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Walking the Boundaries between Modernity and Tradition: Perambulation and ‘Beating the Bounds’ in Nineteenth-Century Hungary

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Walking Histories, 1800-1914

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Abstract

Gray shows how walking was crucial in producing and defining the limits of the peasant world of nineteenth-century Hungary. Through the traditional practice of beating the bounds, the space defined by everyday use became ingrained in local memory and customary law. Yet, as part of the overhaul of Hungary’s traditional rural society during the long nineteenth century, new practices of surveying, mapping and measuring threatened to supplant these traditional practices. Gray shows how beating the bounds retained its authority, acting as a more accurate reflection of local practice and expectations than maps, surveys and registers, and thus ensuring traditional borders were accounted for within the new legal boundaries produced by reform.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Borsod–Abaúj–Zemplén Megyei Leveltár (Borsod–Abaúj–Zemplén County Archives, Miskolc, Hungary, hereafter BAZCA), IV.501/e, Borsodi vármegye nemési közgyűlési iratai, közgyűlési és törvényiszéki iratok, 1820 évi 494 sz.

  2. 2.

    A puszta, which literally translates as ‘devastated, deserted or abandoned’, was an area of open, uncultivated land often used as pasture or meadow. Such land was once the site of a village but had since been abandoned, most commonly during the frequent wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Hungary was fought over by the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Rather than being permanently resettled, these pusztas were utilized by peasants from neighbouring villages. Additionally, the ‘Puszta’ refers to the flat, steppe-like landscape of the Great Hungarian Plain, which itself had been largely abandoned as a consequence of the struggle between Habsburgs and Ottomans.

  3. 3.

    The határ refers to lands attached to a particular village, formed from the individual peasant plots whether these were held and farmed as distinct, separate units or collectively in open fields, together with any communal buildings such as a church, inn, mill or school. The határ formed the basic unit of rural administration, governed by a village council which oversaw the farming of the land and ensured all taxes and dues owed by the villages were paid. As will become apparent, however, exactly where one határ ended and another began, or what was and was not to be included within the borders of a határ, was far from certain.

  4. 4.

    BAZCA, IV.501/e, Borsodi vármegye nemési közgyűlési iratai, közgyűlési és törvényiszéki iratok, 1820 évi 504 sz.

  5. 5.

    Ibid.

  6. 6.

    Lajos Rácz, Magyarország környezettörténete az újkorig (Budapest, 2008), 39–45; Lajos Rácz, ‘The Price of Survival: Transformations in Environmental Conditions and Subsistence in Hungary in the Age of Ottoman Occupation’, Hungarian Studies, 24(1) (2010), 21–39.

  7. 7.

    See, for example, the similar case of Atány, Heves county, detailed so evocatively in Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer, Proper Peasants: Traditional Life in a Hungarian Village (Chicago, 1969).

  8. 8.

    István Orosz, ‘Az alföldi mezővárosi parasztság termelési eljárásai a XVIII. században és a XIX. század első felében’, Arany János Múzeum Közleményei, 4 (1984), 403–28; Lájos Rácz, ‘A tanyarendszer kialakulása’, in Ferenc Pölöskei and György Szabad (eds), A magyar tanyarendszer múltja (Budapest, 1980), 97–148.

  9. 9.

    There are many variations of these two basic forms, and a vast literature has been produced by Hungarian historians and ethnographers in the search for a distinct, ‘Magyar-type’ settlement. See, for example, István Györffy, Magyar falu, magyar ház (Budapest, 1943); István Szabó, A falurendszer kialakulása Magyarországon (X–XV. század) (Budapest, 1966); Kálmán Eperjessy, A magyar falu története (Budapest, 1966); Tamás Hofer, ‘Déldunántúl településformáinak történetéhez’, Ethnographia, 66 (1955), 125–86; Tamás Hofer, ‘Agro-Town Regions of Peripheral Europe: The Case of the Great Hungarian Plain’, Ethnologia Europaea, 17(1) (1987), 69–95.

  10. 10.

    John Komlos, ‘The Emancipation of the Hungarian Peasantry and Agricultural Development’, in Ivan Volgyes (ed.), The Peasantry of Eastern Europe, Volume 1: Roots and Rural Transitions (New York and Oxford, 1979), 11–13; Klara T. Merey, A somogyi parasztság útja a feudalizmusból a kapitalizmusba (Budapest, 1965), 7–21; Imre Wellmann, A magyar mezőgazdaság a XVIII. században (Budapest, 1979), 11–20.

  11. 11.

    István Balogh, Tanyák és majorok Békés megyében a XVIII–XIX. században (Gyula, 1961), 5–7. This region of Békés county, like much of the Great Plain and, to a lesser extent, the area around Szirma, was subject to frequent inundations, with as much as three-quarters of the land lying under water for part of the year. See Rácz, Magyarország környezettörténete, 199–205, 233–6.

  12. 12.

    János Varga, A jobbágyi földbirtoklás típusai és problémai, 1767–1849 (Budapest, 1967), 115–16, 128; Gyula Benda, Statistikai adatok a magyar mezőgazdaság történetéhez, 1767–1848 (Budapest, 1973), 99–103, 173. This calculation includes plough-land, meadow, gardens, vineyards and some pasture, but excludes the great extent of open pastures formed from the pusztas.

  13. 13.

    Magyar Országos Leveltár (Hungarian National Archives, Budapest, hereafter MOL), D.1, Közepkóri oklevelek gyűjteménye. 6390 sz.

  14. 14.

    As the Ottomans were pushed out of Hungary the largely protestant nobility of eastern Hungary and Transylvania rose up against the Catholic Habsburgs in two wars during 1678–81 and 1703–11. Led by two Transylvanian Princes, Imre Thököly and then Ferenc Rákóczki II, these rebellions sought to reestablish the independent medieval kingdom of Hungary as it had existed before the Hungarian defeat at Mohács in 1526. Rákóczi’s eventual defeat and the subsequent Peace of Szatmár (1711) led to Hungary being integrated into the Habsburg Monarchy as a semi-autonomous kingdom. See, for example, László Kontler, A History of Hungary: Millennium in Central Europe (Basingstoke, 2002), 181–90; Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy 1618–1815 (Cambridge, 1994), 73–81, 111–20.

  15. 15.

    MOL, E. 156, A Magyar Kamara archivuma: urbaria et conscriptiones, fasc. 54, nr. 15.

  16. 16.

    BAZCA, IV.501/b, Borsodi vármegye nemési közgyűlési iratai, Acta politica, mat III, fasc. I, nr. 128.

  17. 17.

    For the completion of Bél’s Notitia, see Gyula Tóth, ‘Introduction’, in Matyás Bél, Notitia Hungariae novae historico geographica, Volume 1: Comitatus Arvensis et Comitatus Trentsiniensis, ed., trans. and annotated Gyula Tóth et al. (Budapest, 2011), 23–9.

  18. 18.

    Matyás Bél, ‘Leirása Szirmáról és környékéről’, in Matyás Bél, Notitia Hungariae, 110–13.

  19. 19.

    Lajos Rácz, The Steppe to Europe: An Environmental History of Hungary in the Traditional Age (Cambridge, 2013), 182–6, 192–200.

  20. 20.

    Eperjessy, A magyar falu története, 7–11.

  21. 21.

    Fél and Hofer, Proper Peasants, 56–8, 86–93, 170–2, 336–8.

  22. 22.

    MOL, C. 59 III/b, Az úrbéri ügyosztály iratai 1783–1848, fasc. 181, Egyedi ügyek: az allodialissá nyilvanított paraszti telek 1803, nr. 164.

  23. 23.

    Lajos Takács, Határjelek, határjárás a feudális kor végén Magyarországon (Budapest, 1987), 165–6.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., 28–95.

  25. 25.

    Martyn Rady, ‘Judicial Organization and Decision Making in Old Hungary’, Slavonic and East European Review, 90(3) (2012), 450–81, at 454–60.

  26. 26.

    Takács, Határjelek, 119–20.

  27. 27.

    Ibid., 151–2. For similar cases, see Lajos Takács, Egy irtásfalu földművelése (Budapest, 1976), 41–6.

  28. 28.

    For this distinction between ‘place’ and ‘space’, see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1984), 117–29; Allan Pred, Place, Practice and Structure: Social and Spatial Transformation in Southern Sweden: 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1986), 5–31.

  29. 29.

    Nicholas Blomley, ‘Law, Property and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93(1) (2003), 121–41, at 122–3; Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose, ‘Taking Butler Elsewhere: Performativities, Spatialities and Subjectivities’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18(4) (2000), 433–52.

  30. 30.

    The idea of a ‘spatial order’, now increasingly adopted amongst historians, has here been adapted from Elizabeth Grosz and, in turn, from Foucault. See Elizabeth A. Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York and London, 1995), 103–4; Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16(1) (1986), 22–7. See also Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, Thinking Space (New York and London, 2000), 7–13; Alan R. H. Baker, Geography and History: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge, 2003), 45–71.

  31. 31.

    Jozsef Laszlovszky, ‘Space and Place: Text and Object. Human Interaction and Topographical Studies’, in Jozsef Laszlovszky and Peter Szabó (eds), People and Nature in Historical Perspective (Budapest, 2003), 86–90.

  32. 32.

    Árpád Papp-Váry and Pál Hrenkó, Magyarország régi térképen (Budapest, 1989), 92–119; Robert J. W. Evans, ‘Essay and Reflection: Frontiers and National Identities in Central Europe’, International History Review, 14(3) (1992), 480–502, at 486–94.

  33. 33.

    A legislative institution in the (medieval) Hungarian kingdom.

  34. 34.

    Varga, A jobbágyi földbirtoklás, 11–32; Robert W. Gray, ‘Bringing the Law Back In: Land, Law and the Hungarian Peasantry before 1848’, Slavonic and East European Review, 91(3) (2013), 511–34.

  35. 35.

    Zita Horváth, Paraszti vallomások Zalában: A Mária Terézia-kori úrbérrendezés kilenc kérdőpontos vizsgálata Zala megye három járásában (Zalaegerszeg, 2001), 12–29; Zita Horváth, ‘Örökös és szabadmenetelű jobbágyok a 18. századi Magyarországon’, Századok, 143 (2000), 1063–71.

  36. 36.

    Robert J. W. Evans, ‘Maria Theresa and Hungary’, in Robert J. W. Evans, Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs: Central Europe c.1683–1867 (Oxford, 2006), 20–2; Franz A. J. Szabo, Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism 1753–1780 (Cambridge, 1974), 320–8; Dezső Szabó, ‘A megyék ellenállása Mária Terézia úrbéri rendeletével szemben’, Értekezések a történeti tudományok köréből, 25 (1934), 20–35.

  37. 37.

    For the emergence of surveys and maps as a challenge to the customary construction of landscapes, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998), esp. 22–47.

  38. 38.

    See Gray, ‘Bringing the Law Back In’; Robert W. Gray, ‘Land Reform and the Hungarian Peasantry, c.1700–1848’ (PhD thesis, University College London, 2009).

  39. 39.

    BAZCA, IV.501/b, mat XXII fasc. I, nr. 148.

  40. 40.

    BAZCA, IV.501/c, Bejegyzett törvényszéki iratok, Acta judicialia protocollata, XI, fasc. IV, nr. 415.

  41. 41.

    Similar rejections were common throughout Hungary, particularly in those areas that had fallen under Ottoman occupation. Zita Horváth, in a survey of nine Hungarian counties, estimated that between 35 and 40 per cent of villages refused to submit to the urbarial patent and instead chose to retain their customary contractualis arrangements. In Borsod county, where Szirma lay, this figure reached 92 per cent. Horváth, ‘Örökös és szabadmenetelű jobbágyok’, 1087–103.

  42. 42.

    BAZCA, IV.501/e, 1837 évi 1950 sz.

  43. 43.

    BAZCA, VII.1/c, Törvényszéki iratok: az úrbéri törvényszék iratai, Szirma sz. N.

  44. 44.

    Tim Ingold, ‘Footprints through the Weather-World: Walking, Breathing, Knowing’, in Trevor Marchand (ed.), Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relation between Mind, Body and Environment (Chichester, 2010), 115–32. See also Nigel Rapport and Mark Harris, ‘A Discussion Concerning Ways of Knowing’, in Mark Harris (ed.), Ways of Knowing: New Approaches in the Anthropology of Experience and Learning (New York and Oxford, 2007), 306–30.

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  1. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

    Robert W. Gray

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  1. University of North Carolina at Chapel H, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

    Chad Bryant

  2. Department of History, King's College London, LONDON, United Kingdom

    Arthur Burns

  3. Department of History, King's College London, LONDON, United Kingdom

    Paul Readman

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Gray, R.W. (2016). Walking the Boundaries between Modernity and Tradition: Perambulation and ‘Beating the Bounds’ in Nineteenth-Century Hungary. In: Bryant, C., Burns, A., Readman, P. (eds) Walking Histories, 1800-1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48498-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48498-7_2

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