| Abstrakt: |
The legal articles of the town of Vyšší Brod include and sanction many sectors of public life in the urban community, ranging from public order to safety and hygiene through the honest sale of weighed and measured products, basic food hygiene, fire protection, road and land use, neighborhood relations, wood use, water management, school attendance, spas, and forest and grazing economy up to piousness and the celebration of feasts and the level of negotiations held before the city office. The inventory of these articles undoubtedly draws on earlier drafts of the law of South Germany which was spread to the Rožmberk dominion first from the residential town of Český Krumlov and then at the beginning of the 17th century f rom residential Třeboň. The beginnings of these rules evidently go back to the colonization of the 13th century, and we will probably never know why they took so long to be revised in writing. Nonetheless, it is a remarkable and specific reception of urban law in the micro-historic conditions of a market town that had two degrees of subservience: in the first instance in the ecclesiastical authority (the monastery of Vyšší Brod), and in the second instance the secular nobility (the Rožmberks, who were also the nobility of the monastery), in Český Krumlov and briefly also in Třeboň (for about 9 years). The town of Vyšší Brod lacks municipal books from this particular period. The various denominations of currencies that are sometimes found in the articles could testify to the acceptance of some articles from foreign city rights, most likely from the Austro-Bavarian region. Some articles also definitely respond to specific conditions in the Vyšší Brod region or to cases that had already been dealt with in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
