Book of Henryków
chronicle which contains the earliest known sentence written in Polish
The Book of Henryków (Polish: Księga henrykowska, Latin: Liber fundationis claustri Sanctae Mariae Virginis in Heinrichow) is a Latin chronicle of the Cistercian abbey in Henryków in Lower Silesia, Poland. Originally created as a registry of belongings looted during the first Mongol invasion of Poland of 1241, with time it was extended to include the history of the monastery. It is notable as the oldest known document to include an entire sentence written in early Polish language. What can be interpreted as Old Polish language is described in the text itself as polonico and converted to latin. Currently the book is on exhibition in the Archdiocesan Museum in Wrocław. On October 9, 2015 the Book of Henryków was listed in UNESCO's "Memory of the World Programme".
The first part of the 100-page-long book is devoted to the early history of the abbey, from its foundation by Henry the Bearded in 1227 until 1259. The second part includes the later history until 1310. In the record for 1270, a settler from the nearby village is reported to have said to his wife "Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai", which could be roughly translated as "Let me, I shall grind, and you take a rest".
The circumstances under which this sentence was written closely reflected the cultural and literary conditions in Poland in the first centuries of its national existence.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Book of Henryków” as chronicle which contains the earliest known sentence written in Polish. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as chronicle which contains the earliest known sentence written in Polish. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2672449. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1241, 2015, 1227 and 1259.
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This entry incorporates text from “Book of Henryków” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.