Maria Theresa's Urbarium of 1767

[K2]

The Urbarium of 1767 issued by Maria Theresa radically changed the rights of peasants in the Austrian Empire.  For the first time, the urbarial land rights of peasant farmers were defined and their feudal obligations to their lords was regulated.  A urbarial "census" was conducted in each village that showed the size of the each peasant's farm land for which he had the right to use.  The standard size of a farm for a given village was determined by the quality of land in that area.  These were called teleks or sessios.  A peasant might have rights to a whole or some fraction (1/2, 1/4, 1/8 etc) of a sessio.  The peasant's dues to his lord and the number of days he was required to work for his lord was determined by the size of the farm land he lived on and used. 

It is very interesting to see the census for your ancestor and learn about their property and their obligations.  I am trying to construct a translation template of the headings used in these censuses.  Most of the headings are straight forward and reflect the days of work required by each man and the amounts of things such as firewood, chickens, eggs, butter etc which he owed in addition to 1/9th of his crops.  But several of the headings are difficult to translate.  A literal translation of the words doe not provide what was meant.  Consequently, I would appreciate any help members of this forum can provide in understanding those headings.

I have attached examples of two village censuses because they are somewhat different. Rather than try to translate all the headings in this post, I'm going to start with just the first couple of columns.

1767 census headings:

kereszt és vezetéknevek=  first name and surname

jobbágy helynek minémösége     The ubarium established the size of a Telek (a sessio) which is a farm having a house, garden, barn, ploughable fields and grazing fields.  The size of the Telek depended on the quality of the land so it varied across the empire.  Farmers could “have use” of a whole sessio or a fraction of one (1/2, 1/4, 1/8 etc).  So I think that this heading maybe indicating the size of the sessio for a given farmer but I am not sure.

jobbágy helynek külső belső mivolta  Külső and belső refer to the location of the land.  The land around the house in the village and the land out of the town in the fields.  But I have no clue as to what the fractional numbers mean.

Pofoni mérőre való   I think this might be indicating some kind of quality measure.  “Pofoni” may actually be the Pozsony measuring system.  Pozsony is of course the old Hungarian name for Bratislava.

 

szántó föld, hold   This a measure of the number of “holds” of land that the peasant had under cultivation.  The official kataszteri hold or cadastral hold, used for land taxation, is 1600 square öl or about 0.5752 hectare (1.421 acres); this unit is equivalent to the Austrian joch.

rét, ember vágó   Not really sure what is meant here.  It definitely has something to do with reaping.  Perhaps it says how much land the peasant had as pasture or how many men it took to reap the pasture.

These first columns appear to be quantifying the size and description of the farmland.  Can anyone make sense of these headings in terms of the numbers in those columns?  I'll come back in another post with some of the other headings.

Carl

[Martin]

You have it right, Carl. First the two puzzlers, I'll add some more about context and the calculations, etc., in bits and pieces in separate posts (it boggles the mind how they calculated their obligations to the nobleman).

"Pofoni" may actually be the Pozsony measuring system

Exactly. It's not an -f-, but a "long s" used in writing in the more distant past. In essence, printers (as well as others) used "our" -s- at the end of a word and the long -s- inside or at the beginning. Both stood for the same sound, our [s]. Here's an example in a 1669 edition of Milton's Paradise Lost. And because Hungarian spelling uses the letter -s- to indicate what's pronounced [sh] in English and Slovak, the reference is, indeed, to Prešporok (historical Slovak), Pressburg (German), Pozsony (as it is spelled in Hungarian today).

The volume represented by the Pressburger Metzen (German) / Prešporská merica (Slovak) changed over time. During the time of Maria Theresa's Urbarium, it usually represented today's ca. 14 U.S. dry gallons (over 16 liquid gallons).

how many men it took to reap the pasture

Indeed. It was the size of the meadow(s) expressed in terms of the number of mowers (people, no machines then) needed to mow it in a day.

[K2]

Thanks Martin.  But I don't know what column two (the Pofoni mérőre való column) is telling us.  Notice in the document from Suvete, this column is always twice the size of the first column.  But in the Kun Taplocza document it varies in size and is not always double the first column.  But what does the number mean?

Supposedly, the Ubarium established the maximum number of days a lord could require a peasant farmer to work for him (known as the "robot").  The maximum work days for a farmer using a full sessio farm was set at 2 days labor per week (104 days a year).  This was cut in half to 1 day per week (52 days a year) if the farmer used draft animals to do the work.  The days required were then adjusted proportionately to the size of the farm.  As you can see in the documents, the days required to work on the lord's manor was adjusted by the fractional size of the sessio shown in column 1.  A 1/4 sized sessio required 13 days work with draft animals (column 5) or 26 days (column 6) if the work was done by hand alone.

Note that men who didn't have a farm and were just day laborers on the farms of others, still had a "robot" obligation to the lord.
Carl
 

[Martin]

what column two (the Pofoni mérőre való column) is telling us

Sure, let's take it by columns, we'll get to the above in the corresponding post.

The size of a farm.
 

a sessio, which is a farm having a house, garden, barn, ploughable fields and grazing fields

Yes. Better call the last ones meadows: a lot of them were a source of hay, i.e., no grazing. Incidentally, a village usually had communal pastures. It would often hire a cowherd, who would drive everyone's cattle to the pasture in the morning and back to their farmyards in the evening.

The Urbarium listed the number of sessios, which was a measure whose size, as you say, Carl, "depended on the quality of the land so it varied across" the kingdom. The size of a farm could be several sessios or a fraction of a sessio, which hints at the relative wealth of the farms in a village, but is not readily convertible to a quantifier more comprehensible for us today.

Those who owned 1/8th of a sessio, taken to be the smallest size to sustain a modest household, or more were seen as farmers. Those with less were želiars (cotters), some of whom had a house and land inside the village, and some of whom were houseless. The former were typically obligated to 18 days a year of robota in the nobleman's fields, the latter usually to 12 days of robota.

With her Urbarium, Empress Maria Theresa wanted to set the upper limit of robota (work in the nobleman's fields) to 104 per year, reduced to 52 days per year if the farmer used a draft animal. There was to be no higher obligation even if the size of a farm was larger than one sessio, while some of the wealthy farmers had farms the size of 10 sessios or more. The farmers on your pages appear not to have been doing that well, Carl, but...

The main catch in speculating about the possessions of a farmer based on the Urbarium was the resistance to it among the nobles, who instigated the farmers to declare less than they owned, helped them with that, and did so themselves. One of Vienna's goals was to receive money from the Kingdom of Hungary, where the nobles paid no taxes (and managed to keep it that way till the middle of the 19th century). Historians of the period estimate that, as a result, the Urbarium may have recorded but a third of the land the kingdom's farmers actually owned.
 

[K2]

I'm still not sure what the second column fraction means (the Pofoni mérőre való column).  But anyway, my ancestors were obviously very poor.  They barely skimmed along to survive.  But I am finding this extremely interesting and something that I want to quantify in my family history.   So far, I have identified 5 direct ancestors in 4 villages in this census.  All were poor.  Looking at the church records, I see that disease and starvation had a immense impact on my families.  Somehow, enough of them survived to lead to me.  I just want to understand what their lives were like. 
CK

[Martin]

I'm still not sure what the second column fraction means

Yes, Carl. I've only covered the first column so far. I'll get to them as time allows.

[Martin]

Possessions of the farm.

"Land ownership" would be a more understandable modern rendition, the Urbarium did not list the buildings, cattle, etc. That was probably considered in establishing the "size" of the farm – in the number of sessios or its fraction in the first column (i.e., the first column after the name of the owner and sometimes the name of his sons).

The land column is split, as you noted, Carl, between the land owned within the village ("intra-village") and the land in the outlying areas ("extra-village").

Intra-village possessions expressed in Bratislava mericas.

This is the left-hand sub-column among the three sub-columns that come after the size of the farm. Just a note first, it's pozsonyi mérő in modern Hungarian (the -re attached to mérő in its header row was and is just a grammatical ending in Hungarian, which plays the same role as prepositions do in English and Slovak). Let me also note again that the old spelling in the attached pages of the Hungarian version of the Urbarium is not Pofini, it is Posoni (Poſoni, if anyone's mailer displays it correctly) – see the earlier post about this with a linked example. The measure was called prešporská merica in Slovak then and Pressburger Metzen in German, all based on the name of Bratislava.

The intra-village part of a farm (similar to what's often called a farmstead in English) generally consisted of the land on which the house, farm buildings, and yard were located, typically open to the village street through one gate. It was important historically that there be only one, because tax used to be excised "per gate," not per the size of the farm.

The layout of Slovak (and Central European) farming communities comes into play here. It differed from how farms are often laid out in the U.S. There was a densely populated village where the farmers lived close to each other, with just their houses, yards, barns, and groves in the rear around them, while their fields and meadows were outside of the village, scattered in all directions (with geographic limitations), sometimes even a couple of miles away. Except for a few spots (like Julie's Kysuce), farmers did not live far from each other, spread out on farms surrounded by their fields like in the U.S.

The Urbarium expressed the size of the intra-village part of a farm, of the farmstead, in the number (or fractions) of Bratislava mericas (Bratislavská/Prešporská merica / Pressburger Metzen), a volume measure accepted in many parts of the Kingdom of Hungary. There were mericas based on other Slovak localities, e.g., the twice smaller Trnava merica or the twice-as-large Skalica merica.

The volume of the Bratislava merica changed over time. During the time of Maria Theresa's Urbarium, it was usually close to today's 14 U.S. dry gallons. So what on earth does that say about the size of the intra-village part of the farm, right?

The number or fraction of a Bratislava merica in that column gave the volume of grains needed to sow the area of the farmstead with them. Naturally, no one sawed the land under the farm buildings, the farm yard, etc. It was merely a way to express the size of that area. And, understandably too, the area that could be sown with 14 gallons of grains was larger or smaller depending on a variety of local growing conditions. Very approximately, then, one Bratislava merica was roughly representative of ca. 0.4 to 0.6 acres.

[Martin]

Possessions of the farm.

Despite the column header, this set of three sub-columns records three types of just land areas (not all the possessions of a farm – see earlier, also about how "intra-village" and "extra-village" were common concepts in Slovak villages and the rest of the kingdom).

Extra-village arable possessions.

The size of the plowed fields in this sub-column, the one in the middle of the three, was expressed in jutros, which were historically seen as an area a farmer could plow in a day. As with all measures in the past, the actual size changed with time and place. By the time of Empress Maria Theresa's Urbarium, one Hungarian iuterum (Latin), uhorské jutro (Slovak), ungarische Joch (German), magyar hold (Hungarian) was about one U.S. acre. An Austrian or Viennese Joch (also called "cadastral," Katastraljoch as you noted, Carl) was about 1.4 acres during the same time. Emperor Joseph II introduced it formally in the Kingdom of Hungary about two decades after his mother's Urbarium, but the kingdom generally preferred to use "its" jutro.

[K2]

Interesting.  I would never would have gotten the relationship between the units of seeds and the area of the intra-village lot.  That sure isn't obvious. 

And you are saying that the traditional Hungarian hold was used in this census and not the official kataszteri hold.  I see that the traditional Hungarian hold is smaller than the kataszteri hold and is only about 1.066 acres.  So the size of the farm land was described in terms of units of seeds for the intra-village lot, multiples of the area that a man could plow in a day (holds) for the cultivated extra-village land and the number of men it would take to reap the meadow land in one day.  You are right that it boggles the mind how they calculated these areas.

I was aware that the meadow land was used for hay and not as a pasture or grazing land.  In addition to the land the farmer had use of, he was entitled to use the communal pasture of the village to graze his animals.  My Kotlarčik family came to Gemer county and settled in Suvete sometime after this census.  The men became the cow herds (tehen pasztor) for this and nearby villages for many generations.

In addition to the payment of goods each farmer was individually obligated to provide his lord, the village also had to jointly provide calves based on the number of farms in the village. 

Carl

[Martin]

Possessions of the farm.

This is about the last of the three columns under the above header.

Extra-village meadows in mowers.

A mower was a person with a scythe, historically also a sickle (there were no mowing machines then). Mowing was done in the summer with long daylight, so measuring meadows "in mowers" worked with the area a mower could scythe in about 12 hours. Its size varied widely depending on the density of grass in the given area, which changed with elevation and local climate. The amount of mowing was also commonly seen as yielding a wagonload of hay after the grass dried. It ranged approximately from 0.7 to 1 U.S. acre, stabilizing closer to the lower number at around the time of Empress Maria Theresa's Urbarium and later (but it never became the same recognized measure as a merica/Metzen or jutro/Joch).

The recent posts probably cover what you asked, Carl, you said the duties to submit, e.g., 4 1/2 eggs to the nobleman are clear.

that the traditional Hungarian hold was used

All of these measures as well as the actual records in the Urbarium need to be approached with a lot of latitude. Specialists in the period estimate that about two-thirds of the land owned by the farmers and noblemen remained unrecorded. It then does not ultimately matter much which exact version of a merica or a jutro was, theoretically, used in what village. No matter which one, the bets are high that most farms had lots more, 3 times as much on average, than what the Urbarium listed.

it boggles the mind how they calculated these areas

Yes, and we ain't seen nothin' yet. By contrast to your village, the calculations of the days of robota and dues to the nobleman could get arcane beyond belief in places. Just a hint, if a merica is A, a jutro is B, and a mower is C, then some villages would work out the number of the days of robota with a draft animal by first calculating X = A + 2(B+C), X was then rounded to the next higher number divisible by 13, which was then divided by... (no, not 13), etc.

[K2]

Thanks for all you explanations and help about the Urbarium Martin.  And yes, I think I have a pretty good handle as to the other obligations.  The only question I do have is about the quantities of some of the things like the eggs, chickens, capons (castrated roosters) etc is how can they be fractions?    The header for these items indicate the unit is in "the number of".  Are these yearly obligations or some other time frame?  Half a chicken or 4.5 eggs seems strange.  The units for the yarn, butter and firewood make more sense. 

I also thought it was interesting that the obligation for 1/9th of the natural produce of the farm did not extend to the house garden nor for things raised in "damaged" fields beyond the farmers holdings.
Anyway, thanks again Martin
best regards,
Carl

[Martin]

Are these yearly obligations or some other time frame?  Half a chicken or 4.5 eggs seems strange.

Very. Yes, they were yearly obligations. The weird fractions of poultry and even more so of eggs were commonly handled on a village-wide basis. Historically, a village, especially a contractual village, had obligations to the nobleman as a whole, as a community, not each farmer as an individual. The Town Hall handled who gave how much when (in the distant past, the "edible" obligations were to be submitted twice a year, at Easter and Christmas, but it didn't stay exactly like that). Maria Theresa's Urbarium calculated it per farm, so the village council worked out parts of it as it used to earlier, say, a farm would give 4 eggs one year and 5 eggs the next year, and another farm first 5 and then 4, so that the annual "victual tax" from the whole village to the nobleman kept fairly constant. Usually the same with poultry – say, a farm contributed no chicken every fourth year if its obligation based on the Urbarium was 3/4 of a chicken annually.

[Martin]

a pretty good handle as to the other obligations

Could you then, perhaps, add what you have on them, Carl, to complete the account of Empress Maria Theresa's Urbarium in the Kingdom of Hungary?

[K2]

I've attached a file that provides translations of all of the headings for the Urbarium Census.  Thank you again for all your help in constructing this file Martin and also to Peter Martyn and someone named Erika who also provided assistance.
Carl

[htcstech]

Great work Carl!

Just 2 minor points. You wrote "Funt" = 1.2 lbs. If that's the weight I know, it should be spelt "Font".

Also, The headings were also handwritten in Latin and I think published in Slovak and German - though I'm not sure of this.

Peter M.

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[K2]

Thanks Peter.  But the unit at that time was called the "funt".  Look at the chart.  You can't make this stuff up.

[Martin]

The headings were also handwritten in Latin and I think published in Slovak and German - though I'm not sure of this.

Yes, they were, Peter. Not neatly downloable like Carl's, here are "bookmarkable" images of how Maria Theresa's Urbarium was handled in most of the Slovak-majority area of the Kingdom of Hungary:

http://www.pitt.edu/~votruba/qsonhist/urbariummariatheresa.html