Polish Law

(Elbląg Book), a Polish law code compiled in the late 13th or early 14th century on the territory occupied by the Teutonic Knights. A manuscript containing the code was discovered in Elbląg in 1868. The code includes provisions of the common law and legal decisions (29 articles). Some of these provisions had originated much earlier and, as noted in the text itself, were no longer applied at the time of compilation. The articles of the Polish Law deal with agrarian relations and differences in the legal status of various strata of the population, and they interpret questions of liability, family, and inheritance law and legal procedure.