Cseri Miklós, Füzes Endre (szerk.): Ház és ember, A Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum évkönyve 8. (Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 1992)

KNÉZY JUDIT: Kisnemesi bútor-jobbágyparaszti bútor a Dél-Dunántúlon (A 16. század végétől az 1850-es évekig)

Judit Knézy FURNITURE FOR PEASANTS AND FOR THE LESSER NOBILITY FROM THE END OF THE 16TH CENTURY TO THE BEGINNING OF THE 19TH Based on rare Hungarian inventories made in a few forts in Southern Transdanubia during the 16th century, then on the more abundant records concerning furniture in the second half of the 18th and the early years of the 19th century, the author suggests that the differences between the furniture used by petty noble and peasant families can be outlined. She then proceeds to analyze some fort inventories and records of litigious matters dating from the time of the Turkish occupation of Hungary in the 16th and 17th centuries, then again records of lawsuits, inventories, auction reports, set price schedules and materials concerning proceedings at manorial courts of the following period. The fort inventories do not cast light on the usual furniture of either a noble or of a peasant home. They only make mention of the strictly necessary means of sitting, lying, and storage, plus tables. Only the captain's room, or that of the steward was a little more lavishly furnished. An inventory taken in Zalaegerszeg in 1587 included a sideboard, a cabinet ("almárium"), and a round table. According to the inventories drawn up of the property of less affluent noblemen living in Southern Transdanubia in the middle of the 18th century the round table, canopy bed, and sideboard were characteristic pieces just like the bedclothes (pillow- and cushion-slips, feather bedding covers, and different sheets), which were of better quality and higher variety than those used by serfs. Quilts and table carpets could not be found in a peasant's home even later. Corner benches with the pertaining arrangement of furniture do not seem to have been characteristic of the rooms of noble families; they usually appeared in their employees' homes and in the vineyard cellars. Better-to-do noblemen, eneposessionatus in the Latin of those days, often had four-poster beds with curtain, round, tall, and compound tables, chairs upholstered in leather, a settee, weapons and pictures of the family and on patriotic subjects on the walls, various clocks and fancy textiles. Some types of furniture, commonly found in the rooms of lesser noble families during the 18th—19th centuries, would also appear in peasant houses later. Some pieces - e. g., the tall turned round table, desk, leather- and textile-covered chairs, in most places even the four-poster bed - never became part of the traditional set of peasant furniture in Southern Transdanubia. Others, like the wardrobe and the chest-of-drawers came much later. The carpenters' price lists, like the ones from Somogy County for 1775 and 1793, give incomplete data and even those only for certain pieces of furniture. The price of a bed, chair, cradle or chest was subject to its material, and execution: whether it was sawn or turned, painted or unpainted, ornamented or unadorned, reinforced or not. We have to draw on other sources to find out what clientele these carpenters worked for. Interior decoration in the homes of well-off craftsmen, many of whom were German, was not much below that of the gentry at the end of the 18th century and in the early years of the 19th

. Based on inventories of peasant properties taken in Somogy county and on dated pieces it can be stated that around the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries furniture, painted black, was known in many villages in the northern half of the County (Nagyberek and Northern-Outer-Somogy). In the German villages of the County blue furniture was preferred. At the time Outer-Somogy was more advanced in respect of interior decoration (including household textiles) than the western and southern parts of the County. The so-called "nice room" (the room for receiving visitors) developed so the room-kitchenroom ground plan arrangement became common. Hewn chests could only be found in the pantry or in the room of the very poor and, side by side with the generally used sawn and painted chest appeared the chest-of-drawers and the wardrobe in the nice rooms. The German inhabitants of the county also had two-door wardrobes by then. An example is the one dated 1833 found in Ecseny, a village of cotters. Hewn chests were replaced by carpenter-made sawn and painted ones in the western and southern parts of Somogy County during the Age of Reforms (1825-48). The process is obvious when we look at the dowry chests, most of which were made by a carpenter and dated between 1830 and 1850. At the same time even some of the hewn chests were dated. In the earlier half of the 19th century the corner bench was typical of the room of peasant houses all over Somogy County.