Urbs - Magyar várostörténeti évkönyv 3. (Budapest, 2008)

Abstracts

grave material burdens for the remaining non-noble burghers, since the tax burden of the towns were divided between a lesser number of households. In the mentioned three towns the noblemen — refusing the authority of the burgher magistrate - organised themselves into a separate local government. As a consequence in the towns actually two legally completely separated communities lived together. However, the nobility of our market towns were not at all uniform. Their nobility can be quite well separable into a town nobility (the members of which have county and estate offices, characteristically having also tenant lands) and noble burghers (who outside their burgher plots and outside lands did not have any other lands, who often lived from work done by their two hands). Exploiting the situation of the pauperized inhabitants primarily certain more significant town noblemen purchased a significant part of the lands that were located in the border area of the market towns. This further deepened societal inequality. These influential noblemen by merging several urban plots established for themselves residential houses made of stone, built parallel to the side of the road, which were much larger than the traditional ones. This changed the view of the town. As a result of this the society of the towns changed significantly compared to the status of the beginning of the century - which probably reflects well the relations of the 14—16th centuries. KÁROLY GODA The sociology of power: leading public groups in fifteenthand sixteenth-century Sopron The two main political leaders (judge and mayor) of the late fifteenth- and early sixteenm-century Sopron enjoyed a growing political influence and additional financial benefits. As a result, the members of the urban community - involved in various economic activities including cereal and grape production - strifed for the positions in form of a competition, in which the burghers originating from Austrian towns took and active and successful part. Concerning the quantitative distribution of office-holding periods of the judges and mayors, different groups of burghers headed the town for two or three decades according to the intensity of their presence in the urban government. The analysis clearly showed that there was a growing tendency towards concentration of political authority within the circle of two or three burghers ruling together or alone. Nevertheless, the loss of a dominant role within one or two generations was a characteristic feature on the personal level, especially in the first half of the studied period. In some cases the break in urban role happened because a potential