Divided Ownership in Legislation and Legal Practice of the Duchy of Warsaw and the Congress Poland

The article concerns the history of divided property in the Duchy of Warsaw and then in the Congress Kingdom of Poland until the agrarian reforms of the 1860s. An essential feature of divided (feudal) ownership was the division of ownership attributes between the superior owner (senior) and the lower owner (vassal, peasant). This text describes the most important legal acts regulating divided property during the period under discussion, the circumstances of their promulgation, and the legislative process. Drawing on archival sources, it discusses selected issues related to the interpretation of these legal acts. One of the main theses of the work is that, contrary to views expressed in the literature, the introduction of the Napoleonic Code to the Duchy of Warsaw did not mean the abolition of divided property in rural areas.