The introduction of Christianity to Lithuania in 1387 started the processes of accumulation of landed estates by the local Church. The main wave of endowments for church institutions in the territories of the Bishopric of Wilno continued until the end of the 16th century. Subsequent additions, connected with the setting up of new parishes or convents, were too small to affect the overall picture.
In the middle of the 17th century the largest estates held by the Bishopric of Wilno included Ihumeń (donated by the Grand Duke of Lithuania Witold), Kukuciszki (donated by King Władysław Jagiello of Poland), Taurogiany, Bakszty and Szyszole. Moreover, the Bishop of Wilno, the Chapter of the Wilno Cathedral, individual office-holders of the Chapter, and the Wilno Seminary had their own estates. The Church was owned the benefices attached to the office of the parish priest. In 1651 the Diocese of Wilno was divided into 26 decanates with 354 parish churches and a matching number of benefices. More ecclesiastical landed property was in the hands of religious orders, chief among them the Franciscans (who had their convents in Wilno, Grodno and Nieśwież), the Bernardines (Wilno, Kowno, Troki, and Połock), the Benedictine Nuns (Wilno, Mińsk, and Orsza), and the Bridgettines (Grodno and Wilno).
In mid-17th century all the church estates in the RC Diocese of Wilno in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania comprised a total of 23,000 homesteads. Of that number 6,000 homes belonged to estates held by religious orders; 4,000 were situated in episcopal estates; nearly 3,000 in land owned by the Chapter of the Wilno Cathedral; close to 200 in the estates owned by the Wilno Seminary. Most of the remaining homesteads belonged to the parish priests' benefices.
The landed estates held by the Catholic clergy in the Diocese of Wilno were surveyed in 1649-1650 for the purpose of a hearth-tax to be introduced in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The resultant register of all ecclesiastical tax-payers was compiled in 1653 in connection with a new levy approved by the Sejm of Brześć (24 March - 18 April 1653).
Ours is a critical edition of the original register dated 1653, kept at the MS Department of the Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in Vilnius. It is entered as Item 609 in the Collections of the Vilnius Chapter (Sign. F43-609). The manu-script has the appearance of a form actually used during the collection of the hearth-tax and prepared specially for that purpose. It can be surmised that after a final check-up the document was to have been copied and signed by an authorized person. It seems too that the data recorded in this rough-copy manuscript matched those that appeared in the final version.
This critical edition has been prepared in accordance with the norms formulated in the editing manual Instrukcja wydawnicza dla źródeł historycznych od XVI do połowy XIX wieku, ed. K. Lepszy, Wrocław 1953. Moreover, to avoid misunderstandings caused by inaccurate spelling in the original text, each place name in this edition is provided with an explicatory note.
The Hearth-tax Register of 1653 is an acknowledged primary source of considerable value, yet only a small portion of its content has so far been throughly researched. This publication, it is hoped, will make it more readily available for further study.