Társadalomtörténeti múdszerek és forrástípusok. Salgótarján, 1986. szeptember 28-30. - Rendi társadalom, polgári társadalom 1. - Adatok, források és tanulmányok a Nógrád Megyei Levéltárból 15. (Salgótarján, 1987)
Angol nyelvi összefoglalók (English Summaries)
534 The research on the gentry is no exception to this, although the high proportion of the gentry within the total population was one of the best known and most important characteristics of the social structure of late feudal Hungary- It is no less important, but scarcely known what the social composition of this " order " was. Attention has been primarily and traditionally directed to the aristocracy, which constituted a thin, but very wealthy and influential stratum monopolizing a substantial share of power positions depending on the sovereign. The well-to-do gentry or county of more modest but still comfortable means holding the reins of county administration rarely got into the limelight of research. The " armalistae " (those granted a letter of coat-of-arms and the personal priviliges of the gentry without any landgrant) who made up the bulk of the priviliged groups but were of widely differing education, social status and wealth, went generally unheeded by the historians. The period of French wars (1792-1815) marks a separate chapter in the history of Europe, the Habsburg Empire, Hungary, as well as the counties of this land. The consequences of loyalty to the sovereign: the draft that was getting regular, the ever newer war taxes (subsidium), and the " insurrectio " of the gentry ( = the putting up of a militia) put a heavy strain on the counties. The censuses of the " insurrectie " (= the queen's gentry militia) and the returns of the war tax (" subsidium ") provide us with an exceptional possibility to reconstruct the stratification of the gentry. Special attention deserve the censuses of 1809, embracing the whole of the priviliged class, whose returns were made uniform by law ( Acte 1808: 2 and 3) and which thus seem to be especially suitable for a thoroughgoing nationwide investigation of the structure of gentry society. The county censuses that had been made in preparation of the national census of the gentry militia have not been utilized up to now — these documents are still gathering the dust of the county archives. By utilizing and processing the manifold informations that they offer, we may get a comprehensive everview of the numbers, familial circumstances, age, spatial distribution, legal position and occupational structure of the gentlemen of a county. The county-level and national returns of the gentrymilitia may give a realistic picture of the stratification by wealth, of the gentry at the beginnig of the 19th century, which can be well complemented by the income-estimates made when assessing the war-tax (subsidium). MAGDOLNA LÁCZAY : The gentry society of the Rétköz in the 18th-19th centuries The Rétköz region used to be a geographically and historically well-defined landscape op Szabolcs county. The past tense is justified by the regulation of the river Tisza arid the draining of the inland waters with the ensuing expansion of the large estates. Before that, since the first settling of Hungarians there had been some thirty settlements formed on the sand dunes among swamplands in the semi-cirle of the bend of the Tisza, which used to flood this area. The history of this landscape was, however, scarcely known, its isolation broke down only at the end of the century. In this way one meets the fossils of history when studying this landscape.
