Bánkiné Molnár Erzsébet: Nemesi közbirtokosságok a Kővár-vidéken. Vallomásos összeírás 1803-ból - Monumenta Muzeologica 1. (Kecskemét, 2007)

Kővár was a baronial castle built after the Mongol invasion of Hungary (1241-1242), bestowed by king Louis the Great to Balk, Wallachian voivod. From 1608 the castle became the hereditary estate of Gábor Báthory, prince of Transylvania. In the district organised around the castle, in the area located between the Szamos and Lápos rivers, in the valley of the Lápos river, a considerable number of people lived, members of such layers of the society as free peasants and the lower nobility, who rendered the castle military and other services, and were granted various privileges and rights in return. It was from the year 1615 that the castle and the neighbouring area - as a district having specific rights -had been declared by the Parliament of Transylvania an estate of the Exchequer. At the same time it was enacted by law that the prince did not have the right to bestow the estate of the Exchequer on somebody by "jure perpetuo", but only in the legal way called "inscriptio". The legal action "inscriptio" meant that the beneficiary of the bestowal was granted the landed estate as a precisely identified and fix amount of money, and the beneficiary was only entitled to use it freely, not to pass it on to anybody else. After the defeat of the war of independence lead by Rákóczi, the castle was laid in ruins upon the order of Rabutin. The estates of the Exchequer were bestowed on the Teleki-family as a compensation for the sum of 45,000 florins they had lent to king Leopold I. However, the right of redemption was retained by the Exchequer, since the monarch was not entitled to bestow the landed estates of the Exchequer as hereditary estates, he was only allowed to put these estates in pawn. The right of redemption concerning the estates in the Kővár district was bestowed on the Teleki-family by the queen Maria Theresa in 1780, as the payment for the accrued interest on the sometime loan. The grant was of extraordinary importance for the Teleki-family, but it collided with the interests of the free landowners of the region. What we know is that the list, now published in an abbreviated and summarized form, was compiled in 1803 on the basis of the testimonies made by witnesses, and it was made for the purpose of protecting the rights of the Exchequer, which were in fact taken for granted by the Teleki-family as if they had been their own rights. These testimonies provide the description of pieces of land located in the villages which had been part of the Teleki-estates for a very long time, but in which villages there were other landowners too, noblemen, who owned some pieces of land which they had somehow acquired, and who belonged to the group of public landowners. The landlord's estate was equally prohibited territory for both the noblemen and the peasants living in the village. But 257