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.)
lages. and regions. However, they were mostly determined by the lifestyle of the inhabitants. They reflected a rural way of life, equally characteristic of peasants and the majority of noblemen. From the eighteenth century onwards, inventories of estates, testaments of noblemen, and contemporary descriptions, bear witness to the financial and technical background of the construction of noble homes. From these sources we get information also about their arrangement, furniture, textiles, and utensils. Similar sources offer information about the houses and farm-buildings of the peasantry. It turns out that building materials, the form and arrangement of dwelling houses and farm-buildings, and their furniture were very similar or even identical in most cases. In 1832 Plánder Ferenc wrote of the area called Göcsej in Southwestern Hungary the following: „Landowners in the northern part of Göcsej, who do not care for the future or their grandchildren, have cleared their forests to a degree that there are but a few birch-trees and dwarf pines in the place of the woods where their grandfathers used to cut timber and fire-wood." This description was unfortunately valid for other regions of the country as well. „Being good carpenters, the inhabitants of Göcsej generally make all kinds of buildings themselves. Their houses, stables, large barns, and other farm-houses are made of the best fir coated with tar," Plánder continues. Writing about the region called Őrség in Vas County, Nemesnépi Zakál, György remarked in 1818 that „houses are built by the people of Őrség of wood..." Where timber was scarce, even landed nobles lived in houses „built of wicker-work on a timber support ". The documents of the age like records and lists of damages by fire, reveal that the serfs and cotters of the period also lived mostly in houses of wattle smeared or strengthened with loam. In the early nineteenth century, villages in Western Transdanubia were invariably characterized by houses with so-called smoky kitchens and rooms with tile stoves. Even well-to-do peasants and several noble families lived in 18
