The British in Poland in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

In the territory of the seventeenth-century Commonwealth of Two Nations (the name of the Polish State after Poland's Union with Lithuania in 1569) there lived diverse national minorities. They included the English and the Scots, and to a lesser degree the Irish. The English were generally identified with the Scots, and thus called Scots accordingly. In the Polish Commonwealth in the seventeenth century the British were the second largest national minority, exceeded only by the Germans. Among the newcomers from England there were merchants and artisans, soldiers, religious and political emigrants, professors of academies, of Jesuit colleges and of Protestant schools, students and pupils of various schools, diplomats and travellers, as well as poets and itinerant actors.As early as at the beginning of the seventeenth century the Scots had their organizational structure in Poland, which is attested by the testimonies of a Scottish trader Tamson (Thomson) given to the city authorities of Cracow in 1603. They were written down in the municipal records and then confirmed by other Scots and also Poles. On the basis of this testimony and the entries in Lublin's municipal records we can presume that the Scots in Poland in the seventeenth century had their own autonomy. They were subordinated to their own leader; in towns they formed merchant and artisan brotherhoods as well as religious ones. There were over twelve brotherhoods, which were governed by the elected elders. The Scots governed themselves on the basis of written laws, the law books being kept where they lived. They held their own trials, for which the appeal court was the Scottish Court of Appeal in Torun, which heard appeals on Epiphany day. The Scots were obligated to pay taxes for lay and religious brotherhoods. Disobedience was punished with fines or even with expulsion from the Scottish community.1 The records of the city of Lublin for 1605 also contain the information that for three years in this city the elders and the young held meetings, sixty men strong, in the Kramarczyk house.2 From Lublin's Protestant community the record book of a Scottish brotherhood survived, which was written first in English, then in English and Latin, and then finally in Polish. This bears witness to the Polonization of the members of that community.The influx of the British into Poland had been taking place for a long time. As early as the fourteenth century British merchants arrived in Gdansk, Pomerania, where they formed a separate community.3 In 1404 in Prussia a free association to support trade was established, called the Prussian Company. It was approved by a privilege issued by Henry IV. A few years later in Gdansk there was a separate English house with apartments, exchange offices, and storage facilities.4When the Merchant Adventurers organized the second expedition to Muscovy across the White Sea, they received from Queen Mary and her husband Philip a letter to the tsar dated 1 April 1555, written in three languages: Greek, Polish, and Italian. The fact that the letter was also issued in Polish allows one to draw at least two conclusions: that there was someone in England at the time who knew that Polish could be understood in Moscow, and also someone in London who knew Polish. That the Polish language at that time helped the English communicate with Muscovy is also attested by the correspondence of the first agent of the English company in Moscow, George Killingwroth, who reported from Moscow that one could correspond with the tsar's secretary, Ivan Mikhailovich Viskovaty 'in Polish, Deutsch, Latin or Italian'.5Immigration of the British into Polish territory became intensified in the latter half of the sixteenth century, following religious persecution of the Catholics, and later of the opponents of the Anglican Church. At that time Poland was a country that respected religious tolerance. Under the Act of Warsaw Confederation of 1573 all newly elected kings had to obey its provisions stipulating that the King would not persecute anyone for their religious convictions. …