Jasionka in 1446: peasants who paid in honey

The entry, as printed

…dempta silva, que iacet inter silvam, que spectant ad civitatem Rzesszow et inter silvam Regalem Brathcowske et Mrowka et eciam demptis medonibus, quos solvunt kmethones de Iaszenka, quia isti kmethones solvunt propriis dominis ac si mellificia haberent in propriis silvis.

In English

…except the forest that lies between the forest belonging to the town of Rzeszów and the royal forest of Bratkowice and the Mrowla, and also except the honey that the peasants of Jasionka pay, because these peasants pay their own lords as if they had hives in their own forests.

A village without a date

The Polish Wikipedia article on Jasionka gives no date from the village’s early history. Nor did we find one on the website of Gmina Trzebownisko.

Yet Jasionka is in the Przemyśl court books of the mid-15th century. The land of Przemyśl then reached right up to Rzeszów, and for the area around Przeworsk and Rzeszów the court held its sessions in Przeworsk.

Three brothers named Jan

In the 1440s Jasionka belonged to three brothers from Staromieście, an old settlement by Rzeszów that is now part of the city. All three were called Jan, and the clerk wrote them down just like that: “Iohannes, Iohannes et Iohannes”. They were grandsons of Jan, Archbishop of Lwów, who died in 1436.

On 1 December 1446, at the session in Przeworsk, the brothers sold Staromieście to the nobleman Jan Jakszan of Żelazna for 1,700 marks, with its church, inns, mills, hives, ponds and a third of the forests. Two things they kept out of the sale.

Honey from someone else’s hives

The first was the forest between the town forest of Rzeszów and the royal forests of Bratkowice and the Mrowla. The second was “the honey that the peasants of Jasionka pay”. The clerk explained why the brothers kept it: these peasants paid their lords “as if they had hives in their own forests”.

In the Middle Ages honey came mostly from tree hives, hollows of wild bees in forest trees. The peasants of Jasionka went to hives in a forest that was about to pass to a new owner. But they paid their honey tribute to the old lords, and that tribute was to stay with the brothers. That is how we read the entry; nothing more can be drawn from it.

How we know it is this Jasionka

Three months later, on 2 March 1447, one of the brothers settled his wife Helena’s dowry on half of five villages: “Palikówka, Łąka, Trzebownisko, Jasionka and Zaczernie”. These five villages still lie side by side today, in the gminas of Trzebownisko and Krasne. There is no other Jasionka in such company.

Half a century later, in 1493–1494, the same group, Trzebownisko, Zaczernie, Łąka, Palikówka and Jasionka in the district of Przeworsk, belonged to Jan of Pilica, Palatine of Ruthenia.

What we do not know yet

We have not seen the first volume of the “History of Rzeszów” (Dzieje Rzeszowa, 1994). Its authors may have known these entries. If so, this is not a find unknown to scholarship, but a date that has reached neither Wikipedia nor the gmina’s own history.

Nor do we know how old the village itself is. The 1446 entry speaks of peasants who had long been paying their tribute. So Jasionka existed earlier, but by how much the books do not say.

Sources

• Akta grodzkie i ziemskie, vol. XIII (Lwów, 1888), p. 220, no. 3058 (1 December 1446).
• Ibid., p. 248, no. 3462 (2 March 1447).
• Akta grodzkie i ziemskie, vol. XIX (Lwów, 1906), nos. 509 and 529 (1493–1494).

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