Acts of the Tribunal of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (in the second half of the 18th century)

This paper will examine acts of the Tribunal of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania issued throughout the second half of the 18th century. Although there is considerable literature on the Chancellery of the Lithuanian Tribunal, the Court documents have not been adequately investigated. A growing body of research has studied the work of the nobility and court chancelleries which operated on the territory of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland, as well as the legal documents they issued. This calls for analogical study in respect of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This paper seeks to address the functioning of the Tribunal of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as well as to specify the types of acts it issued and to describe the records contained therein. The study was conducted by determining and analysing the contents of the Tribunal archives. The findings were also compared with existing literature regarding the acts of the Crown Tribunal. The results of the study offer evidence of the variety of documents used in the Lithuanian Tribunal in the second half of the 18th century. It is only the decrees, testimonies, and entries into court records of legal acts that were prepared as fair copies, usually stored together in a single archive. The courts used sub-series of draft acts and sentences separately and had auxiliary registries of court cases, whereas daily proceedings were recorded in a special book called the current protocol (protokół potoczny). An implication of these findings is the possibility that assigning the tribunal judges with running the court chancellery did not affect the work of the chancellery thanks to a clear division of labour among the regents. The documents issued by the Court Chancellery in the period examined were influenced by the long traditions and the judicial reforms introduced in 1764 and subsequent years