The research of late medieval villages is a relatively recent topic in Croatian medieval archaeology. Highway excavations, by enabling the research of the biggest areas that researchers ever had the opportunity to investigate, contributed to this interest. Still, highway excavations face certain problems – both the site of the excavations and the length of the excavated site are determined by the right-of-way of the highway. As a consequence, some of these sites face difficulties of interpretation. Although the investigated areas are big, they are still limited and often do not give enough data to make general conclusions about the layout of the late medieval village. On the example of village of Donja Lomnica, with the help from written sources, onomastics and ethnographic data we can try to gain some more information about the functioning of the village system of a certain area. These results can be only partial, but different kinds of sources combined together can point to possible guidelines that could lead to better understanding of archaeological finds and historical and onomastic sources.

Turopolje is an area south of Zagreb; that is south of the river Sava that marks its northern border. On the other side, it is bounded by the Samoborsko Gorje hills to the west, the confluence of the Kupa and Sava rivers to the southeast, and the Vukomeričke Gorice hills to the southwest. The whole area measures approximately 600 square kilometres, and it consists of three parts. A plains area in the north (traditionally called ‘polje’ [field]), a mountain area called Vukomeričke Gorice (‘vrhovlje’ [peaks]) on the south, and Veliki Turopoljski lug (a marshy area) on the southeast. Turopolje was situated in Slavonia, a constituent part of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary-Croatia.

As a result of special historic circumstances, the medieval as well as modern history of the region was most known because of the noble community of Turopolje. Its members were iobagiones castri, castle warriors of the castle of Zagreb, who managed to preserve their privileges long after the disintegration of the castle system. They owed military service to the king and, in return, they owned their land hereditarily and were exempt from taxes.