Takács Péter (szerk.): A jobbágylét dokumentumai az úrbérrendezés kori Szatmár vármegye Nyíri járásából - A nyíregyházi Jósa András Múzeum kiadványai 66. (Nyíregyháza, 2010)

A jobbágylét dokumentumai az úrbérrendezés kori Szatmár vármegye Nyíri járásából

the county assembly to the villages and the market towns. It was recited at the village assemblies, and a copy was handed over to the village judge.

After the proclamation of the Terrier, the relationship between the landlord and the village was theoretically determined by this document.

In Szatmár county, 26-28-30 or 32 Hungarian hold (14 to 18 hectares) arable lands, depending of the quality of the soil, 8-20 or 12 units of meadow (that could be mowed by a single person) had to be measured to a whole unit of plot. There were, however, few people, who used a whole unit of plot. In Szatmár county, most of the villains lived on a half or a quarter of a unit of a plot. If he needed more grain than could be cultivated on it, he cultivated a part of the manorial or allodial lands of the landlord. In this case, he did not have to pay tax to the state and the county and tithe to the church.

The customs nearly always overwrote the relationship determined by the regulation. The landlords did not demand the ninth from the products of the socage tenure. Few of them asked the rent for the plats. They preferred them doing corvée. They preferred them to plough and sow in the manorial or the allodial fields in the value of the third or the half of the crop. It also happened that despite the regulation accomplished by in the middle of the 1770’s, the services determined in the Urbárium were actually adopted only in the middle of the 1820’s.

The importance of the socage tenure regulation lies in the fact that it afforded the calculation of the domestic tax income that could be spent for the maintenance of the permanent army that was organised to raise the power of the Hapsburg dynasty and other expenses of the treasury. On the other hand, it stopped the excess corvée demanded from the villains, especially in Transdanubia, and the annexation of the lands used by the serfs to the manorial lands. But it left the serfs in subjugation as God had foreordained.

The severest consequence was that it hindered that the lands of the villains and the peasants could be harmonised with the population growth. It did more than banning the manorial abuse. At the liberation of the villains in 1848, the peasants were allowed to posses no more lands than registered in the Tabellae by the socage tenure regulation commissioners in the early 1770’s.

With determining the sizes of the plots and the fixing of the plot ratios, the socage tenure regulation hampered in every village and market town that the growing number of peasants could use as much lar d in the form of socage tenures as they could cultivate with their increasing diligence. It set in action the re-allotment of fields accompanied with rows and local revolts.

We cannot evaluate here the socage tenure regulation. The discussion of the historical and social questions raised by it is also not a proper topic in a source edition. The published sources bear historical truth only in relation to the settlements and inhabitants of the Nyír district of Szatmár county. They are not sufficient to illustrate the national characteristics. But they reveal more than many other sources about the life and the economy of the inhabitants of the fifty villages of the district.

First they tell that the socage tenure regulation was introduced at a conspicuously inconvenient time in the Nyir district. The population had not yet recovered from the Turkish occupation, the contention between the Transylvanian princes and the Hungarian kings,

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