Cogs in the wheel

Having considered what knowledge was necessary for employees to make a case to their superiors, we now turn to how information was collected, organized, and subsequently put to work in the De la Gardie estate organization’s bureaucratic system. In one of the few studies of a similar aristocratic sphere, Mikołaj Turzyński concludes that large conglomerate estates needed a functioning central administration. In the Polish context, such ‘estates consisted of several manor farms, villages, and even towns’. ¹ Clerks handled managerial, administrative, and judicial functions, and among the most important elements were ‘supervision over the resources, reliable registration of quantity and price values for agricultural and animal produce; examining the accountabilities of the property administrators’. One set of instructions required a ‘senior servant supervised and kept a record of daily and weekly product consumption and registered the weekly expenses’ while an equerry or stablemaster kept records of daily and weekly spending on horse feed and a treasurer supervised the money and valuables management. A steward supervised the expenses of the servants, a clerk kept the records of estate movables, and an ‘overseer prepared inventories, including the serfs, livestock, fixed and movable properties’. ²