Shybalyn: a boundary dispute in 1448, 27 years before its “first mention”

The entry, as printed

Generosi dom. Stanislaus actor et Petrus Romanowsky tercia die post duas septimanas intrando ieiunium exequitare habent inter bona Poszochow, Cuthori et Sibalin sub vadio decem marcarum et quilibet ex sua parte locare habet homines ad concordandum pro limitibus et ibi habent fieri dom. Ichnathco Iudex et Stiborius Subiudex.

In English

The noble lord Stanisław, the plaintiff, and Piotr Romanowski are to ride out, on the third day after the first two weeks of Lent, to the estates of Posuchów, Kutory and Sibalin, under a pledge of ten marks; each of them is to bring his own people to settle the boundaries, and the lord Ihnatko, judge, and Stybor, deputy judge, are to be there.

A village that entered history through a quarrel

Documents almost never record the founding of a medieval village. Nobody wrote down the year the first farmer cleared a field above a stream and built a house. A village reached paper when people began to argue over it, borrow against it or divide it in an inheritance. Shybalyn near Berezhany is exactly such a case: the first trace of it we can show is a boundary dispute.

Reference books count the village's history from 1475, Ukrainian Wikipedia from 1457, and English Wikipedia, without any source, from 1451. The land court of Halych wrote down Shybalyn's name in December 1448.

A court that rode out into the fields

After 1434, when the Galician lands came under Polish law, the affairs of the nobility of the Halych land went before the land court: a judge, a deputy judge and a clerk, who met in Halych several times a year for sessions known as “terms”. The clerk entered every ruling, in Latin, into the land book. Everything the nobility wanted fixed in public went into it: debts, sales, dowries, divisions of estates, and endless disputes over boundaries.

In the 15th century a boundary between estates lived not on a map but in memory: in mounds of heaped earth, in marked trees, in the word of old people who remembered where the line had run “from of old”. When neighbours could not agree, the court set a day, and both sides rode out to the spot with the judges, each bringing his own people.

Monday, 9 December 1448

That day the court in Halych dealt with small business: someone's absence through illness, a meadow sold, a surety for a debt. Among it the clerk entered a short ruling. Lord Stanisław, the plaintiff, and Piotr Romanowski were to ride out, on the third day after the first two weeks of Lent, which means at the end of winter or the start of spring 1449, to the boundary “between the estates of Posuchów, Kutory and Sibalin”. Each was to bring his own people to settle the dispute, and the judge Ihnatko and deputy judge Stybor were to be there. Whoever failed to appear would forfeit ten marks.

So by 1448 Shybalyn already had an owner and boundaries, and those boundaries were valuable enough for the court to make the journey. The clerk spelled the name “Sibalin”, almost as it is pronounced today.

How we know it is this Shybalyn

The first thing to check in a record like this is whether it means a namesake. The Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland knows only one Szybalin in Galicia: in Berezhany district, 5 km east of the town. Its southern neighbour is Posukhiv, and in the record of 1448 Posukhiv stands beside Shybalyn on the same boundary.

The second thread is the Romanowski family. On 7 June 1454, in the castle court of Lviv, an attorney for Mikołaj Romanowski, cupbearer of Lviv, sued Andrzej of Zhovtantsi over several peasants. Among them was “Maszecz Denisz of Shybalyn”. It is the earliest name of an inhabitant of Shybalyn we have found: not a lord, but a peasant the lords were quarrelling over.

Where 1475 and 1457 come from

In 1475 the Lviv court fined whole villages for unpaid hearth tax, a tax counted per “smoke”, that is, per house. In the list of villages fined, “Andrzej Romanowski” and “Shybalyn” once again stand side by side. Very likely this is the entry the compilers of reference books once found, and it has been repeated as the first mention ever since.

Where Polish websites took 1457 from we could not establish: nobody gives a source. But both dates are later than the ruling of 1448, which can be shown on the page of the edition.

What we still do not know

Where Kutory, the third estate on the disputed boundary, lay we have not yet been able to establish. It may be an old name for a part of the fields or a hamlet that has dropped off the maps. Someone who knows the old field names around Shybalyn and Posukhiv may know more about it than the documents do.

In the tax register of 1515 neighbouring Posukhiv is recorded with five łany of land, but Shybalyn does not appear in the text available to us. For the following decades the books we have read are silent. The search goes on.

Sources

• Akta grodzkie i ziemskie, vol. XII (Lwów, 1887), p. 185, no. 2128 (9.12.1448).
• Akta grodzkie i ziemskie, vol. XIV (Lwów, 1889), p. 413, no. 3129 (7.06.1454).
• Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego, vol. XII (Warsaw, 1892), “Szybalin”.

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