The 1786 estate settlement of Stanisław Rakowski, a castle court official of Radom

Stanisław Rakowski (d. post-1786), was one of the many anonymous representatives of the Polish judicature of the 18th c. Politically uninvolved, he spent a few decades in Radom, where he worked and lived as a member of the town’s elite (he never owned any land). In 1785 he transmitted his several-thousand property, gathered over the years, to his children: a son (rev. Ignacy) and two daughters (married to noblemen from lawyers families). The document, being an effect of the agreement between Rakowski’s successors, is the object of the present study. The estate settlement, preserved in the 19th-century mortgage book, belongs to the sparse descriptive sources on the pre-partition Radom and the material culture of its elite, as the basic sources on the Old-Polish Sandomierz Voivodeship had been destroyed during WWII. Above all, the act is a valuable relic of the Old-Polish law, presenting the manner of dividing property among the landless nobility (impossessionati): a problem slightly examined in Polish historiography.