Hutman of Serbian Medieval Law

Abstract

The subject of the paper is the institute of hutman in Serbian medieval mining law. The first question to be answered is related to the extent of transplantation of the institute from Saxon customs to Serbian written law. The second aim is the definition of the competence of hutman and the way he was appointed. The results indicate the Despot Stefan’s Mining Code recognized two different institutes of hutman. The first was auxiliary service to urbarar, measuring and marking the land in the procedure of granting mining concessions and after breaking one mine into another, charging a fee. He was probably appointed by tax collectors. The second one is the supervisor of a mine, entitled to collect the payment from the owners of its shares, to record it and presumably to take care of correct conducting all kind of activities in the mine. Most likely he was employed by the shareholders of the mine partnership. The linguistic, systemic, and historical interpretation is applied as well as the comparative method and regressive analysis.