268 ANARCHIA
the Roses, as described in the Paston Letters, when lesser people lived in fear,
and only the barons were safe. Among scores of cases which Lozinski examined
are those of Marian Zielinski of Rotow, who complained in 1628 that he had
been attacked by the royal Starosta with a hired force of seventy Tartar bow-
men; of Walerian Montelupi, the banker's son, who in 1610 returned to the
scene of an attempted kidnap, and hung his would-be kidnapper from the
gatepost of his own estate; of Mikolaj Ossolinski, Starosta of Nowy Targ, a
notorious tyrant and libertine, who fought one war with the Korniakt family for
the recapture of his first wife, and another with the Staroleskis for the honour
of his second; and of Haras Witoszyriski, an Orthodox monk, who in 1639 was
killed in a vain attempt to prevent the wholesale enserfment of his illiterate rel-
atives by a local landowner.^21
The procedures of law-enforcement were extremely haphazard. The royal
courts employed only one permanent official for this purpose, the wozny or
'usher', whose duties were to serve writs and to give notices of sentence. But he
had no means of bringing unwilling defendants to court, or of executing the sen-
tence of the court on fugitive convicts. Although the murder of an usher was one
of the few offences in the Republic punishable with death, he made no attempt
to coerce refractory noblemen. In many localities, there were condemned crimi-
nal noblemen living quite openly on their estates in complete disregard of the
courts. Lozinski quotes the case of one Samuel Lasch, a 'pious man', who had
been condemned in his absence no less than two hundred times with no effect
whatsoever. Of the four punishments to which offenders could be sentenced—
decapitation, imprisonment, banishment, and infamy—the death sentence was
rare, except in the cities. Nobles would fight rather than submit to judgement on
a capital charge, preferring to slash their way out of trouble or to die resisting.
Imprisonment in fundo, that is, in a closed dungeon with no windows and no
comforts, was added in 1588 to the customary fine for the murder of a nobleman.
Banishment was common, especially if the convicted man had refused to appear
in court. In the event that he returned to the country within the term of his sen-
tence, he could be seized and executed on the spot by anyone who cared to do so.
Infamy or 'civil death' was the commonest of all. It deprived the nobleman of his
good name and political rights. Yet for the battling nobility of the provinces,
who had no good name to lose, it was meaningless. When sentence had been
passed, as often as not the offender could not be brought to justice by the court,
and the wronged party in the case would set out to execute the sentence in per-
son. In 1660, for example, John Sobieski, the future King, was assigned the
Crown lands of Belz in lease. On trying to take possession, he found that the
widow of the late Starosta of Belz was still in residence, and was refusing to
leave. After both Sobieski and the widow had obtained writs in support of their
various claims, Sobieski tired of litigation. He descended on the house with 300
hussars, put the widow on the roadside, and marched in. In extreme cases, when
public security was at stake, the Starosta or Palatine could call out the motus
nobilitate, or 'posse' of the nobility of the district or palatinate. In 1655, all the