGAD), in Warsaw; the Jagiellonian Library, the Czartoryski Library,
the Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Arts and of the Polish
Academy of Sciences (BPAUiPAN), in Cracow), crucial archival resources
in Moscow (RGADA, the Russian National Library), St Petersburg (the
Russian National Library and the Synodal Library of the Moscow Patri-
archate) and in Berlin (the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kultur-
besitz, Berlin-Dahlem). For peculiar reasons, unique copies of things are

What’s in a Name? 21
still showing up in Swedish collections (for example in Uppsala). One
always fears (suspects, hopes) that something new will turn up in places
like St Petersburg or Minsk, when a new guide to the archives is pro-
duced; or, better, when someone who has spent a lifetime in those collec-
tions steps forward with some golden piece of information. Still, even for
‘locals’, the study of seventeenth-century Vilnan society requires a certain
amount of travel, effort and expense.
By contrast, the student of Swabian Augsburg will work, for a much
longer time, in that city’s much richer archives and spend a miniscule
amount of time in neighbouring Bavarian Munich.
14
A student of Alsatian
Colmar will work in that city’s archives (again very rich) and briefly in
neighbouring Strasbourg.
15
In both cases, relatively complete tax records
(here too, mostly minus the identification of confession) will serve as the
foundational sources. These are two quite different and crucial cities for
learning how parity worked in the Holy Roman Empire; among others,
they can serve, for the moment, for some thoughts about what compara-
tive reading offers the writer of a comparative urban monograph.
What fragments are available for a study of seventeenth-century Wilno
from this ideal source base I have sketched out? The first important thing
to note is the destruction of the archives. The city burned rather thoroughly
in 1610; the Calvinist compound, together with its archive—spared the
fires of 1610—was burned to the ground in an anti-Calvinist ‘tumult’
of the next year 1611. The city was once again subject to destruction
and pillage following the Muscovite occupation of 8 August 1655. This
means that for many series of documents, especially those connected with
the acta of the courts of the Magistracy—the central source for a study
of the life of the city’s burghers—the archive is practically vacant for the
period before 1610. And it is extremely thin—and thin is probably much
too optimistic a word—for the period 1610–55. After that period, these
acta get back in swing and leave, with a few hiccups at the beginning,
reasonably thick documentation for the rest of the seventeenth century.
The acta of other jurisdictions have been preserved in quite different
ways, some of them defying any final explanation. The record of the
Roman Catholic Cathedral Chapter, which, among other things, had ju-
risdiction over two little streets on either side of the very top of Castle
Street—Skop and Bernardine Streets, plus adjacent alleyways—seems
reasonably full, at least for the higher instances of their court and for the
entire seventeenth century (perhaps due to some sort of plans for evacu-
ation). Lower instances for the same jurisdiction have left us two fasci-
nating smaller books of litigation for the period from the 1620s to just
before the Muscovite conquest of 1655. And it should be noted that, al-
though the judges were canons, that is, clergymen, they passed judgement
according to the very secular Third Lithuanian Statute, and the cases they
heard (litigation, defamation, theft, entry of financial records and last
wills and testaments—not all of the latter by any means Roman Catholic)

22 D. Frick
differed little from the procedures found in the acta of the Magistracy
of the burghers governed by Magdeburg Law. We have spotty records
from the Roman Catholic Consistory and for the so-called Horodnictwo,
a legal jurisdiction peculiar to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
For the seventeenth century, we have baptismal records—for the
Roman Catholics, 1611–16, 1664–92, with minor gaps; for the German
Catholics at the Jesuit Church of St Ignatius, 1666–1700; for the Calvin-
ists, 1631–35 and 1663–1700, with minor gaps. We have records of mar-
riages: for the Catholics at the Parish Church of St John, 1602–15 and
1664–72; for German Catholics at the Jesuit Church of St Ignatius; and
for the Calvinists, 1635–55, 1663–81, and 1684–1700. We have records
of communion for the Calvinists, 1663 and 1682–99. We have death
records—for the Calvinists, 1671–82, 1687–1700; and for the German
Catholics, 1668–1700. We have offertory records for the Lutherans and
the Calvinists. We have some books of inscriptions into religious brother-
hoods. We have spotty record books of the guilds. We have a few funeral
sermons, and two important memoirs.
Several things jump out immediately: the huge chronological gaps in
the individual records and the great disparity in the sorts of documents
available for the various confessions (for example, money offerings from
the Lutherans, but no baptismal or wedding records; baptismal records
for the Catholics, but no communion records, etc., etc.); and the absolute
silence on these or analogous issues in the extant documents about the
lives of Jews and Tatars. We have some relevant documents at higher
levels, ‘one remove’ from the local: the pinkasim of the Chief Lithuanian
Jewish Communities (from 1622), and the annual acta of the Synods of
the Reformed (Calvinist) Church in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania—both
relatively complete for the seventeenth century, and which very occasion-
ally have things to say with direct bearing on local Vilnan problems.
16
However, one issue is so glaring that it has mostly been ignored: the
complete absence of any of these sorts of Church records for the ‘Greeks’,
both Orthodox and Uniate. After all, after the Council of Trent, the Uni-
ates (like the Roman Catholics) were supposed to begin keeping com-
plete records of things like baptism, communion, marriage, death; and
the Orthodox began in a general way to emulate their Uniate brethren,
sometimes with a delay of a few decades. None of that is to be found in
places where I know to look. Or at least, I haven’t been able to unearth
it. One hopes they were carted off after the partitions, and that both
Orthodox and Uniate records (some must have existed) made their way
to collections of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church in
St Petersburg. But this search may take time, so hope remains.
I decided to begin with the map that was suggested by the aforemen-
tioned prose list of the Lustration [Rewizja] of the Dwellings of the Court
of His Royal Majesty, composed in preparation for the visit to Wilno of
the king and his entourage in 1636. Luckily, it came my way early in my

What’s in a Name? 23
work on Wilno. I am, by training, a philologist, not an historian, and
certainly was not then a frequenter of archives (the inside of one I would
not see for another year or so after encountering this foundational manu-
script). The realization of this prosaic document’s eloquence came as a
sort of epiphany before my first trip to Vilnius and to the archives in the
fall of 1999. I spent that summer making a data base of all the informa-
tion the document seemed, to me at that time, willing to surrender: the
basis for a detailed map of the houses of the city, with addresses assigned
to each house; names of owners and renters associated with the given
address; the legal jurisdiction of the house; the estate or profession of
the inhabitant/owner (if Christian), the religion (if non-Christian); a re-
markably concise, but precise physical description of the dwelling—its
size, building material, the numbers, types and general layouts of rooms,
basements, outbuildings, their condition (the purpose, after all, was to
determine whether to put the ‘Queen’s Washer Woman’ in the dwell-
ing, or ‘The Royal Marzipan Maker’, ‘The Royal Wigmaker’, ‘The Royal
Discantist’ (that is, Castrato), or even ‘Lord Ordyniec, the Lord Judge
Marshal’, who, we read, took up his temporary Vilnan abode ‘by force’).
And so, I quickly made maps and databases of every bit of information
that occurred to me at that early moment, including whether the base-
ments were full of water, and how many horses might be bedded down
in the internal courtyards.
The one thing all this information lacked, and this includes practi-
cally all secular documents, litigation, etc.—the very core of my pro-
posed investigation—was confession. Students of cities with much richer
archives—I have mentioned Augsburg and Colmar—note similarly that
their main records (mostly tax records and litigation) omit information
on confession. This fact alone tells us something about the status of con-
fession in the urban politics in these three mixed cities.
So what had the gods of the archives bestowed upon me, just as I was
about to venture into uncharted territory? One very rich document, but
above all, material for possibly useful databases, and most particularly
a list of names, regretfully minus confessions attached to those names.
It turned out, given the spotty, but nonetheless existing Church records
I outlined above, and armed with my treasure trove of names, I was soon
able to attach confession to many names and begin to build preliminary,
tentative genealogies, and their related confessional topographies. The
courts, litigation, last wills and testaments, and other documents, helped
fill in gaps; they were especially crucial for the ‘Greeks’, for whom, as
I have said, we lack all normal Church registers.
So here, I realized much later, was a paradox. The aforementioned ex-
haustive two-volume study of Augsburg, that most important parity city,
in the period ‘between the struggle over the calendar and parity’ (that is,
circa 1582 to 1648), tells us on several occasions that, ‘before the turning
point in the confessional relations in the Thirty Years’ War’, confessional

24 D. Frick
identity never (until 1645) played the least role in the responses elicited
from (presumably also in the questions posed to) those who were ‘taxed’
(in the good King James Bible sense of the word). After that date, confes-
sion was front and centre, along, as ever, with the assessment of taxable
worth. These ‘simple’ facts tell us important things about confessional
relations in the city at a given moment, and researchers are quite aware of
this. Confession remained absolutely missing from such surveys through-
out the seventeenth century. This too has its own eloquence.
But what interests me here is the scholarly workbench, and the result-
ing picture of confessional relations. Those with such embarrassments of
riches—for example, the students of Augsburg, who work primarily with
tax records—will claim that general topographies of wealth, profession
and position, and something like class, are possible, but that up to the
point where these same tax records begin to list confessions (for that city
in 1645), we cannot form clear pictures of confessional topographies.
I doubt this very much. It would ‘simply’ have been a matter of mak-
ing lists of names from the existing tax records, ‘confessionless’ though
they were (which these scholars had clearly done), and then matching the
names with more disparate, sometimes more narrative records (baptisms,
testaments, litigation, etc.). This would allow us to assign confession on
occasion and to begin to form such a map and a narration. It was cer-
tainly not a question of laziness. A lazy reader would never undertake
to make his or her way through the massive, high-quality literature on
Augsburg; I can only marvel at the effort that went into producing them.
I was interested in rather different things. My sources were relatively
skimpy, and they headed in other directions. My goal was to try to
pull pieces of them together. And in the day of laptop computers, some
good part of this smallish data base was within the purview of one re-
searcher. The result, for those who like telling tales, was that the outlines
of stories—a detail here, a litigation there, a death here—began to offer
something like biographies, skeletons at best, but there they were! It is
the result, I would argue, of facing an archival semi-desert, being shown
some volumes and boxes (more than one might have expected, but noth-
ing ‘complete’), and being told, in effect: ‘here, see what you can do with
this’. It is the result of a love for the hunt, the story, the anecdote, and
the sense that, in the face of a lack of fuller documentation, a good yarn
bring us something good, useful, suggestive.
Two things are sometimes lacking for me in the magisterial city studies
of north-western Europe from which I am attempting to learn. First, the
linking of names from things like tax rolls and other records, where in-
formation about confession is missing, with other records, where we can
supply this information. Second, the use of the linking of names in order
to put together small stories.
I recalled a very short article I had read some years ago, by Carlo
Ginzburg and Carlo Ponti, entitled ‘The Name and the Game: Unequal

What’s in a Name? 25
Exchange and the Historiographic Marketplace’ (originally published in
1979).
17
The unequal exchange of the subtitle had to do with the fact
that the two Italian historians had noticed that Italian historical scholar-
ship was very much in a debtor-creditor relationship with their French
neighbours, if ‘only’ to take into account the massive achievements of
the Annales school. What the two Italians wished to point out were the
rich, practically untouched archival fields of Italy ready for the reaping,
which, until then (actually decades before then), had ‘been subjected to
extensive, but not intensive cultivation’ (italics mine). But what was the
remedy? Since their interest was in the ‘small people’, those who show up
seldom and/or with sporadic bursts (think inquisitorial trials)—but they
did show up!—they suggested collecting and following the appearance
of names all over the vast record. In their words: ‘The guiding thread is
the name’.
Ginzburg and Ponti suggested this approach as a more intensive cul-
tivation of an incredibly lush pasture. I had come to somewhat similar
conclusions as a means of survival in an arid field, whereas my interest,
of necessity, became not the lowest of the low (who for us have all but
disappeared), but a society of relatively modest, some less-modest, bur-
ghers, artisans, tanners, goldsmiths, salt merchants, doctors, lawyers, ex-
ecutioners and the occasional ‘loose persons’, who, for whatever reason,
made it into that part of the record that has remained extant. The two
methods are not that far apart. As I spent the months putting together
the index for Kith, Kin, and Neighbors, I came to realize that it was
beginning to take on the shape of something like recent German-style
telephone books, but for seventeenth-century Vilnan society: names, ad-
dresses, titles, professions, relations, connections—for an American pri-
vate telephone subscriber, much too much information.
In any event, I do not suggest that my approach for Wilno will be
useful for all cities, or even most of them. I suspect that in a large com-
parative study of mixed cities in early modern Europe—which I eagerly
await and hope to contribute to—we will begin to discern and recognize
patterns and differences, ‘unity in diversity’ between, for example, the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Imperial cities, as well as be-
tween the Grand Duchy and the Crown; but we will also see structural-
historical differences and similarities across the distances from east to
west. I simply suggest some strategies, and flexibility in employing them.
Each archive is different. Each researcher is different. The responses to
the available resources will be different. The guiding questions perceived
at the outset of each venture will be different. Each project will take sur-
prising turns in response to what the archive offers.
In addition to my Kith, Kin, and Neighbors, three substantial mono-
graphs on Wilno/Vilnius/Vilna have appeared in recent years.
18
The au-
thors are of one generation (if the youngsters will be generous to me).
We had more or less extensive access to the same archives. But for some

26 D. Frick
perverse reason, people obstinately insist on posing different questions
and employing differing methods to the same sources—all of which
makes the hunt more fun and interesting, but the finding of comparanda
more difficult.
But put all together, in a larger comparative context, the results might
amount to something. Whether or not Tolstoy’s binary distinction was
correct, we can leave for the Tolstoyans.
Notes
1. To the memory of my mother, Ruth Hudson Frick (29 January 1929–1
April 2015).
2. Benjamin J. Kaplan is particularly good on ‘hiding in plain sight’. See his Divided By Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe
, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, e.g.,
‘Fictions of Privacy’, pp. 172–97; and ‘Sharing Churches, Sharing Power’. pp. 198–236.
3. See Paul Warmbrunn’s now classic study Zwei Konfessionen in einer Stadt.
Das Zusammenleben von Katholiken und Protestanten in den Paritätischen Reichsstädten Augsburg, Biberach, Ravensburg und Dinkelsbühl von 1548 bis 1648, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz, Abteilung für abendländische Religionsgeschichte, vol. 111, Wies-
baden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983.
4. Brian Pullan, ‘Catholics and the Poor in Early Modern Europe’, Transac- tions
of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 26, 1976, pp. 15–34 (at
p. 26).
5. Kith, Kin, and Neighbors: Community and Confession in Seventeenth- Century Wilno
, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.
6. Among many examples, see Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (eds.), Toler -
ance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman (eds.), Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlighten- ment, Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.
7. On this, in English, see Bożena Wyrozumska, ‘Did King Jan Olbracht Banish the Jews from Cracow?’ in Andrzej Paluch (ed.), The Jews in Poland
, vol.
1, Cracow: Jagiellonian University Research Center on Jewish History and Culture in Poland, 1992, pp. 27–37.
8. On Jewish settlement throughout the century, see David Frick, ‘Jews and Others in Seventeenth-Century Wilno: Life in the Neighborhood’,
Jewish
Studies Quarterly, 12, 2005, 1, pp. 8–42; idem, ‘Jews in Public Places: Fur -
ther Chapters in the Jewish-Christian Encounter in Seventeenth-Century Vilna’, in Adam Teller, Magda Teter and Antony Polonsky (eds.), Polin: Stud- ies in Polish Jewry, vol. 22, Social and Cultural Boundaries in Pre-Modern Poland, Oxford: Littman, 2010, pp. 215–48.
9. See Joseph Lecler, T oleration and the Reformation, 2 vols, New York: Asso-
ciation Press, 1960, e.g., vol. 1, p. 421; vol. 2, pp. 483, 485–6.
10. David Nirenberg (Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996) is especially

good on the rituals of violence that, paradoxically, were part of keeping the peace in late medieval France and the Crown of Aragon. For a mistaken—in my opinion—rejection of the usefulness of a distinction between tolerance and

What’s in a Name? 27
toleration, see Grell and Scribner, Tolerance and Intolerance in the European
Reformation.
11. See Kaplan, Divided by Faith, p. 8.
12. The basis for the topography that lies at the basis of my work was transcribed, not without errors, transl. into Lithuanian (the original was in Polish), and provided with invaluable
notes, much from the Lithuanian Metryka, in Min-
daugas Paknys, Vilniaus ir miestiečiai 1636 m: Namai, gyventjai, svečiai, Vilnius: Vilniaus dailės akademijos leidykla, 2006. The original manuscripts are to be found in the Library of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow: Bib- lioteka Jagiellońska, sygn. B Slav F 12 as well as (for 1639) B Slav F 15.
13. Cf. 1 Tim. 4:3.
14. See Bernd Roeck, Eine Stadt in Krieg und Frieden: Studien zur Geschichte er Reichstadt
Augsburg zwischen Kalenderstreit un Parität, 1 vols., Göttin-
gen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989 and Etienne François, Die Unsichtbare Grenze: Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg 1648–1806, Sigmarin- gen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1991.
15. See Kaspar von Greyerz, The Late City Reformation in Germany: The Case of Colmar, 1522–1628.
Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische
Geschichte Mainz, vol. 98, Abteilung für Abendländische Religionsge- schichte, ed. Peter Meinhold, Wiesbaden: Verlag Philipp von Zabern in Wis- senschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980 and Peter Wallace, Communities and Conflict in Early Modern Colmar: 1575–1730, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Brill, 1995.
16. In general, on the available sources, see Frick, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors, pp. 9–15.
17. See, in English translation, Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Ponti, ‘The Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange and the Historiographic Marketplace’, transl. Eren Branch, in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (eds.), Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, pp. 1–10.
18. I am thinking of Aivas Ragauskas, Vilnius miesto valdantysis elitas XVIIa: Antrojoje pusėje (1662–1702
m.), Vilnius: Diemedžio leidykla, 2002; Jakub
Niedźwiedź, Kultura Literacka Wilna (1323–1655), Cracow: Universitas,
2012; and Tomasz Kempa, Konflikty wyznaniowe w Wilnie od początku reformacji do końca XVII wieku, Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uni- wersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2016. But there are still many more specifi- cally focused monographs (such as the Muscovite occupation of 1655–61): Irina Gerasimova, Pod vlast'iu russkogo caria: Sociokul'turnaia sreda Vil'ny v seredine XVII veka, St Petersburg: Evropejskij universitet v Sankt- Peterburge, 2015.

In the harsh climate of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania a roof and a hearth
were conditions of survival. The northern climate certainly affected the
conditions of residence. It is hard to dispute this generalization, so let us
turn our attention to the details. Some believe that God is in the details,
2

others might locate the Devil therein. Either way, the image of the past
which emerges through the details contained in sources is usually full of
colours and shades, rather than one-dimensional and monochrome. Just
like the present.
The right of members of the Cathedral Chapter of Vilna (Vilnius) to
their own home (called a canonical curia) was a necessary consequence
of the statutes which required them to reside in the vicinity of the cathe-
dral.
3
However, the Chapter faced a shortage of accommodation, ini-
tially having only several properties at its disposal, but twelve canons
and six prelates (the provost, dean, archdeacon, custodian, scholar and
cantor) to house. This was despite the fact that in the sixteenth century,
the Chapter’s jurydyka (a legal term which essentially means the plots of
land within the city limits subject to capitular jurisdiction) held about
sixty-four houses, most of which were rented out to lay persons.
4
This sit-
uation gave rise to much tension. It also led to canons residing temporar-
ily in inns, something which—as the Chapter itself recognized—harmed
the reputation of the clergy.
5
The consequences were not restricted only
to the kind of excess which typically amuses readers, such as carousing
in female company, playing cards or wine-fueled feasting. These things
went on not only in taverns, but in capitular residences as well.
6
At this point it is worth recalling a meeting which had an altogether
different character and which is even cited sometimes as a symbol of
religious toleration in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
7
The matter is
quite well known, thanks mainly to the Calvinist convert from Ortho-
doxy and client of the arch-Catholic Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł, Fio-
dor Jewłaszewski, who recorded his sojourn in the capital of the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania.
8
His memoir has been repeatedly published,
9
and
from among the several translations into various languages I quote that
of the late Father Alexander Nadson, with only minor modifications:
2
A History of One House
The Microcosm of the Jurydyka
of the Vilna Cathedral Chapter
in the Sixteenth and Early
Seventeenth Centuries
1
Wioletta Pawlikowska

A History of One House 29
During the year 1565 I resided in the city of Vilna, collecting the so-
called poll-taxes. There I received great consolation, listening to the
word of God preached to the Christian congregation by the learned
ministers Wędrogowski and Kościeniecki. On the other hand I found
great favour with a man worthy of memory, Father John Maka-
viecki [Joannes Makowiecki], the Archdeacon of Warsaw, Custodian
and Canon of Vilna, Secretary in the Treasury of His Majesty, who
made me more skilled in figures and did me a great service by giv-
ing my name and recommending me to several people. For at that
time difference of religion was no obstacle to friendship, for which
reason that age seems to me golden in comparison with the present
day, when even among people of the same faith hypocrisy reigns,
but when it comes to different religions, then it is useless to look
for love, sincerity and good manners, especially amongst lay people.
I remember well from times not long ago, when the present Pope
Clement was still a Cardinal at the court of His Majesty King Ste-
phen in Vilna, I was sitting together with some of his foremost Italian
servants at table in the house of Father Bartholomew Niadźviedzki
[Bartolomeus Niedźwiedzki], Canon of Vilna. On learning that I was
an Evangelical they were astonished that the Canon dared to invite
me to dinner, and when he explained that there was no hate among
us and that we loved one another like good friends, the Italians were
filled with praise and said that God Himself dwelt here, while at
the same time they complained of their own domestic customs and
disorders. May God grant even now the return of gentler times, that
all Christians—who, even though they differ in some articles of faith,
are Christians nevertheless—may show greater respect for the su-
preme and greatest Christian monarch the Pope: and may he, like a
wise and kind father, love and suffer them all, in the likeness of the
father of a family who knows and suffers all his sons, even if they
differ from him and the other brothers in their opinions.
In the autumn of the year 1566 there was a plague in the city
of Vilna; I lived there for some time, frequently seeing Doctor Sa-
prez [Sierpc], the Canons and other people who also remained alive
during the plague. From this doctor I received advice to beware of
fright, for there were temptations in the air, but if I saw anything,
I should seize a weapon and walk towards the apparition and it
would disappear.
10
The memoirist records here, that in Vilna in 1565 he met many good
people of various religions, including members of the Cathedral Chap-
ter such as Joannes Makowiecki, who went on to recommend him to
other noble persons. Jewłaszewski was also hosted for dinner by Canon
Bartolomeus Niedźwiecki. In 1566 Canon Albertus Grabowski of Sierpc
(known as Doctor Sierpc) worked out his horoscope.
11
Perhaps this task
lay behind the rumours coursing the Vilna streets about Grabowski,

30 W. Pawlikowska
namely that he was said to indulge in necromancy,
12
that is, a form of
forbidden magical practices in which the sorcerer calls on the souls of
the dead in order to discover the future.
13
Moreover, no known source
actually proves that Grabowski was awarded a doctorate in medicine,
14

although he is titled as such several times in capitular sources.
15
A doc-
toral degree was a condition for receiving a doctoral canonry. Perhaps
Grabowski merely declared that he held the requisite degree. Was it for
this reason that he was so emphatically and contrarily called Doctor Si-
erpc by persons of his acquaintance?
A great deal happened behind the doors of capitular houses as well as
in the taverns of Vilna. Perhaps Jewłaszewski also crossed the threshold
of the house—a canonical curia—to whose history the present text is
devoted. Henceforth we shall be dealing with the possessors and, when-
ever possible over a period of seven decades, with the fabric of a house
located on Bernardine Street (ulica Bernardyńska, Bernardinų gatvė). We
do know that during Jewłaszewski’s stay in Vilna this house was the resi-
dence of Archdeacon Joannes’s brother, Canon Thomas Makowiecki.
16
I have discussed the state of research on the jurydyka of the Cathedral
Chapter, along with the sources that relate to it, in another publication.
17

Similarly, I have also discussed the term jurydyka at greater length else-
where. Nevertheless, it is worth recalling that in early modern Vilna we
are not dealing with a consolidated or continuous area, and that its inhab-
itants were subject to a separate court.
18
The source material for what fol-
lows comes from the archive of the Cathedral Chapter of Vilna, including
the volumes of protocols currently preserved in the Wróblewski Library
of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in Vilnius.
19
At this point some
attention must also be paid to the method. In accordance with the prem-
ises of socio-topography (inclining towards microhistory), which I would
like to apply in this chapter, one of the basic problems is the capture of
the relationship between social structure, particular persons and space at
a given moment in time, accentuating the problems of daily life—in this
case from a capitular perspective.
20
Fuller understanding of the details
preserved in the sources for this micro-study can come with their contex-
tualization, according to the obligation on every historian to make use
of all the sources necessary to understand the subject and elucidate the
problem in question. However, in a brief text, it is not possible to make
use of all the accessible archival material. It is also appropriate here to
draw on the techniques of collective biography—prosopography—which
I have employed elsewhere to present the functioning of the Chapter of
Vilna and its members. For the Chapter, like many other early modern
corporations, comprised people from various backgrounds, circles and
territories.
21
In the case of the jurydyka of the Vilna Chapter, the task carries the
risk—as with any retrospective—associated with the incompleteness of
the sources and the imprecision of some of the entries. The risk increases

A History of One House 31
along with the detail of the narrative. Carelessly attempted microhistory
can become simply storytelling which, however entertaining, contributes
little of lasting significance to historical knowledge and understanding.
22

However, micro-historical socio-topography might also yield a more or
less successful study of the streets of Vilna.
Scholars who try to locate buildings from the fourteenth, fifteenth or
even sixteenth centuries on the basis of maps from the eighteenth or even
the seventeenth centuries run a high risk of error. The known plans of
Vilna from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—however beautiful
and interesting in their own right—are for these purposes imprecise.
23

Alas, even the excellent works of Kęstutis Katalynas and Gediminas
Vaitkevičius are of limited use here.
24
As Jerzy Ochmański noted in the
case of the episcopal jurydyka in Vilna, ‘at the end of the fourteenth cen-
tury the picture [. . .] was completely different to that in the year 1553
at the time of Vilna’s greatest prosperity, ruined by the Muscovite inva-
sion of 1655’.
25
In the case of the capitular jurydyka, the verdict must be
analogous. Nevertheless, the contributions made in this regard by Józef
Maroszek, Mindaugas Paknys and David Frick, when combined with
close attention to the sources, stimulate the posing of new research ques-
tions and hypotheses.
26
The system for taking possession of a canonical curia—via the option
iuxta vocacionem (according to the length of service as a member of
the Chapter)
27
—forced clergymen into micro-mobility, at least within the
confines of the jurydyka, and encouraged them to participate in the gen-
eral sessions of the Chapter, during which the allocation of houses was
decided. Moreover, the procedure of options had a domino effect on the
capitular community, as the vacating of one property on the acquisition
of another created an opportunity for another clergyman to do likewise,
and so on, until the granting of a house to a newcomer who had not pre-
viously resided in a curia brought the sequence to a halt.
28
This principle
also applied in most Chapters in the Polish Crown. Both prestimonial
estates (landed properties belonging to the Chapter) and houses were
assigned to the temporary care of particular canons.
29
Such clergymen re-
ceived a document allocating the particular curia and house for their resi-
dence. One such provision, drawn up by the famous Polish Renaissance
poet Jan Kochanowski for the archdeacon of Śrem, Jan Kąkolewski, has
survived to this day.
30
Things were different, however, for the six Vilnan
prelates, whose properties were attached to their particular benefices.
Apart from the prelates, canons and lower clergy, the capitular ju-
rydyka was filled with burghers and other inhabitants of the city who
were subject to the Chapter’s jurisdiction. They represented the most di-
verse professions and trades: apothecaries, carpenters, hatters, tailors,
furniture makers, saddlers, swordsmiths, cobblers, glazers, locksmiths,
carters, brewers, masons, blacksmiths, weavers, bakers, potters, salters,
traders of bread and hides, and washerwomen.
31
Some of these lived in

32 W. Pawlikowska
capitular houses or in their basements and cellars, naturally in exchange
for rent, although not always to the approval of the Chapter. Not every
trade was equally welcome. On 5 October 1583 the Chapter reminded
its members that some of them were sheltering tenants who practised
‘dirty’ trades: cobblers, saddlers, locksmiths and herring sellers. All for
miserable gain at the expense of the good name of the corporation. It was
then resolved to forbid the receiving of representatives of such groups
in canonical houses, on pain of the loss of the daily allowance (the re-
fectio) for an entire month.
32
We know from later sources that despite
these sanctions—or perhaps from their not being applied—the practice
continued.
Thanks to their residence in these properties, cathedral clergymen
could not only reduce their expenses but also earn a few groats from
letting out rooms. So it is no surprise that some priests continually
sought the Chapter’s approval to live in canonical curiæ. Until the
1560s the right to ask for a capitular house belonged only to the
canons although there were cases of prelates enjoying the privilege as
well. This changed when the canonical and prelatical properties were
united into one capitular estate. This process, which was intended to
equalize the right of clergymen to a house, lasted a long time. One
fragment of this complex past which still casts a shadow in the surviv-
ing sources is the wooden house, situated on a plot adjoining Bernar -
dine Street in Vilna.
33
In the sixteenth century Bernardine Street was one of the main through-
fares of the city. It was so named because it led to the large church and fri-
ary of the Observant Franciscans, who in Poland-Lithuania were known
as Bernardines after St Bernardino of Siena. In 1636 as many as eight
houses located on this street were subject to the Chapter’s jurisdiction,
including two tenements inhabited by Canons Martinus Szulc Wolfowicz
and Franciscus Dołmat-Isajkowski respectively, as well as the tenement
containing the St Ambrose dormitory.
34
We are concerned with one of the houses of Bernardine Street which
might have been numbered 3, or perhaps 6, according to later and un-
confirmed identifications.
35
In the sixteenth century, curiæ had neither
names nor numbers. For this reason the protocols only locate them by
reference to topography, or to the names of the neighbours, if they are
located at all.
36
In order to establish the names of the residents of the
house on Bernardine Street it is necessary to follow the chain of the
options exercised on its possession. The first known inhabitant of this
house is Canon Erasmus Eustachius de Cracovia (de Czas?) (who bore
the Łodzia coat of arms and therefore had noble status).
37
He lived here
from at least 11 September 1533
38
until 8 June 1537.
39
Canon Erasmus,
who died in or after 1544,
40
may have been the person inscribed in the
metrica of Cracow University as Erasmusem Szolcz Eustachii Scholcz

A History of One House 33
de Cracouia,
41
who held positions at the royal court as notary and sec-
retary.
42
It is worth adding, bearing in mind the earlier passage on the
horoscopes and almanacs of Canon Albertus Grabowski, that to Canon
Erasmus was dedicated an almanac published in Cracow in 1537 by
Michael a Viślica,
43
the head of the chair of astrology and the dean of
the philosophical faculty of Cracow University, as well as the custodian
(later dean) of the Chapter of the Church of St Florian in Cracow.
44
On 8 June 1537,
45
Canon Bartolomeus of Kowno (Kaunas), who was
of burgher origin, exercised his option and acquired the right to the
house. The Chapter obliged him—in accordance with the letter of the
statutes—
46
to raise the standard of the building. This house turned out
to be Bartolomeus’s last home on earth before he moved to his eternal
dwelling place. However, he was in no hurry to embark on that last jour-
ney. He resided in the house—probably with some breaks—for almost
a quarter of a century. In the meantime he had to sub-let the property
to the suffragan bishop (and also the cantor) of Vilna, Prelate Georgius
Albinus, who, not being a canon of the cathedral, had no automatic right
to a curia. On 7 November 1550 Canon Bartolomeus made a complaint
against the suffragan bishop, that Albinus disturbed him in his own
home.
47
From the entry dated 9 May 1551 it transpires that Georgius
Albinus had submitted a request for taking possession of the house from
Bartolomeus of Kowno. The latter immediately contested this, underlin-
ing that Albinus had neither any right to the house nor any proofs that
the Chapter had leased him the house either in whole or in part. Even if
he had lived in the house for several years, that was no proof for any legal
title to possession. Given that Albinus had not presented any convincing
arguments, he was commanded forever to remain silent on the matter
by the Chapter. By the same token, the right to the house of Canon Bar-
tolomeus was confirmed.
48
Leaving the Chapter, whether through death or resignation, gave
the other members an opportunity to improve their living conditions.
Along with the vacancy of the prebend, the Chapter announced the va-
cancy of the house and/or prestimonial estate which the former mem-
ber had possessed. This usually sparked a flurry of interest among the
cathedral clergymen, who gathered in Vilna in order to participate in
the option. Canons who obtained a new curia and/or prestimonial
estate were expected to give up the property or properties they had
hitherto enjoyed.
It is notable that Canon Bartolomeus did not choose to move to a
new house when opportunities to do so arose. Perhaps he was simply
lazy? Or perhaps the alternatives to his existing residence were insuf-
ficiently attractive? Perhaps he was genuinely attached to his house
on Bernardine Street? Whatever may have been the case, on 26 Au-
gust 1552, following the death of Canon Joannes Kunicki, the late

34 W. Pawlikowska
clergyman’s house and prestimonial estate became vacant. The then
procurator of the Chapter, Canon Joannes Wirbkowski announced
that the right to them fell by option to Canon Bartolomeus of Kowno,
as the most senior member of the Chapter present at the session. Bar-
tolomeus was duly offered the house, on condition, however, that he
raise the standard of this curia within three years. Bartolomeus did
not wish to meet this condition, and so declared his refusal of the offer
of the new house. He took care, however, to reserve his rights to par-
ticipate in future options. This was in accordance with the accepted
principle that such resignations needed to be explicitly declared to
be on a one-off basis, that is, without setting a precedent. In the end
the canonical house formerly occupied by Canon Kunicki was given
to Joannes Wirbkowski, who duly moved out of the house he had
previously occupied.
49
So Bartolomeus remained in his house on Ber-
nardine Street.
Canon Bartolomeus’s next chance to move home presented itself in
1556. This time a brick-built house on Castle Street (Ulica Zamkowa,
Pilies gatvė), the city’s principal throughfare, fell vacant. Bartolomeus
of Kowno swiftly asked to be granted possession, appealing to his se-
niority. Although the Chapter did not forbid him from participating in
the option, it did set conditions which he either could or would not ful-
fil, and so withdrew his request. Again, he reserved his right to exercise
his option in future. It is notable that this brick-built house, presumably
of higher than average standard, situated on prestigious Castle Street,
was then given to a canon and prelate in one person, Bartolomeus Sa-
binka. Sabinka was then reputed to be the best of the royal medics.
50

It would seem that in this case, connections at the royal court were the
decisive factor in the decision. Indeed, it can even be stated that it was
in Sabinka’s interests sometimes, as he himself put it in a letter to Stan-
islaus Hosius, to stay ‘in the desert, whence he and the king were led to
be tempted, probably by the Devil himself’.
51
In contrast, when another
prelate, the aforementioned Cantor Georgius Albinus, requested yet an-
other house, the Chapter again refused him. This time Albinus decided
to appeal, first to the bishop of Vilna, and then threatened to take his
case to the archbishop of Gniezno (in whose metropolitan province lay
the bishopric of Vilna). Moreover, he continued, if that appeal was also
refused, he would go to the Holy Apostolic See.
52
On top of all this,
on 6 March 1556 Albinus declared to the Chapter that if the bishop-
ordinary, Valerianus Protasewicz, would not support and help him, he
would no longer wish to assist him as his suffragan.
53
Two weeks later,
the capitular procurator—Canon Wirbkowski—made a formal com-
plaint against the cantor, recalling that he had for several years fallen
behind with the repayments on a loan.
54
Georgius Albinus paid back half the sum—fifty Hungarian ducats—
just as another option was held for a further vacant house. The Chapter

A History of One House 35
accepted the money, but did not award this further house to Albinus. It
justified its decision thus: the house in question was a canonical curia
and prelates could not live in it. At this the cantor riposted that since
he had no house in which to live, he no longer felt obliged to reside
permanently near the cathedral and to carry out his ecclesiastical du-
ties.
55
Unjust applications of different standards in similar situations
are therefore no monopoly of corporations, including academic cor-
porations, in the present day. This example testifies to the canons’ in-
terested, indeed arbitrary application of the regulations of the statutes
depending on the needs of the moment. And so Bartolomeus of Kowno
lived in the house on Bernardine Street from 1537 until his death, early
in 1560.
On 20 February 1560 the Chapter considered the request made by
the bishop-ordinary of the neighbouring diocese of Samogitia, Joannes
Domanowski, for the house vacated by the late Canon Bartolomeus. The
reason given for refusal was that on a previous occasion the bishop, who
was also a prelate (the provost, no less) of Vilna Cathedral, had not re-
served his right to participate in future options.
56
Domanowski repeated
his request on 5 March 1560. However, he achieved nothing.
57
The
Chapter also refused a similar request from another prelate, Archdeacon
Josephus Jasiński, on the grounds that he had not improved the house
already in his possession. Jasiński stated his intention to appeal the deci-
sion. At this point the vacant house on Bernardine Street was asked for
by the royal physician, Canon Petrus of Poznań. The group of applicants
was soon joined by the custodian, Prelate Joannes Makowiecki, who of-
fered to invest one hundred schocks of Lithuanian groats in the building
and pay an ‘entry fee’ of thirty Polish złotys. This proposition suggests,
inter alia, that after twenty-three years in the possession of Canon Bar-
tolomeus, the fabric of the house needed serious attention. The remaining
clergymen in the Chapter house, considering these propositions, taking
into account the current needs of the Chapter, including the shabby state
of the garments in the sacristry, proposed that Petrus of Poznań reach an
understanding with Joannes Makowiecki. At this Canon Petrus protested
that the Chapter’s decision was unjust and even indecent, testifying to the
venality of the corporation, and so he would not yield, and insisted on
his right to request the house. Finally the Chapter resolved to postpone
the decision.
58
The Chapter reprised the question of the house left by Bartolomeus of
Kowno on 11 March. Petrus of Poznań and Joannes Makowiecki were
joined as candidates by the cathedral preacher, Canon Isaiah. According
to the principle of seniority, priority belonged to Canon Petrus. How-
ever, it was decided to resolve the question by a majority vote. Bishop
and Prelate Joannes Domanowski voted for Makowiecki, who for his
part promised to air the ecclesiastical wardrobe frequently (whatever
that might have meant). In addition, Domanowski argued that Canon

36 W. Pawlikowska
Petrus had already received a prestimonial estate. In his view, two prop-
erties should not be allocated to the same person during a single option.
Canon Joannes Wirbkowski initially resigned from participation in the
option on behalf of Archdeacon Jasiński, but in the end he voted for
Makowiecki. Canon Stanislaus Narkuski, citing the capitular statutes
and a royal privilege establishing that during options on houses a prel-
ate should not be preferred to a canon, voted for Petrus of Poznań.
He also expressed his surprise that before the uniting of the prelatical
and canonical properties had taken place, prelates were seeking canoni-
cal houses. Nevertheless Canon Albertus Grabowski voted to grant
the house to Prelate Makowiecki. In turn Canon Petrus Arciechowski
proposed that the clergymen reach an agreement between themselves.
Because of the different opinions, the decision was postponed until the
following Friday.
59
On 18 March Petrus of Poznań declared that if he
received the house, he would invest a hundred schocks of Lithuanian
groats in it. This made a difference, but now he and Makowiecki had
three votes each and the community was still divided by opinion. Fi-
nally, the house once occupied by Bartolomeus of Kowno went to the
royal medic, Canon Petrus of Poznań. The latter factor clearly weighed
more than his birth as a burgher. The wooden house thus vacated by
Petrus was immediately sought by Canon Isaiah, who said he wished to
live closer to the cathedral church.
60
The ceremonial entry of the new
possessor of the house on Bernardine Street took place on 21 March.
Arciechowski inducted him on behalf of Procurator Wirbkowski. How-
ever, despite the provision of statute number 25,
61
the obligatory visita-
tion and compilation of an inventory were not carried out.
62
However, Petrus of Poznań did not intend to reside long in the house he
had taken over from the late Bartolomeus of Kowno. On 17 May 1560
the canons commenced the option on the houses vacated by Canon Al-
bertus Narbutt († 23 March
63
/ 24 March 1560)
64
and Archdeacon Jo-
sephus Jasiński († 14 April 1560).
65
The house in which Narbutt had
resided was requested by Arciechowski, who in exchange offered to in-
vest a hundred schocks of Lithuanian groats in the necessary repairs and
refurbishment. This was accepted by all the clergymen participating in
the session, except for the royal medic Petrus of Poznań who laid down
the condition that if in future the king should wish that one of his court-
iers should live in a capitular house allocated by option, then the Chapter
should agree. Arciechowski did not wish to accept this condition and so
announced he would appeal to the bishop of Vilna. The option contin-
ued.
66
This house—formerly Narbutt’s—was then requested by Petrus of
Poznań, accepting the condition rejected by Arciechowski, that is, the
condition which he had proposed himself. He obtained this property. At
the same time he resigned his rights to the house on Bernardine Street.
This house, formerly occupied by Bartolomeus of Kowno, was now

A History of One House 37
awarded to Prelate Joannes Makowiecki (a noble, bearing the Dołęga
coat of arms).
67
He voluntarily promised to carry out repairs costing one
hundred shocks of Lithuanian groats.
68
Makowiecki kept his word. This is attested by the entry in the ca-
pitular acts for 22 May 1562. It also illuminates the system of values
held by the early modern clergy. In exchange for the investments he had
made, Custodian Makowiecki requested that the income generated by
this house be used to establish an anniversarius, that is, a liturgy on the
anniversary of his death, for the sake of his soul. The Chapter liked the
idea, and it then decided that in future each prelate or canon taking pos-
session of a house should make a payment of six schocks of Lithuanian
groats. Of this sum, two schocks would go towards an eternal anniver-
sarius for the soul of Bartolomeus of Kowno, whereas four—for the soul
of Custodian Makowiecki.
69
A few months later—on 6 November 1562—Makowiecki took pos-
session of yet another house on Bernardine Street, one that was next
to the house of Canon Alexander de Pessenti. In exchange for an ad-
ditional wooden house he promised to pay an annual rent of seven
schocks of Lithuanian groats, payable at Martinmas that is on 11 No-
vember. The last inhabitant of this wooden house had been a burgher,
subject of course to capitular jurisdiction—the barber Iwanek.
70
Iwanek
had acquired the right to reside in this house—for the same annual rent
of seven schocks of Lithuanian groats—as recently as 10 July 1562.
He had also been obliged to carry out the necessary repairs.
71
Soon af-
terwards, on 25 August, he moved in.
72
The previous resident, Marcin
Polikowski, had been removed from the house because of far-reaching
neglect. He had also sub-let the property to third persons.
73
By 4 Febru-
ary 1563, this additional wooden house—acquired by Makowiecki—
was in such poor condition that it was apparently impossible to live
in. For this reason Makowiecki asked for yet another house in which
Iwanek the barber had once lived. He received this further house for
twelve years in exchange for the same annual rent of seven schocks of
Lithuanian groats, also payable at Martinmas. In return for maintain-
ing the house in good order and carrying out the necessary repairs, he
was granted the Chapter’s consent to live in the property, to rent out
rooms, sell goods and distil liquor. After the end of the lease the house
would return to the Chapter.
74
The question of the residences of Prelate Makowiecki was again raised
at the session of 25 May 1563. The clergymen present listened to the
claims of the custodian regarding the house in which Iwanek the barber
had lived. According to the entry, Iwanek had paid an annual rent of just
five schocks of Lithuanian groats. The custodian proposed that the Chap-
ter should guarantee him a lifetime rent of seven schocks per annum.
The Chapter, given the small number of houses at its disposal, and that

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XXIX.
Before I went to Italy I could not write; after I had crossed the
Simplon I could: the wonders I saw wholly revolutionized my soul.
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learned that she was the true stylist, and that she was not
inimitable.
I lingered at Florence and made acquaintance with many there—
native, English, and foreign. Among these were Trelawny and
Landor, whose names still continue remarkable. Of the last I saw
little; he was preparing to drive himself to England in his gig. He had
greatly offended the Government of Tuscany by the freedom of his
speech, and he became intolerable. This resulted in his being served
with an order to quit the country. When matters came to so serious
a pass, he was taken by surprise. He called on the Grand Duke to
remonstrate; he told that amiable prince that it was an honour to
the country to have such a man as himself residing in it; on which
subject the Grand Duke agreed with him, and the edict of expulsion
was withdrawn.
He, too, was one of the artificial stylists.
People went little abroad in those days for want of travelling
accommodation, and the English generally in Florence, were not of a
kind to make a favourable impression; many of them were ill-
disciplined in principle, and had become dregs who reached the

bottom, though there were many who were quite as respectable at
home as a thousand miles off, and were absent on business only,
economy, or pleasure. Colonel Burdett, a friendly and agreeable
man, heir to the prince of Radicals, Sir Francis, was a traveller on his
way to Rome, and invited me to accompany him; but I desired to be
stationary for a time, that I might acquire the lingua Toscana, which
I was learning under the Abbé Caselli.
Landor was not a nice man; he was violent in his conversation: he
thought it worth saying that his ancestors were statesmen when
Lord Mulgrave’s were working in a ditch, forgetting that his
descendants in the course of things might be working in a ditch
while Lord Mulgrave’s were statesmen.
Then there was Dr. Bankhead, who was the newsman of the
fashionable past in all instances where slander mostly fitted in.
There was a divorced, re-married countess who, as the wife of a rich
parson, was a leader, but whose story he ripped open for the delight
of all comers, at the same time the nearer he might venture to
England himself the worse he would have fared.
The relief in acquiring such companions is that one never expects
to meet them again.
I am probably the only one living who was acquainted with
Trelawny in his younger days. It was during my first residence in
Florence in the years 1831-32. He was of a strong, noble build, of
quiet, gentlemanly demeanour, and of a manner of conversation free
from all display. He was much courted by the English residents. His
adventures, his marriage with the maid whose father’s life, the Greek
chief Ulysses, he had defended and saved, his connection with
Byron, his cremation and burial of Shelley, were in every mouth, and
he is undoubtedly one of the celebrities of our time. His likeness was
taken by Kirkup, an English artist who lived and died at Florence,
and who was the discoverer of Dante’s portrait, now universally
known.

I knew Kirkup well. He was a pleasant companion in those early
days, over sixty years ago; he afterwards became entangled in the
superstitions of spiritualism, all through lack of that physiological
training which should be given to all, and but few enjoy. These
shocking errors of the mind, to which not even the cattle are liable,
appear to gratify their slaves for a time; but they have no ultimate
value, only encouraging the clear-sighted to look down on their
fellow-creatures.
It is only due to the memory of Trelawny as a hero to record here
that the English women, married or single, old or young, were
crazed as Juliets about him, at the same time that they were
gushing over with stories of his cruelty to his lovely wife, whose hair,
trailing on the floor of Ulysses’ cave, he was said to have stripped off
to the roots in a moment of anger.
There was a good anatomical school at Florence, of which I did
not fail to profit.
On this my first visit to Florence I got to know many new things—
the meaning of the fine arts, the beauties of Michael Angelo, Cellini,
and Bruneleschi; the mysteries of Dante, Boccacio, Petrarch, Alfieri,
Ariosto, Tasso; so I returned richer than I went. But of all the
persons I remember, Madame Catalani is foremost in my memory;
she is never to be forgotten. And till I returned to the city again, I
lived within sight of the Palazzo Vicchio, the Duomo, and the
Campanile.
Lord and Lady Holland occupied the British Ministry at Florence.
Among other English families resident there were Lord Burghersh;
Lord Mulgrave, a great musician; Sir Henry Floyd, Lady Peel’s
brother; Dr. Bankhead; Kirkup, the artist; the Perrys, the Losacks,
and several others with and without handles to their names; Mr.
Hare among them, still guessing at Truth. Among natives was the
incomparable Catalani. The English, or most of them there, were
awaiting events, making pleasant homes, until future prospects
came closer and within reach.

At Sir Henry and Lady Floyd’s I met with Colonel Burdett, the
brother of our best lady, the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, whose
estimable acquaintance I made more than half a century later.
The Marquis Spinelli was very fond of the English and a great
favourite with them, acting as a medium between our countrymen
and his own.
What an experience and toning a young man gets from a
residence of this sort, in a favourite foreign city, at an age when his
sap is rising, and has yet to burst out and congeal into full leafage!
I am not going to describe Florence; my love of it will come out
better when I visit it again.
All was new to me then! Imagine only what it is for such sweet
little cities as Piacenza, Parma, and Modena to be new; imagine
Milan to be seen for the first time, after architectureless Brighton!
I remained at Florence, a voluntary seeker after knowledge, a
great part of 1831 and 1832. I then went into Switzerland by way of
Milan, Como, Lugano, Bellinzona, Zug, Zurich, Schaffhausen; made
acquaintance with Strasburg, Stutgard, and several other German
cities, not omitting the Rhenish and other German towns, ultimately
reaching Brussels and home.
Before long I was at Brighton again on a visit to the widow
Wallinger, my faithful and generous aunt.

XXX.
I once was spoken to by a king; I had great anticipations. When I
saw him, I found, to my astonishment, that he was only a man. I
had to go on a knee and show my affection for him, which I did not
feel, by kissing his hand, which was large and flabby. This gentleman
was named William; there had only been three of that name before
him.
The next day I saw a queen; her name was Adelaide. This lady
bowed to me, smiled at me.
This introduction did not lead to any intimacy, as may be
supposed, but it entitled me to the acquaintance of our ambassadors
abroad, and to the entrée at foreign courts.
On the evening of the Drawing-Room, my friend Mr. Nussey took
me to dine with Sir William Martens, at St. James’s Palace. He
belonged to the Court, and on the subject of royalty was emotional.
The conversation turned on the ladies at the Drawing-Room. I
spoke of a daughter of Lord Stewart de Rothsay as the one great
object of admiration. He went into raptures over the name, and
congratulated me on having seen the most beautiful woman of the
day.
This lady married the Marquis of Waterford, and is the mother of
our naval hero, Lord Charles Beresford.
An old friend of mine, Madame Gandillot, whom I knew at the late
Lady Ripon’s, was brought up by Sir Herbert, the Privy Purse, and
Lady Taylor. I heard from her many amusing anecdotes of the king
and queen, one of which I may relate. Sir Andrew Buchanan had
just returned to England, and was at Brighton, where the Court was
staying. It was suggested by Queen Adelaide to dress Sir Andrew as
a Turk, and to inform the king that the Turkish ambassador, whom

he expected, but did not then know, desired an audience of him.
This, by the assistance of the Taylors, was fully carried out, and Sir
Andrew, fully disguised, was introduced by Sir Herbert; the queen,
Lady Taylor, and my friend being the only persons present.
The king received the supposed ambassador graciously, but looked
puzzled; he received his message in due form, but still had a puzzled
look, as if, as was surmised, the face of the envoy was not new to
him. So the interview passed off, to the great amusement of the
queen, followed by no remark from the king either then or after.

XXXI.
Again at Brighton. I may here say, the delight of myself and
brother to this day is the recollection of Mrs. Wallinger, our aunt,
long gone, and of the eccentricity of her mental powers, increasing
as time went on.
I have spoken of her often in an earlier page, but her sayings
were really droll enough to be put on record. I often make the new
generation laugh by repeating them.
When she had done anything that gave her a triumph, she would
say to one of us, “Did I not, my dear, show my great good sense?
Am I not always right?” Of course we assented with a smile of
mental reservation.
As she grew old and less capable, and ceased to feed her friends,
she dropped into a more melancholy mood, and, looking upwards
with her fine large eyes, and a sigh, would say, “What a world it is,
isn’t it, my dear? Here we are, my dear, all alone, one with another.”
She did everything in her power for her relations with kindness of
heart and ample means, but it only made her feel that she was
everybody’s victim, so all her good deeds made her sorrowful.
She reached to a very advanced age, when her decay of memory
showed itself in a curious manner; she would forget, in part, the
very subject she was dwelling upon. Thus, when the sad story of Sir
Thomas Troubridge was made public, that he lost both arms and
legs in the Crimea; that the lady he was engaged to marry before
the war did not shrink from her pledge on his return, she was
greatly impressed by the circumstance, and would say, “If it had
been me, my dear, I could not have married him. I know it would
have been very dishonourable of me, but I should have said, ‘Sir, I

can’t!’ Only think, my dear, how dreadful it would have been, he in
so helpless a condition, not able even to wash his own hands!”
Some in this mental state will in speaking forget even their last
word, when it has served as a clue to the one that comes next.
Thus, such a person repeating Lord Lytton’s earlier names, Sir
Edward Lytton Bulwer Lytton, would never stop, because after Lytton
he is necessitated to say Bulwer, after Bulwer, Lytton, after Lytton,
Bulwer again, and so on for ever.
When the memory begins to fade, the ghost of a word sought still
haunts the mind, and by dwelling on it for some time, the substance
will return to the shadow, and the word again lives. The memory
must be far gone to encounter total obliteration—threads to every
subject long remain; but the difficulty, then the impossibility of
finding and taking up the thread at last follows. The lady of whom I
have spoken, the kindly aunt, was brought up at Exeter. I once
asked her if she remembered Northern-hay. Her reply was, she had
never heard the name. I spoke of other places, beginning with St.
Bartholomew’s. We lived there, she said, after we left Bowhill House,
and we used to walk up Fore Street to St. Sidwell’s, and then across
Northern-hay Hill.
I have mentioned how in her better days this generous, kind-
hearted lady felt herself the victim of her family, spontaneous as was
her interest in all that concerned them. My mother, while we were at
Brighton, had a fall on the stairs, which produced a severe
dislocation of the hip-joint. I hastened to Mrs. Wallinger’s house to
acquaint her with the distressful news. She evidently took in all at a
glance, with the weeks of kindness she would be compelled to
bestow on the sufferer, and her first remark, accompanied with a
sigh and upturned, pathetic eyes, was, “Is it not very hard on me,
my dear? To think of my family!”
I must not omit a very frequent saying of this lady. Her house was
a model of cleanliness, and to that virtue she would allude with
pride. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” she would say; “for what
else is there, my dear?”

I cannot resist noting another favourite exclamation of hers,
always uttered when any event, serious and unexpected, transpired.
On such occasions, she would look piously upwards, and say, “Does
it not show how true everything is, my dear?” just as if the whole of
the holy Scriptures had suddenly flashed across her mind.

XXXII.
In my earlier days I was intimately acquainted with the Earl of
Elgin, whose name is co-immortal with the marbles of ancient
Greece. It shows what an amiable man he was to have taken so
much notice as he did of a young man so insignificant as myself, and
to have introduced me on equal terms to his wife and family.
How fortunate is London to contain the Elgin Marbles and the
Raphael Cartoons, which, exclusive of the Venus of Milo, and the
Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci, are of greater worth than all the
other sculptures and paintings in Europe.
I knew Lord Elgin in London and Paris; it was when his great
diplomatic career was ended. He was a patient sufferer from facial
neuralgia, and was under the treatment of Hahnneman. He was
unable to speak, for the motion of his lips left a new paroxysm of
pain. So he wrote what he would have said, and on one occasion he
placed the words on paper that violent as his suffering was it was
due no longer to the disease, but to the medicine that was
administered. A remedy in homœopathic hands is thought to occupy
the disease, and by slightly exaggerating it to effect its cure.
Lord Elgin would have liked to see me one of Hahnneman’s party;
he introduced me to the physician. I saw some of the practice, but
always left in exactly the same state of mind as I went.
I sometimes joined the family party at dinner in Paris, so I knew
Lady Elgin and her two daughters who were then single. I think the
eldest was called Lady Charlotte, the youngest was Lady Augusta,
who became the wife of Dean Stanley.
The manner and ways of this family were of the simplest; there
was not the slightest show of rank in anything they did or said.

Afterwards, in London, the earl brought his son, Mr. Frederick
Bruce, to see me, and this visit afforded me a pleasant recollection;
for Mr. Bruce, Sir Frederick afterwards, became a distinguished
public servant, and, when ambassador in China, took a keen interest
in Charles Gordon, and assisted him in every manner in his power.
He was tall of stature, and a much finer looking man than his
eminent eldest brother.
Lady Matilda Bruce, afterwards Maxwell, through her marriage,
was the eldest daughter of Lord Elgin by his first wife, and was the
heiress of her mother’s large fortune. I did not meet her, but she
showed me kindness through a common friend, and when I visited
Canada she gave me a cordial introduction to her brother who was
Governor-General of that colony at the time.
There was a drama published by me in 1839, called the
“Piromides,” which many members of this noble family took a
pleasure in reading. It was my first serious work, and was inscribed
to the Earl of Elgin, the late ambassador at the court of the Sultan.

XXXIII.
As our latter end comes about, we reason on and take stock of
our friendships, chiefly those of our youth. Our statistics,
accumulating with time, enable us to grasp the subject in its fulness.
People are apt to call their acquaintances their friends because it
sounds more important, but this is a mistake; if I am known to have
been on intimate terms with a man for twenty or thirty years and I
speak of him as an old acquaintance, I have at least the satisfaction
of telling the truth.
A community of interests may last a lifetime, and it may be as
strong as that of the banks, which would argue efficiency. Such is
the friendship of circumstance, but should the conditions change it
would vanish.
It seems to be a moral law of our species that new friends,
however gratefully they accept one’s services, so long as they are
needed, have a disposition to drop off when they can no longer
profit by them. Such friendships are like a fever which runs its
course; a fever sometimes affecting a whole family, and then not
leaving a symptom behind.
Nevertheless, a good acquaintance is a very pleasant thing, even
though its benefits on both sides may balance and explain each
other.
There are some who practice friendship quite naturally, others
who are only skilled in it as a game. It would prove amusing to make
a good classification of one’s friends, as is done of the animal
kingdom, by dividing them into warm-blooded, (hæmatotherma) and
cold-blooded friends (hæmatocrya). We are all too fond of forming
friendships. I have often observed that nothing is more fatiguing
than what is generally called a night’s rest, unless it be the dream

and its final result, that we have made friends! Dreams are as
laborious and realistic as realities; the nervous powers are put
through walks and conversings with strangers, as well as
acquaintances, some dead long ago. One has introductions,
dialogues as with the living; but what is so amusing and ludicrous,
many dream that they have made new friends, to find it was in their
sleep!
Regarding friendship, how often it is only theoretic; intimacy
without intercourse; instead of active only passive sympathy, the
philosophical equivalent of cement, such as isinglass or glue! When
friends have a common interest, how they stick to each other! There
is still another kind of friendship of an agueish type, which one
might call intermittent. It has some foundation in a community of
nature, but is unable to sustain itself continuously, showing itself in
fits. It is the most aggravating of all social alliances, and would be
better extinct.
At Brighton I enjoyed the inestimable friendship of Sir David Scott,
a leading magistrate there, of very high social rank—in fact, the
most important personage of the place at a time when it needed
men of influence to direct it towards its present unrivalled position.
As a young man, Sir David Scott succeeded to the baronetcy of Sir
James Sibbald, of Sillwood Park, and he bore the addition of K.H.G.,
an order that was extinguished with the severance of Hanover from
our ruling sovereigns, on the accession of Victoria. This order, the
use of which has been very much replaced by that of the Bath, was
conferred on Sir David by George the Fourth, whose life he probably
saved by having a madman arrested at Brighton, who was provided
with pistols to shoot the king. Sir David, a true gentleman without
being a courtier, and therefore at home in all that related to good
breeding, once gave me an amusing account of his interview with
the “first gentleman in Europe,” telling with much gusto an anecdote
of the king’s studied elegance even in taking a pinch of snuff. “I
perceive, Sir David,” he said, “that you take snuff; allow me to offer
you a pinch from my box.” This Sir David took, shaking his thumb

and finger over the box, as one ordinarily does, not to waste any of
the precious powder on withdrawing the hand.
This was the king’s opportunity of showing himself more advanced
in gentility than his subject. He said, “Now, Sir David, permit me to
try a pinch from your box.” The baronet drew forth his box and
presented it to the king, who, having secured his pinch, withdrew his
thumb and finger with careful rapidity, evidently lest any particles
that had been touched should fall back into the box, and so render
the remainder unfit for use.
Sir David gave me an amusing account of how the official who
received him at court and introduced him to the king’s presence
became the great man that he was. It was Sir William Knighton, who
had accompanied the Marquis of Wellesley as his physician to Spain.
It was said that Dr. Knighton would never draw his salary, which he
evidently did not wish to be paid in money. So at the conclusion of
his service the marquis sent him to the king with important
documents, which exactly suited him for the exercise of his
effrontery and self-assurance. The gentleman-in-waiting, having an
appreciative and loyal mind, said, “You will be very much surprised
when you come to see the king.” Dr. Knighton replied, “He will be
very much surprised when he comes to see me!”
So it turned out. The king was very much struck with the
physician’s manner and aptitude for affairs, and before long made
him his “Privy Purse.”
At a time when the now proud town of Brighton was only half
built, Sir David purchased the estate of an Oriental Company on the
west cliff, facing the sea. A building that was already erected on it
before the project failed, he converted into a mansion, which he
called Sillwood House: this he occupied himself, with his family. On
the ground in front were built two elegant streets, called Sillwood
and Oriental Places. Later, on a portion of the ground, he erected for
himself a villa with an entrance on the Western Road, and laid out a
charming garden and shrubbery there, where he lived for many
years, making his home the resort of a fashionable and cultured

circle. He was often spoken of as the “King of Brighton,” and he
certainly exercised great influence there as a Conservative leader. At
the same time, he supported every charity in the place, and
materially assisted the Rev. H. M. Wagner, the then all-powerful
vicar, in planting the town with churches.
Sir David Scott had a pension given him by the Government for
saving the king’s life; this the Liberal Parliament, on coming into
power, withdrew—sorry, perhaps, that such a life had been saved.

XXXIV.
A very remarkable character who used to visit Brighton was the
Countess de Montalembert, mother of the nobleman of that name
who made himself known in France. She was the daughter and
heiress of Mr. Forbes, whose “Oriental Memoirs” were much
esteemed in his time. This lady had friends among all sorts of
people. While chuckling over scandalous and not decent letters from
Lady Aldeburgh, she would be receiving the visits of such
uncontaminated beings as Lady Mary Pelham, and conferring with
her on religion. In her invitations to me she would one day say, “I
want you this evening to come and meet the religious set:” this
would be such men as the Robert Andersons. Another time it would
be the worldly set that she was to receive and I was to meet; and
this was certainly the most pleasant set of the two.
She had great naïveté, and was full of fun, trenching often on
those sources of humour which are forbidden to delicate minds. Her
literary occupation at the time when I saw most of her (in 1837) was
in writing a “Life of King David”—a work that she completed with
great self-gratulation, and which, at her death, her executors burned
without estimating its worth, the quicker to dispose of her numerous
papers.
Her husband was a baron at Louis Philippe’s court, and received
the higher title from that temporary king. His wife, being a
Protestant, was not admissible at court—a difficulty which she
readily overcame by crossing over the way to the Catholic faith; and
this she quitted when it was no longer for her interest to remain in
it.
She had two sons. She cared only for the elder one. He lived in
Paris, and at her death inherited her fortune. She died of a quinsy at

her house in Curzon Street, about a year after the time when I saw
most of her.
She was sprinkled and crossed, at baptism, by the name of Rose,
which name may have suited her well in her bloomy days, for late in
life she had a pleasing face, full of lively expression, with a fine
portly figure. She was fond of sketching herself seated on a music-
stool, which she called a Rose sitting on a Thorn.
In the death of friends whom one sees from first to last,
witnessing their gradual rise and fall simultaneously with our own,
there is nothing striking; but how different the effect on our minds
when we lose sight of them in their prime, and reflect that their
sturdy figures, seeming to be still unobnoxious to change, lie
prostrate in their graves! We recall them, and see them still in full
activity; they appear to have only gone away! So was it with the
kindest of men, my best of friends, Sir David Scott, whose name and
goodness deserve a better monument. So it was with Mr. Wagner,
whose quick limbs and upright pleasant face appear to be moving
through the streets of Brighton at this hour! I see him now rapidly
turning the corner of Castle Square into the Old Steyne! Then comes
back into view the rapid step of Horace Smith, another celebrity of
the place, with a pun almost out of his mouth before we were within
hearing of each other! They all seem still alive!
Wagner walked through the streets as if they were his own,
reviewing the people as he passed as a general would an army, now
stopping, speaking, laughing, now pushing on again. He had been
tutor in the Duke of Wellington’s family. The wonder is that, with his
firmness of purpose and successful handling of men, he did not
reach a bishopric up to that of Canterbury itself. He might have led
even the House of Lords by the nose. But Brighton was to him an
episcopal see. He enjoyed the patronage of nearly all the livings
there, with the monopoly of marriages, births, and deaths; building
church after church himself out of his own large resources and the
pockets of willing or unwilling friends.

There was an abomination of doctors at Brighton in those days,
potent firms, chiefly on the Steyne; but the class is soon forgotten,
since they leave nothing behind them but their patients and their
shops.
Among apothecaries, Newnham was prince. One saw him walking
across the Steyne, then red-bricked for foot-passengers only, he
wagging his head with a look of triumph, and in gaiter attire; his
face nearly six feet above his shoes, with an expression on it of the
miracles that may be achieved by salted senna alone, not to mention
the openings artificially made in veins with the mere thumb and
finger. But Newnham was a friendly, knowing character. I think often
of the advice he tendered me as a young physician, “Never dine with
a patient. Such has been my rule through life; for if you do, sooner
or later you are sure to let out the fool!”
I must not omit the name, in these brief memorials, of my
cultured friend, George Hall, a physician and still more than that, a
gentleman. As travelling Redcliffe Fellow, he spent ten years in
visiting Greek and Italian and Turkish cities, and the chief courts of
Europe. He was too refined for a Brighton physician; few of his
patients were to his taste. When summoned to those who suited him
best, he passed hours with them instead of sharing his time fairly
among all. He had some noble blood in him, according to rumour;
but it was of a sinister strain. This held possession of him secretly,
and influenced his life; but he found consolation in marrying Lady
Hood, a peeress of very considerable fortune, and in retiring from
the vulgarity of physic.
The pun sacrifices the sense and purport to the playful analogy. In
the practice of this Horace Smith expended the conversational
portions of his life. I told him, at one of Mrs. Smith’s evening
receptions, that a man known to us had injured a limb while
travelling in Norway. His reply was, “I suppose a bear came and
Gnaw’wayed his arm.” His daughter, Miss Smith then, and I believe
so for life, was a quick and clever match for her father in drawing
him out. She had an open, good-tempered face, with the eyes well

apart, to which her nose, following suit, owed a flatness. Most
auditors must have observed that all whom Nature has favoured
with a lying-down nose were let fall by their nurse when babies in
arms. Thackeray was one of these. One would have thought they
would have fallen on their backs; but no, they all fall on their noses.
The only authority for punning that I know of is Aristotle; he
recommends it to a pleader. Horace Smith’s puns are yet
remembered; the one on elder-flower water was his best.
The evening receptions at Brighton were pleasant pastimes,
especially those of Lady Carhampton and the Hon. Mrs. Mostyn,
daughter of Mr. Thrale, of Johnsonian memory. This lady, in Sillwood
or Oriental Place, near the Horace Smiths, had a suite of receiving-
rooms winding all round the mansion, hung with pictures. In one
room was a couch enclosed by a silken canopy within a recess,
above which was gilded in large letters, “Mon Reéoë.”

XXXV.
Any one who has enjoyed the help of an acute mind in life must
have concluded that the human creature was not designed to be
very intellectual. It has great faculties, but these can do little more
than provide munificently for its wants. It solves with facility all the
problems of luxury and amusement, but can for the most part no
further go. Nevertheless, there are a few of an intellectual caste,
living apart from the vulgar and ostentatious; these force their
thoughts on unwilling recipients, and in what they produce give
intimations of a higher race than that of man being still possible,
though scarcely to be expected to spring from the few, since the
grovellers have so immense a majority.
The clergy of Brighton were adapted more to the wants of the
congregations than to those of religion. One likes the clergy. They
have a good education up to the age of one or two and twenty, and
their profession is gentlemanly. If they renewed their knowledge of
science from time to time, they would not interpolate nature with
dogma, the effect of which is more damaging than they can
conceive. To the eye clarified by impartial thought, it is like a pimple
on the face of a pretty girl; but it will run its little course.
While at Brighton I first knew Count Pepoli, the head of an
illustrious Bolognese family. He was the author of some pleasant
works, and wrote the opera of “I Puritani” for his friend Bellini, the
composer who furnished the music. He was banished from his
country, and had his estates put under forfeiture by Pius IX., whose
utmost science could do no better than proclaim the dogma of an
immaculate conception, and announce himself infallible, as
occupying upon earth the rotten throne of an Almighty. Yet this
gentleman, by the aid of his superstitious adherents, was able to
expel the best families from Bologna, for not wishing to retain him in

his place of civil chief—put into that place by those supernatural
chemists, the cardinals, who, by mumbling cabalistic words over a
drink of wine, could turn it into blood, and, by showing the whites of
their eyes, could metamorphose a mouthful of dry bread into the
flesh of Christ. They mean well, they administer to existing wants;
but the drinking and the eating of these would be cannibalism of the
worst description, and this they have not the imagination to
perceive.
Pepoli reached England a poor man, though the owner of many
palaces and lands. He supported himself by becoming, almost at
once, Professor of the Italian Language, Literature, and Antiquities
at the University of London, in Gower Street; and he retained this
post for some twenty years. When the pope was shown the shortest
cut out of Rome, Pepoli rushed back to Bologna, and got hold of his
magnificent palaces once more, and recovered his lordly position.
Some twenty years after this, when I last visited Italy, on my way
to Rome I stopped at Bologna, and inquired of my landlord,
Pellagrini, the way to the Palazzo Pepoli, which I accordingly sought
and found. It was a massive, ancient structure, and on inquiring of
the janitor if the count was at home, was informed that his
kinswoman, the Countess Maria Pepoli, lived there; and I was
directed to his residence, which was a large building occupying one
side of an open Place, and which seemed only to need a sentinel to
complete its pretensions to being a royal palace.
Unfortunately for me, the count was at his country seat.
This nobleman, while in London, married a Scotch lady. My old
friend, Mr. Plattnaur, kept up a constant correspondence with the
count, informing him of all that happened to his English friends.
Plattnaur was very intimate with Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle. The lady once
asked when he would join them at dinner. He replied, “If you please,
to-morrow.” “Yes,” she answered, “do come to-morrow: it will be the
first day of the chicken.”

I have not spoken of Sir Matthew Tierney, a physician of Irish
extraction, a good-looking plausible man, always equal to the
occasion, whatever might fall in his way. He had the look of a
baronet when once you knew he was one—a title that he won easily,
by a stroke of worldly wisdom. When George No. 4 was a Brighton
man, reposing under that Chinese umbrella, the Pavilion, he was
surrounded by physicians, one of whom, Dr. Bankhead, I was
intimately acquainted with in Italy during 1831 and 1832. Bankhead
was a powerful-looking Scotchman, with a large red face and hair to
match, living abroad for reasons, and practising among the English
residents at Florence, by whom he was much liked and courted, and
as little respected as many of them were respected by themselves.
But all liked his anecdotes of life high and low, more especially so
did the men after dinner, when the ladies had left the table.
He told me that he used to meet the king’s physicians every
morning before visiting the royal patient, and that he and the others
invariably passed away an hour in inventing scandalous stories about
the aristocracy, calculated to give amusement and pleasure to their
patient. He had been Lord Londonderry’s physician; with him he had
lived in town and country, and so had become acquainted with the
noblest in the land, and with all their foibles.
Bankhead knew the history of Tierney’s rise to the summit, which
had a very humble beginning. The king, always self-indulgent, was
of course always ill. At that time his favourite groom, who was
suffering under circumstances similar to those of his master, and
could get no attention from the medical men of the palace,
consulted Tierney. That astute physician saw his chance, and giving
the groom as much care as he would have bestowed on royalty
itself, effected a cure, which, commending itself to the king, led to
Tierney being summoned, and to his advice being followed with
marked advantage.
Sir Matthew kept up a handsome house at Brighton, on the Grand
Parade, where he resided in the season, living in London during the

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