The burgomaster presided at the sessions of the town council, and decided on many affairs; the more important ones, however, being reserved for the whole council. To these sessions the councillors were either summoned by writ or by the sound of a bell. The tocsin and the red flag on the tower—from which watchmen were looking out for any danger menacing the town, or fire breaking out—were still in use, in cases of fire, till thirty years ago. The oldest book of town records, preserved to the present day, into which all events and affairs were entered indifferently in succession, opens at the year 1301. The town council used the great seal (cf. illustration 5) for particularly important documents, and a smaller one, with the image of St. Wenceslaus, the original patron of the town—whose place was taken in the fourteenth century by the martyr-bishop, St. Stanislas—for those of minor importance. The City Arms show three square towers built of ashlars, crowned by the standing figures of the two patron saints, the middle one surmounted by the escutcheon with the Polish Eagle; on both sides of these towers there are escutcheons with the arms of the royal family, and below the middle tower, an open door with the usual hearse and a figure kneeling in it.
The mayor and the jurymen originally administered justice, later on this function partly passed to the town council. The jury decided on civil law-suits. In criminal cases involving a sentence of death, the proceedings were short. The witnesses heard, the criminal was delivered to the hangman and cast into the dark prison below the town hall. The executioner and his assistants now brought the accused to the torture-chamber called Kabat, where he was tormented in order to be moved to confession. Part of the municipal torture-engines is preserved even now in Matejko's house—41, St. Florian Street—to be seen daily; magnificent beheading-swords of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are to be found in the collections of the National Museum. The torture was applied three times, and after this painful inquisition there followed the verdict; upon this, the criminal—as the formulas of judgment testify—was still to be
