Sprawy sejmowe i dorobek prawodawczy „tempore Conventi Generalia Torunensis A.D. 1576” w świetle Metryki Koronnej

Polish-Lithuanian Seym of 1576 convened at Toruń was the first ordinary parliament under the reign of the second freely elected Polish king, Stephen Bathory (1576–1586). According to the opinion of legal historians this Seym was ineffective since no parliament-adopted statute (in the old-Polish terminology referred to as the constitution) was issued during its stormy debates. This was due to fact that at that time there appeared a serious divergence between what the monarch (who was preoccupied with the civil war between the Crown and the city of Gdańsk) expected from this Parliament and the Polish-Lithuanian gentry that tended toward fundamental constitutional reforms. In my opinion, this Parliament, functioning under the pressure of necessity, went as far as adopting two enactments of the end of November 1576, referred to as the ordinances. One of them dealt with the duty of the towns to accommodate the royal officers. The other one limited itself to appointing special deputies of both houses of the Seym, and equipping them with the task of collecting and administering a socalled defense tax. In the volumes of Metrica Regni Poloniae, numbered 113–115, there were also registered a plenty of privileges issued for towns and some social groups at that period. There were also contained in them some documents illustrative of parliamentary debates. The content of the discussed volumes sheds a new light on the efficiency of Conventus Generalis Torunensis A.D. 1576