Bánkiné Molnár Erzsébet: Nemesi közbirtokosságok a Kővár-vidéken. Vallomásos összeírás 1803-ból - Monumenta Muzeologica 1. (Kecskemét, 2007)

these prohibitions were infringed over and over again. The infringement took the form of either an excessive seizure or occupation of land, or the clearing of areas in the forest, or the appropriation of less important, minor royal rights of usufruct. The aim of the hearing of witnesses was to investigate and throw light on these grievances. The total size of the volumes involved in the analysis is 3850 pages consisting of notes in Hungarian, Latin and Romanian languages. The author analyzes the testimonies, the ownership of the noblemen who were public landowners, the quantity of and the methods used by the actions of clearing and occupying the pieces of land, the analysis being made village by village, from the points of view of the history of society and economy. The author explains the reasons leading to and the methods used in dividing the "antiqua sessio"-s into pieces. "Antiqua sessio" is the term used for the piece of land that played the role of a symbol, expressing and referring to the relevant rights and responsibilities of the owner, it was a sort of a measure of the owner's legal title, indicating the extent to which he had claim to the public fields. In the Kővár region the house in the village and the ground-plot belonging to the house constituted the "antiqua sessio", which was associated with complementary parts located in the area on the outskirts, in the fields publicly owned by the village. Noblemen were entitled to use a part of these publicly owned fields proportional to their "antiqua sessio" located in the village. From the analysis the reader can gain detailed knowledge on the agricultural practices and the methods of clearing that had been used in the region. The emphasis is on the landownership of the lower nobility, but we learn new details concerning the rights to work a mill, and that of the innkeepers. The testimonies throw light on local customs, like e.g. the self-insurance scheme. The investigation covered 1118 members of the public landowners. This social layer of the lower nobility, however, can by no means be considered as a uniform layer. The predominant majority of them did the peasants' work in cultivating the land themselves, there were several of them who lived a cotter's life, and two of them lived on serf's holdings. There were several noblemen of whose nobility even the commissioners of the investigation themselves were not convinced. On each occasion the testimonies went into details in highlighting these doubts. The fact that someone had been raised to noble rank often became obscure, whereas detailed knowledge concerning landownership had always been kept in the remembrance of the community of the village. Even after several generations it was still common knowledge which family had "antiqua" 258