Noble estates and their owners in the Orłów county in the second half of the 18th century

Abstract

The Orłów county, being one of the smallest in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was a part of the Łęczyca voivodship. The towns, villages and other real estate in this county belonged exclusively to the nobility and to the Catholic Church. The contemporary historians investigating the ownership of these properties in the 16th and 17th centuries unambiguously determined that the accumulation of properties and creation of large estates made up of a dozen or more villages did not occur in the said county. The owners of noble estates were not too wealthy, neither in the country nor in the voivodship. The situation did not change in the next century, as confirmed by the study into the records of the chimney tax in 1775 and the head tax in 1790, which covered the entire Łęczyca voivodship. At the time, the most affluent was the voivode of Łęczyca, Szymon Dzierzbicki, being in possession of the town of Bielawa and eight villages, as well as the voivode of Vitebsk, Józef Sołłohub, the owner of Żychlin, six full villages and a part. In 1790, the largest property, including six villages, belonged to the general of the Russian army, Jan Sołłohub. It confirms that no noble estate that would be composed of over ten towns existed in the Orłów county. The area was dominated by small estates, consisting of one or two villages, or their parts, which mainly belonged to the less affluent nobility. In some cases, a village was owned by two or three noblemen, but sometimes even by thirteen. Over the next 15 years, the situation has not changed significantly since the process of property consolidation did not take place. The group of landowners did not grow smaller, and the analysis of the number of chimneys in the villages of the Orłów county in 1790 indicated that a considerable part of the Orłów nobility was working the land and was also tax exempt for having small estate.