Skarga ubogiego szlachcica na niesprawiedliwość świata tego - źródło do historii mentalności czasów saskich

Abstract

The article is devoted to a 18th-century confession-complaint, which was written down by Franciszek Husarzewski, a poor nobleman from Podlasie, a lieutenant of infantry of king August II. It is difficult to establish why in 1753 Franciszek, on four little pages, described the unhappy turns of his life; was it for the record for his descendants, or was complaining about his fate to a higher authority. He enumerates the events of his life in a few points, starting with the marriage with Marianna Szczygielska, as badly-off as himself, and taking over of a small and, as it turned out, ruined manor Szczygły, his wife’s dowry. Not much is known about Franciszek. He was probably bom at the tum of the 1680s and 1690s, in the family of a minor nobleman from Podlasie. In his youth Franciszek was a soldier, a lieutenant of the royal infantry, but most of his life he was trying his luck at the courts of more wealthy noblemen. On the 28th of February, 1713 Franciszek married young Marianna Szczygielska, daughter of Konstancja Szczygielska and Tomasz Szczygielski; her mother was a daughter of a court official of Podlasie. Marianna and Franciszek led a life full of hardship, worries, and conflicts with the neighbours, in the times of the Northern War. The analyzed text displays not only the tragic figure of Franciszek Husarzewski, struggling with poverty and dishonest neighbours all of his life, but also the sad reality of the Saxon rule in Poland. Poverty of minor noblemen, especially in such regions as Podlasie, who owned small manors, usually indebted and ruined by the war, forced them to try other ways of making a living; it was usually military or court service, in the armies of aristocrats or as officials in gentry’s estates.