Original scientific paper
A Castle and an Estate Boundary. The Castle of Guščerovec and Boundary Demarcations between Vrbovec and Gradec
Ranko Pavleš
; Koprivnica, Croatia
Abstract
In this article we deal with two different subjects connected with the Križevci area in the Middle Ages. In the first part we analyse a document of an estate division from the year of 1476 with a description of an estate division after the death of ban Damjan of Litva. A part of divided goods refers to the Guščerovec estate with a detailed description of the castle, which is very rare in documents in northwestern Croatia from the Middle Ages, as well as to the villages belonging to the castle of Guščerovec. From the castle description one can see that there once existed a central building (perhaps made of bricks) with a great hall, a couple of rooms and other chambers connected to it, and a cellar. Apart from this building inside the castle, there were also other buildings such as the granary and the bakery. A part of farm buildings, and perhaps residential buildings as well, was embedded in the earth dam. Besides the dam, a tower above the front entrance of the castle, as a defensive structure, is also mentioned. It is possible that a ditch around the dam once existed, or perhaps another dam. The villages which were the subjects of estate division were situated around the very castle (Guščerovec, Bočkovec, Orehovec), northern under Kalnik (Presečno), southern from Guščerovec (Beketinec), and on the area of todayʼs Sveti Ivan Žabno (Kopina, Žabnica).
The second subject of this article is the small nobility and the name formula that it used at the end of the Middle Ages. As an example we took a document from the year of 1514 about the demarcation of estate boundaries between the manor of Rakovica and Dubrava province of the Zagreb bishop, at which many noblemen from the area of Križevci and Vrbovec participated, but also a couple of them from remoter areas. In this document we enumerated 68 noblemen, of which even 48 of them possess a last name. It is interesting that as many as 21 have their last name ending in –ić. It can be concluded that at the end of the Middle Ages a name formula ʻname+last name+estate attributeʼ is predominant in official usage, in contrast to earlier periods when this formula read ʻname+patronymic+estate attribute.ʼ This second example of name giving among the nobility is, for instance, predominant in a 1457 document, in which among 70 noblemen only 12 have a last name. A comparison with tax lists of the same period (1495-1520) points out to somewhat different results in reference to the name formula, which is possibly a consequence of a completely different kind of document. We also made a comparison of serf lists, on which a majority of serfs already in the first half of the 15th century have a last name, and at the beginning of the 16th century almost all have. This paper is only an attempt at prompting the experts to open the subject of the name formula in Slavonia of the Middle Ages.
Keywords
the castle of Guščerovec; nobility; name formula; the Middle Ages; Križevci area
Hrčak ID:
135389
URI
Publication date:
29.12.2014.
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