Veres Gábor: A népi bútorzat története Északkelet-Magyarországon - Studia Agriensia 28. (Eger, 2008)
THE HISTORY OF FOLK FURNITURE IN NORTHEASTERN HUNGARY
torical sources it was possible to establish those processes and procedures that were instrumental in setting up a centre of production. With the benefit also of a wide range of material evidence the study outlines the characteristic stylistic features and local similarities present at folk furniture production centres throughout the region. We have sources recording the general lack of furniture and other objects in folk domestic culture in northeastern Hungary at the end of the seventeenth century and in the first half of the eighteenth century. Inventories and damage assessments tend to contain a few items of furniture of little monetary value. Researchers have usually suggested that this is due to the general state of poverty in the wartom years following the Turkish occupation. The data featured in this study, however, helps to provide a more detailed picture. Firstly, there was one section of the peasantry who enjoyed relative prosperity during the cereal boom of the first half of the eighteenth century. For them, unlike the majority, Maria Theresa’s regulation of the labour statute proved to be a drawback rather than an advantage. Having conducted a comparative price analysis for the decades covered in the study, which includes the prices for the furniture types favoured at any one time, it becomes clear that poverty is not a sufficient explanation for the lack of furniture, and that when poverty was an issue it only affected a particular section of the peasantry at any one time. Comparing the price of furniture with household goods, foodstuffs and the kind of clothing that couldn’t be made at home, it becomes apparent that furniture was not entirely beyond people’s means. For instance, there is hardly a piece of folk furniture in our region whose price would have exceeded that of a traditional shepherd’s cloak. Apart from the questions of household management and relative market prices it is only by looking at peasant attitudes during the period in question that we can hope to find an adequate explanation for the changes that went on in the way people lived. For the peasantry, labour was its defining feature, whether one farmed one’s own land or tilled somebody else’s. Those peasants with smaller plots of land invariably also had to hire out their services as a means of supplementing their income. The floor-space of the outbuildings was frequently four to six times larger than that of their dwellings, a ratio, however, that fell on the Great Plain, where it was not normal to build bams. Even there, however, outbuildings continued to exceed the dwellings in size. The building of substantial dwellings for larger families from materials that were readily available in the locality proved of less 180
