Cseri Miklós, Füzes Endre (szerk.): Ház és ember, A Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum évkönyve 8. (Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 1992)

HOFFMANN TAMÁS: A faház (domus lignea) a középkori Európában

als Baumaterial verkaufte. Das wurde auch in Gesetzen gesichert. Die Lage fing an sich bereits im frühen Mittelalter in den Städten zu ändern, in entscheidendem Maße jedoch erst nach der im 13. Jahrhundert vollzogenen großen Welle der städtischen Entwicklung. Vom Süden her - über die Alpen - verbreitete sich der Brauch des Steinhausbaus. Die ökologische Anpassung wurde von einer neuen Strategie abgelöst: von der der Wertanhäufung, das ist ein typisch bürgerlicher Zug der Kulturschaffung. Die Bauern eigneten sich diese Tradition erst kurz vor den modernen Zeiten, gleichzeitig zur industriellen Revolution an. Das alles erfoglte aber nur in denjenigen Regionen unseres Kontinents, in denen die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Kontakte aus den tausendjährigen Rahmen traten und interkontinantal wurden. An den Periferien kamen die Veränderungen 8-10 Generationen später und setzten erst von den ungeheuren tektonischen Energien der modernen industriellen Gesellschaft getrieben ein. Der Reichtum an Holz, die bestimmende Wichtigkeit der Besitzverhältnisse und der Patron-Klient-Kontakte (in erster Linie in Osteuropa) verschoben ganz bis zu unseren Zeiten die Lösung jenes Problems, zu dem das Holzhaus in elemetarem, d. h. familiärem Maße den Rahmen sicherte: das Problem der Reproduzierung der Wirtschaft der Bauernfamilie. Tamás Hoffmann THE WOODEN HOUSE CALLED DOMUS LIGNEA IN MEDIEVAL DOCUMENTS Those buildings, first of all dwellings, are called wooden houses whose walls are structures of hewn beams. Such constructions were mainly erected in the oak and pine belts of Europe. Various techniques and static solutions were developed as early as prehistoric times. The conventions of construction shaped subject to the building materials available. Wooden houses were fairly rare in Southern Europe although both trussings and floors, initially even the columns of porches, were made of wood. In Continental Europe timber frames were set up with split board or daubed wattle infill. In other cases the walls consisted of piles driven into the ground. This however happened quite rarely and until the Middle Ages had only been characteristic of Northern and Atlantic Europe. Everywhere in the pine belt, in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe alike, walls were made of beams lying paralell with the ground level. Buildings like this have practically always been adapted to ecological conditions. Most of them consisted of one or two rooms up to the Middle Ages; in the east and north until even the 17th—18th centuries. The centre of such houses was an open hearth, less frequently, in the East and North, an oven. The first steps toward smoke removal were taken at the twilight of the Middle Ages simultaneously with an increase in the mass of the building, the introduction of a more complex ground plan and, in some places, with the addition of an upper storey. All this came as a new fashion through the passes of the Alps from the North of Italy and reached the villages via the towns. Besides proving such contacts the modifications also indicated that the carpenter's techniques, which had been almost unchanged since Celtic times and served for erecting houses and producing the majority of their furniture, were not sufficient any more. At the end of the Middle Ages joiners and turners joined in furnishing the home, to say nothing of potters and smiths who had already been turning out objects for the inhabitants of wooden houses. With the professional craftsmen supplying goods, construction with the help of relatives and neighbours directed by a jack-of-all-trades peasant came to an end, although unskilled labour continued to be provided by the family for whom the house was being built. The house erected for money became a kind of investment. Lasting works serving more than one generation changed the village-scape in the closing years of the Middle Ages. This change was also underlain by the economic stability of the villages. In Western and Central Europe no village had existed for more than three or four generations before the 12th—13th centuries. They were destroyed by natural disasters, declining crops, or by attacking soldiers. However the villages inhabited by serfs survived, in theory, for several centuries and about half of them have been inhabited since their foundation. The peasant house turned into immovable property. Dwelling houses had previously often been taken apart and re-erected when the inhabitants moved or simply sold as timber. This was allowed by law. The situation began to change in the towns as early as the dawn of the Middle Ages but was only completed after the great wave of urbanization in the 13th century. From the south, beyond the Alps, the custom of erecting stone buildings spread northwards. Adaptation to the natural environment was replaced by the strategy of accumulating wealth. It is a typically bourgeois feature of creating a civilization. Peasants only began to embrace this tradition before modern times, at the time of the Industrial Revolution. However all this only ensued in those parts of Europe where economic and social communication crossed the limits that had prevailed for millennia and became intercontinental. However changes on the peripheries were late by eight to ten generations and only began when driven by the energy of the huge tectonic movements of modern industrial society. The abudance of wood, and the decisive role of the conditions of proprietorship and liege lord - liege man relations, particularly in Eastern Europe, put off until our days the solution of the problem for which the wooden house gave an elementary, i.e., family-size framework: the cause of economic reproduction at peasant family level.