Horodnytsia near Skalat: 1519, and with it the lost village of Solkivtsi

The entry, as printed

Mtas Regia consensit Venceslao de Baworow villas Hrodnycza, Solkowcze et Soroczko districtus Trambovliensis de manibus Nicolai Solkowsky et Ioannis Calynsky Annaeque relictae Ioannis Soroczky, redimere cum conservatione eius in possessione earum ad vitam.

In English

His Royal Majesty has consented that Wacław of Baworów may redeem the villages of Horodnytsia, Solkivtsi and Sorotske in Terebovlia district from the hands of Mikołaj Sołkowski, Jan Kaliński and Anna, widow of Jan Sorocki, and keep them in his possession for life.

Three dates for one village

The sources disagree about when Horodnytsia first appears in the documents. Wikipedia gives 1784, without a reference. The regional encyclopedia gives 1559. Polish armorials know that in 1549 Florian Baworowski received in fief “Horodnica, Szołkowce and Serocko in Terebovlia district”.

Even the earliest of these dates is thirty years later than the entry kept by the royal chancery: 12 October 1519.

A royal village in pledge

Some villages in old Poland belonged not to nobles but to the Crown. The king was always short of money and service, so he pledged such villages: a nobleman lent the treasury money and, until it was repaid, took the village's income. To take a village from one holder, someone else had to pay him the sum of the pledge, to “redeem” the village, and that needed the king's consent.

That is the consent the chancery entered into the Crown Register on the Wednesday before St Hedwig's Day, 1519. The king allowed Wacław of Baworów to redeem the villages of Horodnytsia, Solkivtsi and Sorotske in Terebovlia district from Mikołaj Sołkowski, Jan Kaliński and Anna, widow of Jan Sorocki, and to hold them for life.

What this short entry tells us

More than it seems. Horodnytsia in 1519 was not a new settlement but a royal village that had already been in pledge to local nobles. Those nobles are named after villages: Mikołaj Sołkowski is “of Solkivtsi”, Jan Sorocki “of Sorotske”. So all three villages already had their people and their own minor gentry. When they were founded the document does not say, but it was earlier.

And one more thing: here the Baworowskis appear for the first time, the family that would hold Horodnytsia for more than three centuries, into the 19th.

How we know it is our Horodnytsia

There are several places called Horodnytsia in Galicia, and even the 1564 tax register of Terebovlia district has two. But ours stands there in the same pair as in 1519, next to Sorotske. Horodnytsia then had thirteen peasant households, a priest, three cottagers and two craftsmen; Sorotske had ten households and a priest as well. Two villages with churches, neighbours in 1519 and in 1564.

The Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland places this Horodnytsia 4.5 km east of Skalat and names its owner as Count Wacław Baworowski. The same family as in 1519.

Solkivtsi: a village that left only a site

The third village in the entry, Solkivtsi, is not on any modern map. Yet in 1519 it was a real village with its own gentry. In the 1564 register Horodnytsia and Sorotske are there, and Solkivtsi is already gone. What happened in between, the documents do not say.

The name, though, did not vanish from the papers. In 1766 the nobility of the Halych land instructed its envoys to the Diet to protect the Baworowski heirs, “who have long held by hereditary right the estate of Horodnica and the siedliszcze in Sułkowce”. A siedliszcze is the site where a settlement once stood: the farmsteads were gone, but the land, its bounds and its name remained. The editor of these acts in 1935 looked for Solkivtsi far away in Podolia, on the Snyvoda river, but every document we know places it beside Horodnytsia near Skalat.

Why Wikipedia says 1784

Redeeming a royal pledge in 1519 had long consequences: for two hundred and fifty years it was disputed whose land this was, the king's or the Baworowskis'. In 1768 a royal court ruled that “the estates of Horodnica and Sołkowce” were Crown property, and the regional nobility told its envoys to press for them to be left to the heirs of Wacław Baworowski. According to the regional encyclopedia, in 1781 the village appears in a deed on ownership of a former royal estate, and in 1783 Józef Baworowski buys it.

So 1784 on Wikipedia is not the beginning of Horodnytsia's history but the end of a dispute that began in 1519 at the latest. Where exactly Solkivtsi stood is still unknown. The answer may survive in the names of fields and tracts around Horodnytsia, and the people who remember them may know more than the documents do.

Sources

• Matricularum Regni Poloniae summaria, part IV, vol. 1 (1507–1548), ed. T. Wierzbowski (Warsaw, 1910), p. 178, no. 3087 (12.10.1519; Crown Register, book 34, fol. 155).
• A. Jabłonowski, Źródła dziejowe, vol. XVIII, part 1 (Warsaw, 1902), p. 100: the 1564 register of Terebovlia district.
• Akta grodzkie i ziemskie, vol. XXV (Lwów, 1935), p. 627, no. 331 (1766) and p. 657, no. 346 (1768).
• Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego, vol. III (Warsaw, 1882), p. 140, entry “Horodnica”.

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