Urbs - Magyar várostörténeti évkönyv 1. (Budapest, 2006)

Abstracts

served its role in this process well into the Early Modern period. Thus the sources are rather sporadic and incomplete. In Sopron up to 1535, there are only occasional entries of new burghers in the so-called "Burgerbuechl und Ächtbüchl", which was in fact a town-book with very mixed contents, some similar entries in other town books (Gerichtsbuch and Gedenkbuch), plus a few certificates of honest birth and proper conduct. Nevertheless, it can be seen that the town council, similarly to other towns of Europe, showed some flexibility in the treatment of the conditions of admission. Among these, beside the material criteria (house-ownership, admission fee, later on birth certificate and a letter of release from their previous lords), swearing an oath to the council played an important role. The formulas of such an oath have been preserved both for the full-right burghers and for the tenants. In order to reach a desirable constituency of burghers, the authorities could modify these obligations even on an individual basis. In the instances when one can follow the later careers of the new burghers, those who were required to pay a higher fee seem to have integrated better and more durably into the urban community than their poorer fellow-citizens. The sporadic references do not allow for a thorough analysis of the occupations and places of origin of the newly admitted burghers, but the data show that a high number of them were craftsmen, and that the most important recruitment areas were the villages owned by the town. In the last part of the article I pose a few general questions that reach beyond the analysed primary source material. Firstly: was it attractive for the inhabitants of Sopron and other Hungarian towns to become burghers and thus take up long-term obligations, or was the status of a burgher a rather burdensome one which they tried to avoid? Secondly: how did the changing conditions of admission regulate the circle of burghers, and what kind of rules were applied in the cases of those who did not acquire full burghers' rights although they possessed property in the town, namely women, clerics, and Jews? Thirdly: was there a time lag or other differences concerning the regulation and administration of the admission process between Hungarian and other European towns? And finally: in the last few decades, urban research has paid more emphasis on the functional than on the legal definition of towns. Should this shift influence our concept of burghers as well? Should one create a more functional definition of this term? ISTVÁN H. NÉMETH The Status of Free Royal Town in the Early Modern Period The study investigates the position of towns within the feudal society, and those significant features that had an impact on the status of free royal town. The study confirms the outstanding importance of this status for the given settlement since through the