Land Reform and the Hungarian Peasantry C. 1700-1848
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Land Reform and the Hungarian Peasantry c. 1700-1848 Robert William Benjamin Gray UCL Thesis submitted for a PhD in History, 2009 1 I, Robert William Benjamin Gray, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 25th September 2009 2 Abstract This thesis examines the nature of lord-peasant relations in the final stages of Hungarian seigneurialism, dating roughly from 1700 to the emancipation of the peasantry in 1848. It investigates how the terms of the peasants’ relations with their lords, especially their obligations and the rights to the land they farmed, were established, both through written law and by customary practice. It also examines how the reforms of this period sought to redefine lord-peasant relations and rights to landed property. Under Maria Theresa land reform had been a means to protect the rural status quo and the livelihood of the peasantry: by the end of the 1840s it had become an integral part of a liberal reform movement aiming at the complete overhaul of Hungary’s ‘feudal’ social and economic system. In this period the status of the peasantry underpinned all attempts at reform. All reforms were claimed to be in the best interests of the peasantry, yet none stemmed from the peasants themselves. Conversely, the peasantry had means to voice their grievances through petitions and recourse to the courts, and took the opportunity provided by the reforms to reassert their rights and renegotiate the terms of their relations to their landlords. By examining the petitions, court cases, and negotiations between lords and peasants, the thesis examines how far peasant needs and expectations were understood by those enacting the reforms, and whether these were met by the new laws. In doing so, the thesis investigates how peasant rights to the land were established, challenged or undermined and how the peasants reacted to the changes imposed upon them as Hungarian seigneurialism was dismantled in the years before 1848. 3 Contents Acknowledgements p. 5 Introduction p. 6 1: The peasants, the land and the law p. 19 2: The Hungarian village: a sketch of rural conditions p. 53 3: Lord-peasant relations in the eighteenth century p. 69 4: Lord-peasant relations in the nineteenth century p. 97 5: Four case studies in lord-peasant relations p. 137 Conclusion p. 199 Bibliography p. 207 4 Acknowledgements First, I wish to thank my supervisor Professor Martyn Rady, for all his assistance during my time working on this thesis, and his dedication in providing me with the tools and knowledge to complete it. Particular thanks must also go to Peter Sherwood, without whom I would never have been able to grasp the intricacies of Hungarian, and to the late Professor László Péter, whose insights, if given in a somewhat intimidating manner, proved invaluable. I would also like to acknowledge: the AHRC, for funding my research; and the staff of the British Library and the library of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London; the National Széchenyi Library and National Archives in Budapest; and the Szentes municipal archive for their assistance in helping root out the material on which this work is based. Thanks should also go, in no particular order, to Dr Richard Butterwick, Dr Thomas Lorman, Dr Rebecca Haynes, Dr Susan Morrisey, Trevor Thomas, Dr Rohan McWilliam, and Clarissa Campbell-Orr for their assistance not only in relation to my thesis but also in furthering my academic career to date. I would also wish to thank the organisers of the various seminars and conferences at which I have presented parts of my work, in particular the Centre for Central Europe and Friday Circle at SSEES. There are too many people who deserve thanks in addition to those already mentioned to list in full: they know who they are, and I am grateful to them all. Finally, thanks to my parents for their constant support and patience: I would not have got to the point of writing this without them. 5 Introduction I In the spring of 1848, with the rumoured threat of a peasant army marching on Pressburg, and much of Europe experiencing revolution, Hungary’s diet emancipated the peasantry from centuries of seigneurial dependence. The hastily drafted legislation freed the peasantry from their remaining obligations to their lords and the church, and granted the peasantry full property rights to their former urbarial plots. The emancipation of the peasantry proved one of the most enduring features of the Hungarian revolution. Yet land reform had formed a central part of the liberal programme for the last fifteen years. In the preceding years, two events had brought home the importance of the ‘peasant question’: the cholera uprising of 1831 and the more violent jacquerie in neighbouring Galicia in 1846. Ever louder voices from within the Hungarian nobility had been condemning the legally inferior and economically unviable status of the peasantry as the greatest impediment to the liberal society that they wished to create. Laws passed by the diets between 1836 and 1844 had gone a long way to reconstruct the legal position of the peasantry, their relations to their lord, and the rights to the land they farmed. These followed upon measures that had been taken to define and categorize the legal position of the peasantry, their relations to their lords, and to the land they farmed during the era of ‘serfdom’ (a jobbágyság kora). This work, then, is an attempt to reconstruct the peasants’ as defined in Hungarian law. Principal amongst these laws were: Stephen Werbőczy’s Tripartitum, the canon of Hungarian customary law produced in 1517; the Urbarium issued by Maria Theresa by octroi in 1767; and the decreta issued by the diets between 1836 and 1844. In the course of what follows, I aim to reveal how the law impacted upon and reflected rural conditions, shaping the nature of lord-peasant relations and the peasants’ rights to the land. I will also demonstrate how the process of dismantling ‘serfdom’, if it can be termed as such, was well underway prior to the emancipation of 1848. Following the Dózsa rebellion of 1514, the most violent peasant jacquerie in Hungarian history, the peasantry were condemned to the status of ‘perpetual rusticity’. By the laws of that year, the peasants’ status as the personally free but legally dependent tenants of their lords was confirmed. From then on, the 6 peasants owed a set list of dues and services to a lord (be this the crown, the church or a nobleman) in return for their right to farm the land. Three years later, by being included in Stephen Werbőczy’s Tripartitum, the terms of the 1514 laws were cemented in what would become the principal text of Hungarian law for almost three and a half centuries. Simultaneous to this, by expanding upon the rights associated with ‘perpetual rusticity’, the Tripartitum guaranteed to the peasantry rights of hereditary tenure to the land. In other words, the peasants’ relationship both to their lords and to the land they farmed was established in written law. Nevertheless, the terms of the Tripartitum were vague and much remained customary and unwritten, the product of tacit agreement and use. From then to the early eighteenth century, as Hungary was fought over by the Habsburgs and Ottomans, the legal position of the peasantry remained largely unchanged. Once the Ottomans had been expelled from Hungary and the influences of Enlightened Absolutism had taken hold in Vienna by the mid- eighteenth century a new wave of legislation began to impact upon lord-peasant relations across the Habsburg lands. The Urbarium, a decree issued by Maria Theresa in 1767, intended to supplant unwritten custom and varied local use with a set of written and uniform standards. The Urbarium aimed to record and regulate the peasants’ holdings, and required registers to be kept to account for all peasant-farmed land and the obligations that derived therefrom. As a consequence, the peasants’ urbarial holdings – that land to which they possessed rights as they had been defined in the Tripartitum – became permanently separated from their lords’ dominical land. At the same time, the peasants’ obligations became tied to the size of their holding in an attempt to ensure that the peasants could subsist, pay taxes to the crown and meet their obligations to their lords. By issuing a standardized form that was to be the basis of urbarial agreements, the Urbarium sought to introduce a uniform and regulated set of dues and obligations. By dictating that the agreements were to be accompanied by comprehensive land registers, the Urbarium introduced a uniform regulation and standardization of peasants’ plots. By tasking county officials with overseeing the urbarial agreements and land registers, the Urbarium brought written law more firmly into lord-peasant relations through the persons of the county officials. Through these measures the Urbarium was to supersede the irregularity and lack of uniformity inherent in 7 existing customary arrangements. But, as an unintentional consequence of the Urbarium, a third form of land emerged: the extra-urbarial land. The peasants possessed only ill-defined customary rights to the extra-urbarial land, established through local use and outside of those rights accounted for in written law. Thus, the Tripartitum had defined the rights associated with ‘rusticity’, and the Urbarium defined how far these rights extended onto the land. But the extent of rights to the land was revealed more by what the Urbarium did not include than what it did. Before the Urbarium, rights to the land were held in numerous and varied ways defined by local use and interpreted through customary arrangements.