(^180) SZLACHTA
from the district. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, his lawyers argued
that the men of Sielun did not belong to the noble estate and prevented them
from appealing to the royal courts. In the space of several years, this galloping
cleric, who rode to hounds while the people prayed in church, had established a
parochial despotism which lasted for two centuries. In 1598, his successor, the
Revd. Jedrzej Opalinski, son of the Grand Marshal of the Crown, assumed the
title of 'Prince of Sielun', and required the local nobles to pay a 'tithe', assessed
at the peasant rate of 1 zl. per wloka. For zoo years, the phrase 'szlachcic
sielunski' (a nobleman of Sielun), became a term of derision, known throughout
the Republic. Yet from 1750 onwards, litigation proceeded apace. In 1760, at the
district court of Rozana, 215 persons from Sielun obtained a decision in
confirmation of their nobility, only to find it referred to the Crown Tribunal
(whose President, as it happened, was Bishop Stanislaw Miasecki, Vicar of
Plock!). In 1767, the case went to the Sejm, in 1776 to the Tribunal once again,
in 1791 back to the Sejm, and then to the King. Finally, on 29 November 1791 a
Commission of Inquiry annulled all servitudes exacted from the nobility of
Sielun. Yet the victors had only four years to enjoy their success. In 1795, at the
Third Partition, Sielun was assigned to the Prussian Treasury; in 1807-13, to
Marshal Ney; and in 1815 to Russia - by which time, all those litigants who set
out to prove their noble rights in 1760, were almost certainly dead. So too was
the noble Republic whose benefits they had striven so long to enjoy.^22
Given the great variety of economic interests within the noble estate, it might be
expected that they had few attitudes in common. But this was not so.
Throughout the duration of the Republic, the outlook of the Nobility displayed
remarkable solidarity, especially on the three cardinal issues of noble status, of
equality, and of the 'natural life'.
The nobleman's belief in the exclusive quality of his own estate led to prac-
tices which nowadays could only be described as an expression of Racism.
Although the myth of blue blood was widespread in Europe, it usually referred
to a tiny elite. In the Republic, it referred to perhaps ten per cent of the popu-
lation, and had to be defended on a much wider front. All the specious argu-
ments of history and religion which were later to be used by nationalist
movements to differentiate the development of their own people, culture, and
lands from that of 'foreigners', were used in an earlier period to strengthen the
identification of the noble estate against the rest of society. Despite the contin-
ual process of ennoblement, whereby burghers, peasants, Jews, and foreigners,
were added to their ranks, the szlachta continued to pretend that they were
biologically unique. There was no strong feeling about bastardy, intermarriage
or miscegenation as such - only that the children of irregular unions should
not have a claim to nobility. As Walerian Nekanda Trepka, writing in the
1620s put it:
c. jardin
(C. Jardin)
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