Alba Regia. Annales Musei Stephani Regis. – Alba Regia. Az István Király Múzeum Évkönyve. 20. 1980 – Szent István Király Múzeum közleményei: C sorozat (1983)

Tanulmányok – Abhandlungen - Lukács László: Vándoralakok, vándormunkások és a területi munkamegosztás Kelet-Dunántúlon. – Vagrants, Internant workers and the territorial division of Labour in Eastern Transdanubia. p. 185–199. t. XLV–XLII.

town clerks, teachers, addressing them in the most familiar tone: Hi there! Today I am going to be your guest for lunch! The "host" could only rid himself of his unpleasant guest by giving him 2—3 pengő which the Baron spent on drink in the nearest tavern. Béla Gunda discusses the beggars of Hungarian villages in his valuable study (1972). Here I wish only to mention their role in bringing information from the outside world to the isolated manorial farmsteads. On the farmsteads of the Mezőföld they awaited the beggars around All Saints Day. The field-hands prepared beds for them in the oxen stables. In the wintertime they travelled to the neighbouring villages, manorial estates and farmsteads to beg. Every evening in the oxen stables the farm labourers, and even the landowner's son, gladly listened to the stories told by the beggars come from afar. Depending on ecological conditions, some settlements specialized in growing one type of crop. The residents of these communities disposed of the large quantities of their produce at markets both near and far. In many cases they carted the produce to distant locales, or rural merchants, buyers came directly to them for the goods. A number of settlements in the region under discussion specialized in the cultivation of one crop. Deserving of mention were the potates grown in Zirc and Balinka, the cabbage in Balinka, Fehérvárcsurgó and Csór, the horse radish in Nagyveleg, Magyaralmás and Perkáta, the parsley, carrots, lettuce and celery in Székesfehérvár, the tomatos in Pákozd, the peppers and • paprika in Aba and Cece, and the tobacco in Alap and Fadd. A sweet, thin-leaved mild type of cabbage was grown in marshy meadows in Csór and along the banks of the Gaja creek in Balinka and Fehérvárcsurgó. They sold it in the fall at matkets in Mór, Székesfehérvár and Várpalota. Merchants came from Budapest and Győr to buy cabbage by the truckload. In the period between the two World Wars 80—100 truckloads of cabbage were transported yearly to Budapest from Fehérvárcsurgó alone. People from Bicske hauled cabbage by the cart; among them there were even some cabbage merchants who took eight to ten trips in one day. The growers themselves also carted their produce to the villages and manorial farmsteads of the mountain ranges of the Vértes, Velence and Buda, and to the Mezőföld, where their noted produce always was quickly sold. Cabbage seed was also sought in all three communities. Gardeners and merchants from Budapest, Székesfehérvár and Zalaegerszeg bought the seed and the growers also sold it at the market in Székesfehérvár. In certain areas of this region there was also specialization in grape and fruit cultivation. Wine production was especially prominent in the mountain ranges of the Eastern Bakony, Vértes, Velence and Buda, in the Vál Valley and the ridge alongside the Danube, but wine sufficient for family consumption was also produced in the villages of the Mezőföld. Elek Fényes, who wrote in the middle of the 19th century, considered the wines of Csór, Mór, Kincsesbánya, Isztimér, Vál, Diósd, Érd, Velence, Nadap, Tordas, Sóskút and Zámoly the most outstanding. Mainly white wine was produced in the mountainous regions; in the last century red wine was still being produced in the settlements lying in the hill chain alongside the Danube (Érd, Ercsi, Adony, Rácalmás, Dunapentele, Dunaföldvár and Paks). At that time the white wine producted in the Eastern Bakony and Vértes mountain ranges and a section of the Mezőföld was put on the market in the Uplands by merchants from Komárom, Pozsony and Nagyszombat uniformly under the name of Mór wine. The red and white wine produced in the mountain ranges of Velence and Buda, in the Vál Valley and the hill chain alongside the Danube in the Mezőföld was bought up mainly by wine dealers and innkeepers of Buda and Pest. In Gyúró the yearly wine transport was considered quite an event. After the first bottling, restauranteurs from Buda and Pest bought huge quantities of wine in the village, which the winegrowers transported by cart all at once, on a predetermined day, to the capital city. On this occasion they always brought some kind of gift to the women and children. In the second half of the 19th century the region of Mór (Mór, Pusztavám, Csókakő, Csákberény, Sőréd) worked its way up to become one of our finest wineproducing districts. Until the end of the First World War wine dealers came here from Germany, but chiefly from Austria. During the Monarchy there was a separate Mór wine-tavern in Vienna. In the period preceding the phylloxera plague of the last century yearly they exported more than 50,000 hectolitres of wine from Mór alone. Austrian wine-dealers often ordered transport barrels from the wine-coopers of Mór. In wine-producing communities there emerged a stratum of middlemen, brokers and haulers who organized and administered the winetrade. Primarily in the regions of the Eastern Bakony, Vértes and Velence mountain rangers were people engaged in fruit cultivation. We find orchards in the Eastern Bakony, especially in the vicinity of Dudar and Bakonycsernye; in the other areas they planted the fruit trees among the grapes. In the sphere of animal husbandry sheep-farming involved the most migration. They dealt with sheep-farming to the same degree in the regions of the Bakony, Vértes and the Mezőföld, but beginning in the last third of the 18th century manorial sheep-farming flourished above all in the Mezőföld. At that time primarily German shepherds rented the grazing areas of the large estates. They introduced fine-wooled sheep breeds from Western Europe. Under the influence of the wool boom extensive sheep-farming began from the 1820s on, now on estates under their own management. "The most important and most extensive branch of animal husbandry nonetheless was sheepfarming, for which a long time now Fejér County has been the major centre. However, not long ago

—and not excepting the estates—the majority of sheep were of an ordinary Hungarian breed. But now they have been improved for the most part by Spanish and Saxon rams; in fact, they have raised flocks of entirely pure merino and electoral sheep. In short, both the large and small landowners spare no expense to improve and enlarge their flocks." (1836) The change in breed resulted in the settling here of large numbers of shepherd families primarily of German origin from Moravia, since with the flocks brought from the West came shepherds who knew how to care for them. The immigrant families estabilished shepherd dynasties; their sons became shepherds and their daughters most often married shepherds. Their families remained in this occupation until the middle of this century. In the vocabulary of sheep-farming in the Mezőföld we find expressions of German origin just as in the other trades. In addition to the German shepherds, shepherds also came to the Mezőföld from the region between the Danube and the Tisza rivers, from Tolna and Somogy counties and from the Bakony. All the way up to the First World War every year on Saint Michael's Day (September 29) the shepherds from Eastern Transdanubia and in part from the region between the Danube and Tisza assembled in Székesfehérvár. They attended mass at the "shepherd church" (Saint Sebastian Church) in the upper town and walked in the procession under the shepherds' flag. Afterwards they held the three-day shepherds' feast (lakozás) in the Lamb (Bárány), Crown (Korona), Star (Csillag) and Golden Eagle (Aranysas) restaurants. Here was where the head shepherds hired shepherd lads to tend the enormous manorial flocks. On this occasion they also purchased the paraphenalia necessary for the entire year at the weekly market and from city merchants and tradesmen (shepherd equipment, clothing, footwear). In an 1856 volume of the Sunday Newspaper we can read : "If a projected Shepherds'

1 Calendar were truly prepared for 1857 somewhere in the country, the publishers would certainly do good business in such places this coming Sunday, because every shepherd present in high spirits would surely buy a new calendar, perhaps not just one, maybe more, for his loved-one or someone else at home." Similar type shepherd festivities were held in Sárbogárd until the First World War. Such shepherd gatherings represented an excellent opportunity for the shepherds of farreaching areas to communicate, exchange information. "At these times, in the presence of the entire guild of shepherds from distant stations and manorial farmsteads, many secret agreements and decisions are made, for example, that it is forbidden to abandon sheep farming to become an oxdriver or to accept other ignoble positions." (1856) Since the shepherds brought their daugters with them, we may also attribute to these gatherings the character of a "girls' market", which may have contributed to the perserverance of endogamy within the trade. (Girls' market is the name given to the section of markets devoted to amusement where young men and women could meet, in part for the purpose of selecting a marriage partner.) 196