Własność ziemska w powiecie sandomierskim w roku 1629

Tax registers of the 16th and 17th century are very useful when doing research on the structure of land ownership in the Polish Republic. One of them is tax register of the county of Sandomierz from 1629. It was published in 1989 but it has not been much used by historians so far. Studies conducted by the Author of the research allow to conclude that in terms of a division of land ownership in the county of Sandomierz between the king, the church and the nobility (respectively 16,98%; 31,58% and 51,44% of all taxable farmland together with 20,36%; 32,11% and 47,53% of the total amount of tax paid), the results differ quite much from calculations made for the whole voivodeship of Sandomierz where at the end of the 16th century Crown lands accounted for 11%, estates of the church amounted to nearly 16% and noble properties accounted for 73% of all real estates in the analyzed voivodeship. There is also an important difference when we compare results achieved for Sandomierz county and the neighbor county of Pilzno, where division of land ownership between the king, the church and the nobility looks as follows – 17,86%, 9,39% and 72,75% of all taxable farmland together with 17,09%, 11,80% and 71,11% of the total amount of tax paid. The described registry also confirms common belief that in the first half of the 17th century land was concentrated in hands of large landowners. Ten of the richest landowners representing only 4,04% of all owners (there were 248 of them) gathered in their hands estates which accounted for 20,75% of all taxable farmland and for which the sum of the tax paid amounted to 25,66% of all fiscal charges of the county. Even more impressive are the analogous calculations for the noble property. The wealthiest landowners concentrated in their hands 40,35% taxed farmland and paid to the treasury 53,98% of the tax due to these estates. One should also draw attention to the fact that real estates in the county of Sandomierz were owned by so powerful magnates as Zasławski, Lubomirski, Tęczyński, Leszczyński, Ligęza, Tarło and Ossoliński families. Among the wealthiest landowners of the county of Sandomierz one can also find representatives of old senatorial families such as Oleśnicki, Tarnowski, Sienieński and Firlej. However, most of them spent their time in properties situated outside the very county. We get even more spectacular results while taking into account real estates burdened with tax higher than 100 zlotys. It appears that 20 landowners representing 8,06% of the whole surveyed population possessed a total of over 28% of all land in the county and paid tax which constituted almost 32% of all revenues to the treasury of the Polish Republic. However, if we take into account estates staying in hands of the nobility only (thus excluding the royal estates and church ones), the results are even more striking. The most powerful landowners owned more than 55% of all taxable noble farmland and they paid almost 67% of the tax owed by the nobility in the county. The meaning of these numbers is unambiguous and may serve as a summary of our earlier presentation of the problem.