Primary Collection Registers of the Zviahel County of the Second Half of the 16th Century

The article examines the set of primary collection registers of Prince V.-K. Ostrogski's estates during the first post-Union decade, located on the border of the Volyn and Kyiv voivodeships. One of these was the Zviahel volost. They are an important component in the source base for studying the socio-economic history of these Ukrainian lands. Primary registers were created by landowners or their representatives. On their basis, government officials (collectors) determined by the dietsm created summarizing tax documents (summaries) for individual administrative units of the entire state. The summaries were partially published and widely used in research by representatives of various national historiographies. Primary registers are not sufficiently introduced into scientific circulation. For many regions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, they have not survived at all. The presence of primary (1570 and 1577) and summary (1570, 1577, 1583, 1589) registers offers an opportunity to study the state and dynamics of the development of social and economic phenomena. For Prince V.-K. Ostrogski's estates in the second half of the 16th century, other sources of a descriptive and statistical nature are unknown. The significance of such documents for the Kyiv Voivodeship is particularly important due to their poor preservation for the end of the 16th century. An important feature of collection registers, as well as descriptive and statistical sources in general, is the display of different social indicators of the urban and rural population. They were also used for historical and demographic research. Primary documentation, produced by order of the landowners and related to individual estates, contains records that were lost when generalized in the summaries. These include linguistic peculiarities, the level of implementation of economic innovations, individual indicators of the sex structure of the population, anthroponymic information, customer names, paleographic and diplomatic features, etc. The levy registers began to be introduced in the territory of Volyn and Kyiv region from the end of 1569, and initially, their structure and design did not have an established standard due to the lack of tradition and experience. Tax documentation of the possessions of Prince V.-K. Ostrogski has a sufficiently high representativeness. The entire set of tax documentation – primary and summary – constitutes integrity. Therefore, in source studies, there is an opportunity to research the document circulation system and all its components.