Bács-Kiskun megye múltjából 20. (Kecskemét, 2005)

ÖSSZEFOGLALÓK

TIBOR IVÁNYOSI-SZABÓ THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RISING OF A PEASANT FAMILY The more or less free peasantry became a considerable stratum within the Hungarian agrarian society in the preceding centuries of civil revolution. Among them were the farmers of towns, redeemed from their landlord, and partly civilians of the most developed and populous so-called patented market-towns. Very likely the small number of written materials is the cause of that only a few people were studying the past of free peasantry, while the history of the much smaller heyducks and Jazygian-Cumanians has a very considerable bibliography. Although the real spark-plugs of economic, social and cultural life in our very populous agrarian cities were some dozen famous families for centuries, there are hardly any studies about these families' forming, farming and their role in the settlement's public life. The Ladányi family was well known in Kecskemét for centuries, and some prominent figures of the family deserved to be in some kind of higher function, but they weren't among the most famous and influential families at all. However, I undertook to explore their past because I noticed that Pál Ladányi, who settled down in the city just at the end of the XVII. century, started from a humble level, and his descendants grew wealthy with an undiminished energy and then got among the richest families of the city, finally acquiring nobility too. Through their history we can get to know the possibilities of free peasantry's development on the Great Hungarian Plain, the sources of pecuniary accumulation and the way of getting to public life as well. The lesson is that, despite the ruin of peasant and intellectual families' documents, we can find a way to explore the past of families with more moderate means. We may explore even more prominent families' past by the help of wills, various registers, administrative files and individual's documents, survived in market-town and town archives. We can get to know the life of the family's individuals and keep an eye on their social rising from the first part of the study. The following chapters explore the process of their wealth growing. Through the official registers and family's records we could find a way to show the city's initially poorer then wealthy families' two-centurial practice of cultivation and livestock-farming in detail. The history of Ladányi family also shows us that wealthy peasantry and intellectuals (horatiores) found the way to grow their wealth in agricultural processing industry and occasionally in money lending too. This family's history convinces us that work, saving and family's unity are among the most important values in the society of free peasantry. As they formed mostly the local 'nominal' nobility and frequently married with this class, the mentality of the latter one adjusted to theirs.