Litigants’ Attorneys-at-Law at the Land Courts of Upytė District in the Early Seventeenth Century

Abstract

The article discusses litigants’ attorneys-at-law in the court books of Upytė district in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, whose names are found in the six surviving manuscript court books of that district. Since one book of that period contains only notarial records [1], the focus is on the records in five court books of Upytė district: records of one book of the castle court [2] and four books of the land court [3–6]. The size of the books varies greatly, from 22 [3] to 1353 pages. They contain 2278 records (not counting the aforementioned notary court book of the castle), of which 590 are judicial. The research covered approximately two first decades of the seventeenth century, from 1600 to 1622. Due to poor condition, two land court books from that period (1616–1618) were not available for the research. The extant court books do not cover all years as there are chronological gaps, but material from both castle and land court books cover the period of 1611–1613.
The litigants used to litigate through verbally authorised persons (if they arrived with the litigants) or persons authorised in writing (in the absence of the litigants). During this period, there were several dozen such permanent litigants’ attorneys-at-law in Upytė, but about twenty of them were constantly working in the courts at the same time, very rarely more. About eight to ten persons worked most intensively as attorneys-at-law, others appeared in the court books episodically, worked for a short time, or were from other regions of the state.
Unlike in Samogitia, both the residents of the neighbouring territories (Kaunas, Ukmergė, Trakai districts, Samogitia) and representatives of more distant districts – Lyda, Vilnius, Ašmena used to be litigants’ attorneys-at-law at the courts of Upytė district (see: Lituanistica, 2023, 69/4, 298).
All groups of landlords, from magnates to minor nobility, had attorneys-at-law. Merchants, the clergy, and townspeople often used their services as well, usually of the same persons as in ‘purely’ noble disputes. The interests of subjects were represented by their lord or his servant, who also had attorneys. Larger nobles or magnates had ‘staff’ attorneys who represented them. Jews and Karaites could litigate in these courts by summoning the same attorneys-at-law as the nobility, although such cases were rare.
The most active litigants’ attorneys-at-law represented a dozen cases in one session. It happened that the same pairs of attorneys defended different clients in several cases on the same day. The intensity of the work of the litigants’ representatives suggests that they must have had assistants who were supposed to help navigate the multitude of cases, but the lack of sources does not allow us to prove this statement so far.