Novgorod «court cases» ot the late 16th – early 17th centuries and the prospects for discovering authentic court cases from the Novgorod Prikaznaya Izba Archives of the late 16th century

Abstract

This article examines the possibility of reconstructing the archives of the Novgorod Prikaznaya Izba (office) from the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the materials of which were partially destroyed and partially scattered across various archival repositories. Some of these materials have been introduced into scholarly circulation, while others remain unidentified. There is a debate about the storage location of some of the current documentation of Novgorod institutions, particularly 16th-century census books. It is argued that a significant portion of these documents were transferred to central offices as early as the 16th century. However, some argue that these materials were stored in Novgorod until the end of the 17th century; this opinion is disputed in the article. Private archives and archival collections are cited as one of the prospects for identifying such files. A new document from the N. P. Likhachev collection is published as the application to the article, corresponding to a number of cases known from the Novgorod Court House archives from 1584/85–1604/05. It provides detailed biographical descriptions of the individuals mentioned in this document and their fate during the Time of Troubles. The question of possible avenues for searching for such documents is raised in the final part of the article.