It is finally time to spend a moment in reflection concerning the picture of a medieval knight's manor house that we can get on the basis of archaeological materials and that is presented in this work. I have already mentioned many times that the state of research is insufficient and we shall return to this subject in this chapter later on. First let us have a look at the situation in the neighbouring territories to the Kingdom of Poland, i.e. our conventional area for consideration.

The obvious question arises about the possibility of comparison of the knights’ manor houses from the territory of medieval Poland to those in neighbouring countries, or to estates that were owned by the clergy or belonged to rulers. Even in the content of each chapter there were references to the excavation results of the remains of manor houses in Silesia or Chełmno Land. Admittedly, the reference material here is very rich. Such sites as Plemięta and Bachotek from Chełmno Land as well as Zbrojewsko and Ryczeń from Silesia are a valuable source of analogy. However, there is a formal problem. In principle such a comparison should be carried out on several levels. We should compare knights’ manor houses from the territories of Poland to ones in the neighbouring countries. Similarly, knights’ residences should be compared to those owned by clergymen, as well as owned by dukes, which shall be then multiplied by incorporating the sites from neighbouring countries. To trace the evolution of these settlements and see if they proceeded simultaneously, it would be necessary to present a picture of the dynamic changes, additionally supported by their precise dating. Unfortunately, the present state of research does not allow such an activity. Even in the introduction to this book a reservation was expressed concerning the failure to determine the owners of many of these settlements, which means that there are certainly houses owned by clergy or dukes even among those sites that were considered a priori as ‘knights’ residences. Given such a situation we could propose the thesis that these residences did not differ fundamentally as no important dissimilarities have been noted so far. In academic research, however, it is better to operate with facts rather than speculations and therefore this thesis is still waiting for verification.