The Eighth Tribe, 1978 (5. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1978-10-01 / 10. szám
October, 1978 THE EIGHTH TRIBE Page 7 Book Review on: HUNGARIANS IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA: A BIBLIOGRAPHY By Ruth Bíró Compiled and edited by Joseph Széplaki, with a foreword by Steven Bela Vardy and published by the Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, 1977. This work is the second bibliography in the Ethnic Bibliography Series to be issued by the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. As the book’s subtitle indicates, this bibliography represents the holdings of the Immigration History Research Center. Although the title implies a narrow treatment of the subject, the bibliography is worldwide in its perspective. Publication was made possible through assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockerfeller Foundation, the Minnesota Hungarians, and Dr. Louis Szathmary. Mr. Széplaki has previously compiled numerous bibliographies pertaining to Hungarian subjects and has documented important resources of value to scholars examining Hungarian-American topics. This recent bibliography, Hungarians in the United States and Canada: A Bibliography, is recognized as another step by Mr. Széplaki to record Hungarian materials and can be seen as a first attempt to document the holdings of one of the most important archival collections in the United States for Hungarian resources of this type. In the foreword to this volume, Dr. Vardy, of Duquesne University, notes that ethnic studies have suffered from a lack of bibliographies concerning important immigrant groups. This listing of over 900 items in fourteen major categories contains the basic bibliographic data for each entry. Sub-THE MAGYARS IN HISTORY by S. B. Vardy, Ph.D. Professor of History — continued — CHAPTER XIX HUNGARIAN SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN THE AGE OF PATRIMONIAL KINGDOM (Social and Economic Developments in the Eleventh and the Twelfth Centuries) As we have seen earlier (Ch. VII), the society of the conquering Magyars was already a complex one, with a number of well-defined social classes. Yet, it was still far from a feudal society, which is made up of legally separated classes. Mobility from one class to another wa3 still comparatively easy, and the great majority of the people were in the category of “free men.” The gradual disintegration of the tribal system in the tenth century, and the revolutionary changes introduced by King St. Stephen and his successor in the eleventh and twelfth centuries naturally altered the make-up of Hungarian society. These changes made it ever more complex and polarized, and also moved it in the direction of the West European model (the “feudal society”). Even so, during the two centuries following the Christianization of the Magyars, the majority of them remained personally free. During the same period slavery had also mostly disappeared, and the majority of the people below the emerging “nobility” came to be divided into three distinct classes: the freemen (liberi), the freedmen (libertini) composed of ex-slaves, and the socalled “servants” (servi), the latter of whom were probably in the socioeconomic category of early serfdom. The majority of the people in these three classes were agricultural workers referred to in contemporary documents as “plowmen” (aratores). (Hóman: Magy. tört., I, 280-324; Molnár: Magy. tört., I, 62-75.) Agriculture Although the Magyars had practiced agriculture long before the Árpádian conquest of Hungary in the late ninth century, stock breeding and rotational grazing still appears to have dominated much of Hungarian economy even as late as the second half of the eleventh century. Thus, a sizable portion of the population still alternated regularly be-113
