Register of Citizens 2 (Livre des bourgeois 2 / Bürgerbuch 2) (1415[!]-1769)
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 second register was created in 1416 by the deliberate
designs of city clerk Petermann Cudrefin, who had kept the first
register since 1396 and had found it very disorganized.
