Urbs - Magyar várostörténeti évkönyv 1. (Budapest, 2006)
Abstracts
German parish) reveals that immigrants from distant regions had a remarkably good chance to get admitted as burgher in Pozsony. Yet, the traditional norm to acquire the burghers' rights among the male heads of households decreased considerably and continuously from the 1820s: whereas practically all bridegrooms coming from the established Lutheran burgher families became burghers sooner or later, the majority of all the marrying men did not. A few examples of rejected applicants and the approval of the repeated applications of such people in a much later period prove both the reluctance of the council to grant these rights and the insistence of the town-dwellers on getting admitted as burghers. Finally, the article analyses the history of six Lutheran burgher families, whose ancestors migrated into Pozsony in the decades along 1800 and transmitted with more or less success their social status to their descendants. PÁL BELUSZKY (Former) Free Royal Towns in the Urban Network during the Dualism The conditions of town growth and urbanisation radically changed by the advent of the bourgeois age (1848). Among the main factors leading to this shift, the lapse of the privileged legal status of settlements, the emergence of "free competition" in their development, the effect that the establishment of civil administration had upon the settlement network, the incursion of manufacturing industry, the revolution of transport, etc must be emphasised. However, the towns and the urban network proved to be fairly stable in Hungary, although the fall or - contrarily - the rise of some towns was spectacular. We can not speak about the change of the urban network; in Hungary the previous towns undergo a modernisation, feudal towns disposing of more favourable conditions shifted to capitalist urban development. At the end of the period, the legal status of the fcudalistic era could hardly reflect the economic, social, administrative and cultural impact of the towns. Thus, free royal towns formed a very heterogeneous group in the first half of the nineteenth century considering their central function (rank), economic importance, the number of their population etc. In fact, this large group of towns included on one hand country-wide and regional centres (Pest, Buda, Pozsony/Bratislava-Slovakia, Kolozs vár/ClujNapoca-Rumania, Győr, Kassa/Kosice-Slovakia etc.). On the other hand also towns, like Ruszt (Rust, Austria), Libetbánya (Lubietova,Slovakia), Szentgyörgy (Jur pri Bratislave, Slovakia) that did not or scarcely fulfilled any urban functions belonged to it. At the same time, in the middle of the nineteenth century the country had a large number of settlements, whose urban role and position in the urban hierarchical rank exceeded those of some free royal towns by far. Consequently, the starter position of free royal towns was veiy different at the beginning of the bourgeois age (table 3.).
