Kepurės statymo paprotys: teisinės kultūros aspektas Lietuvos Didžiojoje Kunigaikštystėje XVI amžiuje

ENReferring to the numerous 15th-16th century sources (mostly acts from the Lithuanian Metrica), in this article the author seeks to learn about the custom of placing a hat that was characteristic of competitive court processes, used to express the claimants’ wager, changes in its form and content, and its relationship to the very dynamically adopted norms of the modern ius scriptum, the Statute of Lithuania, among the nobility in the mid-16th century. The placing of a hat in the legal process was a turning-point when, having identified the object of debate, the court would proceed to the presentation of evidence. A hat was usually placed when witnesses were gathered to prove one’s justice. However, it appears wagers were made by submitting documents, although already in pre-Statute times, written documents were given priority in the heirarchy of types of evidence. In historiography, the custom of placing a hat is related to the institution of a pledge or bail (vadium), i.e., the gesture alone of placing a hat constituted as a pledge. Most discussions arise over the actual existence of the pledge in “the hat” during the period of the First Statute of Lithuania, as legal acts made less and less mention of such pledges. That is why historians researching this topic have guessed that an actual pledge was typical only during the period when the custom was just being entrenched. When the Statute was passed, only a symbolic gesture remained. However, court acts show that in the 1530s-1560s court litigants often placed not just moneyed wagers, but sometimes even “from the neck”, that is, they pledged their life. It is thought that the “neck” term in these cases, as in the Statute, should be understood as a legal death, i.e., the losing party relinquishes their freedom to the winner temporarily.Although there are statements in historiography that the First Statute of Lithuania did not regulate this kind of court of wagers or the placing of the hat, it has been noticed that Article 6 of Chapter 6 has legitimised the outcome of a lost wager, called the “skipped punishment” (vina prometnaja, like a suspended sentence), whose size depended on the sum of the wager, usually being paid to the judge by the losing party. Sources testify that on the eve of the passing of the Second Statute of Lithuania, court clients placed wagers, identifying their pledges, even in the rulers’ court. The popularity of the custom of placing one’s hat even at the highest social layers also reveals some paradoxes encountered when modernising laws. Perhaps the best witnesses of these changes were the hat-placing judges (when they became litigants) and even procurators. The geography of these sources also allows denying the opinion that the hat-placing custom was widespread in the territory of present-day Belarus, and “unknown in Lithuania propria sources”. It can be said that in the first half of the 16th century, when the content of a specific wager would experience “pressure” from modern rational pieces of evidence, it would change considerably, and the hat-placing gesture became an inherent part of the entire GDL’s legal system. It was not included in the First Statute because it had become outdated, but because it was, albeit an archaic, way of presenting evidence, but not a type of evidence in itself. [From the publication]