Fair Privileges of August II and August III for Towns of Lviv Land of Ruthenian Voivodeship

The objective of the work is to deepen knowledge about the trade privileges granted to the towns of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by the Polish monarchs in the late 17th and throughout the 18th century. The research methodology is based on historical-critical and comparative-historical methods. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the introduction into scientific circulation of eight official acts, according to which the kings from the Saxon Wettin dynasty – August II and his son August III – established the days of annual fairs in eight towns of the Lviv land of the Ruthenian Voivodeship (in half of them, the days of weekly trades were additionally determined). None of the privileges has been published before. Their copies were found in the books of the Lviv castle court, which are stored in the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Lviv. The prospect of further research is to involve the books of castle (as well as terrestrial) courts to identify the texts of royal grants that regulated trade in early modern cities and towns in Ukrainian lands. Conclusions. According to the privileges, eight towns of the Lviv land (Bibrka, Brukhnal, Hlyniany, Krasnyi Ostriv, Navariya, Pidkamin, Sokolivka, Toporiv) received the right to hold fairs on the days specified by the monarchs, which fell on religious holidays (including holidays according to the Julian calendar, which was observed by the local Ukrainian population). In six towns, the fair days were actually postponed. In a number of cases, this led to the appearance of coincidences in the dates of fairs with similar events in neighboring towns, although the privileges should have eliminated these coincidences. Overall, the texts of the documents are very similar to one another and contain formulaic expressions typical of this type of source, concerning the freedom to sojourn and trade in the towns during fairs for «merchants of all nations and persons of other social ranks», except for those who have broken the law.