Balázs György (szerk.): The abolition of serfdom and its impact on rural culture, Guide to the Exhibition Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Revolution and War if Independence of 1848-49 (Budapest-Szentendre, Museum of Hungarian Agriculture-Hungarian Open-Air Museum, 1998.)

agriculture based on the free ownership of land and modern crop rotation in Western Europe (in England, the Low Countries, and certain German principalities). In Hungary the centuries-old traditional order and self-supporting character of peasant economy had been determined by feudal Market at Pest in the first half of the 19th century land ownership, a major characteristic feature of which was the common use of the land by village communities. Arable land was cultivated in a two or three-field system

, which meant that part of the land was left uncultivated (fallow) every second or every third year. This type of cultivation postulated a set community form of farming. Arable land was divided into two or three parts (calcaturae), one of which lay fallow from the harvest to the summer of the following year. Then it was broken up and used as a pasture. In Hungary the three-field system proved the more profitable of the two in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. One third of the plough-land was sown with wintercorn, one third with spring-corn, and one was used as a pasture till John's Day (26 June). Then it was ploughed and sown with winter-corn. From the early nineteenth century the fallow was not let rest at most places but sown with fodder-plants and hoed plants. 10