of their independent judicial authority even after their incorporation in the town of Cracow.
The Supreme Court at Magdeburg was originally appointed as Court of Appeal; about the middle of the fourteenth century, Casimir the Great instituted a Supreme Court in the Castle of Cracow and ordained this to be appealed to in cases of controversy.
The last instance, however, for verdicts of the Superior Court as constituted by German law, was the Court of Commission for Little Poland, called the "Court of the Six Cities," which likewise resided in the Castle of Cracow. Whenever, then, anybody wished to make an appeal from a verdict of the Superior Court of German law, the king sent his affair to that Court, which consisted of twelve aldermen, two from each of the six towns of Cracow, Sandec, Kazimierz, Bochnia, Wieliczka, and Olkusz.
The Municipal Court judged on cases arising from money obligations, sureties, buying and selling of houses, guardianships; it also took into keeping citizens' moneys and wills; of the latter, those of persons of patrician descent were entered in the town records, whereas the testaments of other citizens were received into the books of the jury.
The Municipal Board watched over the interests of trade and commerce, and had the control of public morals. To its province also belonged: the city police, the economical enterprises of the community, and the financial administration. The houses, gardens, lands, fish-ponds, mills which were town property, also the brick-works at Zwierzyniec, the lime-kiln at Krzemionki, and the stone-quarry on Lasota Hill, were all tenanted by citizens, and the aldermen indemnified themselves, by the produce of these leaseholds, for the gratuitous exercise of their functions in council. This was the source of riches accumulated in the hands of such powerful patrician families as the Turzos, Morstins, Salomons, Schillings, later on the Cellaris, Montelupis, &c. Others, as the Wirsings—called Wierzynek in Polish—in the fourteenth and the Boners in the sixteenth century, take also a large part in the administration of the royal domains, and
