Register of Citizens 1 (Livre des bourgeois 1 / Bürgerbuch 1)
Description
The state archives of Fribourg owns a whole series of registers of
citizens(Bürgerbücher). The first two of these registers are the
most important ones; they cover the period from 1341 to 1769 and
are presented here in digitized form. The registers present the
citizens of the city of Fribourg as they change from a citizenry
that is very open for economic reasons at the turn of the 15th
century to one that gradually closes itself off and then becomes a
privileged patriciate in the 18th century. ‘Bürgerbücher’
were a means of controlling the enrollment of new citizens through
lists, which from the very beginning could be in book form. This
allowed mostly large and medium-sized German cities that had
achieved a certain political and economic development to react to
and to regulate demographic trends and immigration during the late
Middle Ages, after and even before the great plague (mid-14th
century). The first register was not planned, but consists of
separate booklets that were bound together probably in 1416.
