C. Tóth Norbert - Németh Péter: Várjobbágyokból nemesek. A Megyeriek és Rádiak küzdelme a nemesi létért (Függelékül a Megyery család oklevelei és egykori levéltáruk jegyzéke) - Subsidia ad historiam medii aevi Hungariae inquirendam 14. (Budapest, 2023)

From Castle Warriors to the Nobility. The Struggle of the Megyeri Family for Noble Existence (Attached the Family’s Surviving Charters and the List of their Former Archives)

C. TÓTH NORBERT

- NÉMETH

PÉTER

From Castle Warriors to the Nobility

The Struggle of the Megyeri

Family

for Noble Existence

(Attached the Family’s Surviving Charters and the List of their Former Archives)

In September 1364, the families who lived on the lands of Hárommegyer

and

Rád were

shocked upon reveiving the news, a bolt from the blue, that Miklos Fekecs and his brother, originally from the village of Vasvári

in

Szatmár

county,

now lords of the neighbouring Paszab, had petitioned their lands from the king with the pretext that there lived castle people who were subject to royal donation. Needless to say, the families who had thus far existed there undisturbed, namely the Megyeri,

Vasmegyeri, Péci and

Rádi,

contradicted

to the introduction of the grantees, saying that they were in fact not castle people but castle warriors. As a result, they were cited to the royal curia before the judge royal. The first lawsuit ended in 1366 with the defeat of the Megyeri and

Rádi

kindred.

Yet the victorious Fekecs family was clearly unable to enter into full possession of the land, so in 1371 they launched a new suit, from which, two years later, they again emerged victorious. But in 1377 the castle warriors launched a counter-attack, lodging a complaint against Miklos Fekecs on the grounds that he had unlawfully occupied their lands. The third round of the case ended with the victory of the Megyeri

and

Rádi in

1378, with an oath-taking procedure involving nearly 300 nobles. The paper follows these events, first reconstructing the course of the litigation, and then establishing the identities of the people who swore on behalf of the castle warriors. The two following chapters contain the abstracts and Latin texts of the charters that were presented in the case, among them the 1489 transcription of the final judgement that has survived in the archives of the Megyery. In order to make the events easier to follow, family trees of the kindreds involved have been prepared and attached. The last section of the work surveys the post-1526 history of the archives of the Megyery family, from which the research started, and publishes the content-survey {elenchus)

of

the documents that were returned to the family in the first half of the eighteenth century. Also published here in extenso are

the four charters which, alongside the transcription mentioned above, are the only surviving pieces of the family archives which, in the mid-eighteenth century, contained 157 documents.