320 Chapter XIII
the drafting of the new law.^18 Rights for burghers were to be burgher rights, and to
depend on affiliation with a particular town, but modern principles of the state
were admitted in one way, in that all burghers were to enjoy the same rights. A
burgher moving from one recognized town to another was to possess the same
rights in the new town as in the old. No town could refuse the burgher right to any
qualified person who applied for it. Even this much, as readers of this book will
perceive, would appear “revolutionary” in Nuremberg or Geneva. The towns lost
some of the old privileges and autonomies of medieval type. Lvov, for example, lost
the old staple right which had required all goods passing through the city to be
stopped and resold for the benefit of Lvov merchants.
It was only to Royal Cities that the Statute of April 18 applied, cities, that is,
which held or might receive charters from the King. Populated centers having “the
form of a city,” if on royal lands, would receive charters on request. Populated cen-
ters on lands belonging to nobles, if inhabited by freemen or by peasants that the
lord was willing to free, might be set up as cities by the lord if he so wished, and
upon petition by the lord to the King they might receive a royal charter.
Every resident of such a town, if a freeman (not a serf ), and a Christian (not a
Jew), was to have himself enrolled as a burgher in the Burgher Book. Nobles might
enroll as burghers if they wished; those owning property or doing business in a
town were required to enroll, and to come under burgher law, without prejudice to
their noble status. Towns were to enjoy local self- government, and all property-
owning burghers were to elect, and be eligible to, the town offices. Burghers were
allowed to buy and enjoy full property rights in “noble” land, that is, rural estates.
They received access to public office, to higher appointments in the church, and to
commissions in the army, except the cavalry. To them was granted the historic
right of the nobles, neminem captivabimus nisi prius victus; that is, the King would
not imprison them unless they were first convicted in a court of law.
A compromise was reached on burgher representation in the diet. Twenty- one
towns were to send representatives, but since the opinion prevailed that only no-
bles sent by the provincial diets could be “deputies,” the town representatives were
called “plenipotentiaries,” as if the spokesmen of a somewhat alien power. These
town delegates were to sit on the tax and police commissions of the diet. They
could not be refused the right to speak, but could cast a vote only on commercial
matters or other matters affecting the cities. The idea persisted that burghers were
unsuited to affairs of state, and a law subsequent to May 3 prescribed that cabinet
ministers must be men of inherited noble rank.
It was made easy, however, for burghers to be promoted to the nobility. This
provision, among all constitutions of the period, was peculiar to the constitution of
18 Lesnodorski, Dzielo, 156. Lesnodorski contrasts the petition of the towns and the projects
drafted by Kollontay and Ignace Potocky with the final enactments of the diet. He believes that the
diet made the burgher rights purposely complicated in order to befuddle the issue and grant less in
reality than in appearance; and he quotes a remark of Ignace Potocky to the King, that it was necessary
to “flatter” peasants and burghers, but that it would later be possible “gradually to remove all that
which is excessive.” See p. 155. He attributes, however, the disinclination to grant rights to burghers,
or more executive power to the King, not so much to the magnates as to the agrarian republicanism,
with corresponding patriotic and literary traditions, of the gentry as a whole. Here again I am in-
debted to Mr. Michalski.