H. Kolba Judit szerk.: Historical Exhibition of the Hungarian National Museum Guide 2 - From the Foundation of the State until the Expulsion of the Ottomans - The history of Hungary in the 11th to 17th centuries (Budapest, 2005)

ROOM 4 - Villages and Towns in the Second Half of the 15th century and at the Beginning of the 16th century (Piroska Biczó )31

26. Detail of a woven kerchief Upper Hungary, 16th century (these were used in the mansions of the aristocracy and in the homes of town burghers) - influenced the heating and cooking facilities of the market-towns and villages. With their use the banishing of smoke from living accommodation was achieved. The peasant houses of modern times underwent a transformation characteristic of individual regions of the country; this was due to the evolution of the houses consisting of more than one room, and to the positioning of new heating installations and of their stoke-holes. As a result of this evolution, the stoves with impressed round tiles standing in the living-room but stoked from the kitchen became general on the Great Plain during the 15th century, although outside baking and cooking ovens for baking protruding from the exterior of the building were still used. From the early 16th century onwards the use of these outside ovens gradually ceased. In the lesser nobility-market-town milieu simpler versions of the richly decorated tiled stoves were made using figurai tiles.The round and rectangular tiles found on the site of the manor of Külsővat (near Pápa) make reconstruction of the stoves possible. The Besztercebánya (Banská Bystrica), finds from the end of the 15th century show the difference in artistic level and taste among the market-town-lesser nobility milieu on the one hand, and among the burghers of the mining towns open to the new artistic trends on the other. The saints on the stove tiles Besztercebánya (Banská Bystrica), modelled with individual features and clad in richly folded garments with naturalistic details, show the preference of the town burghers for Late Gothic stylistic trends (Fig. 24). FURNITURE IN TOWNS AND MARKET-TOWNS Of the secular furniture of the second half of the 15th century /beginning of the 16th century, only a few outstanding items have survived.The furniture made by joiners was produced using planes, in other words, using a more developed technique than the earlier one of cutting into shape. The spread of sawmills made bulk production possible. An example of such production is the chest from Káposztafalva (Hrabusice), employing frame-and-panel construction. The importance of the table in interiors increased only in the Late Middle Ages, when it became a permanent part of the furnishings. The table shown comes from Transylvania, and is called a cradle table, after its cradleshaped bottom case part. Folding stools of Graeco-Roman pattern were known earlier in the Middle Ages, but their use became more frequent from the 15th century onwards. An outstanding relic of the mediaeval cabinet-makers art is the Bártfa bookcase (Bardejov), whose importance is heightened by the fact that it came to the Hungarian National Museum together with its original stock of books: seventy-five volumes mainly from the 15th and 16th centuries (Fig. 25). The bookcase was made at the end of the 15th century for the books of the Parish Church of St. Giles in Bártfa (Bardejov), and for the documents of the same town. The first written data