Aristocratic Enclaves as a Foreign Legal Element in Urban Space

Abstract

Disciplination of the population in the medieval and early modern city may have been complicated by the presence of an alien element, which in the bourgeois environment was the nobility. In many cases, the nobility was able to acquire town houses and sometimes even managed to have them exempted from the jurisdiction of the municipal authorities and registered in the land tables. Be that as it may, these houses constituted legal enclaves of their kind. The study examines the legal conditions of these enclaves against the background of the legal developments in the Kingdom of Bohemia and Margraviate of Moravia in the fourteenth–seventeenth centuries and tries both to summarize the existing knowledge and to draw attention to some better though lesser-known sources that document this issue.