Kecskés Péter (szerk.): Upper Tisza region (Regional Units of Open Air Museum. Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 1980)

1. LAND AND MAN

of houses was the same (50), 38 being nobles' houses, thus their proportion was 76%. This means that the majority of these nobles had not even a single serf, possibly not even a cotter. The soil was of poor quality and also difficult to till. The holdings usually amounted to about 20—50 hectares (a Hungarian „hold" equaling 0,57 hectares) generally, not even the size of an average serf's lot. The most wealthy had an estate of 80—90 „hold" and farmed with a few serfs, cotters at such a level that had been long passed by the well-to-do peasant. It was this nobility of a provincial, even a peasant style-of-life, who led the political struggle for progress in the Reform period, making the county meeting a forum for progressive political movements. Yet these very same nobles clung to their conservative feudal traditions in the field of economic life, instead of modernizing their agriculture wished to keep up at least the resemblance of their noble state. In their architecture, furniture and clothing they endeavoured to imitate the bourgeois fashion of more wealthy nobles. To preserve their mere existance and defend themselves against the rapid diminution of their fortune, some noble families were even forced to agree to marriages with well-to-do peasant families as early as the turn of the 18th

—19th century. This had the result of many customs and objects of noble origin being diffused among the peasants, which led to class distinctions between nobles and peasants tending to cease in such as clothing and domestic interior. Not only did peasant families acquire objects of noble origin, they took over the noble outlook on life, becoming more conservative by the second half of the 19th century. By the end of that century, in the period of capitalism, the clinging to feudal traditions made not only the views of the nobles, but even of the peasantry anacronistic. Production and consumption Whilst during the period of Turkish occupation it was advantageous to live in an isolated region, this became all the more disadvantageous in the second half of the 19th century and hindered the trade the country's economic revival. From the end of the 18th centurion, western European countries bought Hungarian wheat almost limitlessly. In consequence of the boom in wheat, prosperity rose in and around the estates of Wes9