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)
535 The origins of the population are indicated by historical etimology, linguistics and the documents of early centuries. There were Patzinaks, Slavs and other people living here apart from the Hungarians - they all had the privilege and the task of armed defence of the power of the new state here, in what was then a borderland. The names of villages like örpátroha, Besenyőd, Bércei, Ibrány, Megyer tell this at once. The author's attention was called to the high share of the gentry in the population by the 18th century censuses but, coming from this very landscape she knew how much the conscioussness and behavior of the locals differs from that of the people living elsewhere in the county. Immigrants are not fully accepted even after hundred years. The most detailed census of the Rétköz gentry was made in 1793, which returned the gentlemen by villages and measure of wealth. True, the ordinary gentleman had only one or two peasant holdings (sessio) and the gentlemen with possessions in more than one village were grouped here as well — even people possessing middling or large estates —, but it was stated, how many gentlemen had no real property at all. The number of the heads of families thus gained was compared with the data of Elek Fényes, published in 1839 (then in 1851), and anattempt was made to estimate the number of gentlemen, correction and verification of the results was facilitated by a list found among the returns of the census of the militia (" insurrectio ") . This gives the names of all the gentlemen whose wealth was upwards or downwards of a limit legally prescribed for paying the war-tax (" subsidium "). From this list the poorest gentlemen, without any real property, were omitted, just like from the census of 1754-55. Documents certifying gentle status can not be found in such quantity, later research may prove that they did not even exist. Still, the censuses of the gentry, those quoted and the later ones, though made for other purposes, biased and imperfect, accepted the population of this landscape as gentlemen. It might have been a survival of the medieval freedom of royal soldiers (" várjobbágy "), since the devastating great wars of the Middle Ages had passed the Rétköz by. When the populous gentry living here is accepted as a priviliged, one should also say, what the differences within this stratum were, out of what, how they made a living, since much of the land was under water most of the time, and how the eventual loss of their priviliges effected their lives. BÉLA PÁLMÁNY : The society of the country towns from the last stages of Turkish occupation to the implementation of the liberation of the serfs The country town (oppidum) was a special and very important type of settlement in the development of the feudal society and economy in Hungary. The oppida had significantly varying rights of self-government, feudal relations to their lords as well as different social structures. The functional method of studying urban history makes an objective survey and comparison feasible. The historical county of Nógrád showed a low degree of urbanization in the 18-19th centuries. There were two priviliged towns - Losonc and Nagyoroszi — and seven fortified border towns (praesidium) — Fülek, Divény, Gács, Kékkő, Balassagyarmat, Nógrád, Szécsény) in the county at the end of the Turkish occupation. Their population fell into three social groups: gentlemen, soldiers and free Burgher. The stakes of the investigation of legal standing carried out
