A Kaposvári Rippl-Rónai Múzeum Közleményei 1. (Kaposvár, 2013)
Knézy Judit: Céhes adatok a somogyi pék- és mézesbábos mesterekről az 1810-es évektől 1896-ig
260 Guild information about the baker masters and honey-cake-makers from 1810 until 1869 JUDIT KNÉZY The topic of this study is the deficiency of the historical and ethnographical searches in Somogy county: the history of the baker trade and the honey-cake masters. About the baker trade we haven’t got any review, but there are some publications about the data and activity of honey-cake makers based on ground memories from the middle part of the 20th century. The ethnographic collection of the Rippl Rónai Múzeum saves whole workshop from honey-cakes-master originated from some market towns of the Somogy county. There were two permanent exhibitions showing honey-cake master’s workshop in the County (at Zamárdi-tájház from 1977 untill 80th, and later in Marcali Townmúzeum from 1999 until today). The first part is about the baker and honey-cake masters of the market town Csurgó who belonged to the so called ‘German’ Guild, they arrived to the region between 1810 and 1869. The study contains the known names of these masters, their origins, the organisations to were they belonged, the qualification process of becoming a master, and their guild life including quarrels, sins, the reception of their apprentices, sometimes the problems with these apprentices, the guild feast and funerals. The main source of this part was the Guild’s documental detailing the partly missing or inaccurate list of masters and the financial records on demands and pay offs. These masters mostly came from Austria and the Czech-Moravian lands in the 19th century either as already masters or they qualified themselves in Csurgó. Some German tongued masters came from other regions in Transdanubia. Among the records on the guilds master pieces there is a full detailed description of one such master piece. The honey-cake masters were mostly German tongued at first but lately there were also Slavic or Hungarian ones among them. Year after year there were only one or two baker masters working in the market town or in its vicinity. The masters leaving and entering the service of Csurgó happened so often it is hard to tell if any of them worked in the same town for generations, like the ones in Szigetvár, one of the few cities in the region. Some of the masters left for bigger towns. The low numbers of the qualified baker masters in the county can be the result of the following factors: the late urbanisation process in the region, the remaining practice of baking bread at home and the fact that the wealthier residents and the traders in bakery usually ordered these wares from baking specialist and cooks- men. The number of honey-cake masters were even fewer. The financial documents indicate that the guild of the town usually purchased candles from the masters of Kanizsa town. The second part of the study describes the taxed baker and honey-cake masters in Somogy county: the names, their numbers and workshops, from the time of the urbanisation to the last decade of the guild area (1869). The places were several masters worked simultaneously were important marketing towns or estates of the nobles. These baker masters were also mostly Germans, while the honey-cake makers were Germans, Slavic and Hungarian ones, or they bore Hungarian names.
