Bringing the Law Back In: Land, Law and the Hungarian Peasantry before 1848

Abstract

In the spring of 1848, with the rumoured threat of a peasant army marching on Pest and much of Europe experiencing revolution, Hungary’s diet emancipated the peasantry from centuries of seigneurial dependence. The hastily drafted legislation freed the peasantry from their remaining obligations to their lords and the church, and granted the peasantry full property rights to their urbarial plots, namely those that had previously been held of their lords. The emancipation of the peasantry proved one of the most enduring features of the Hungarian revolution, yet land reform had formed a central part of the liberal programme for the previous fifteen years. In the preceding years, two events had brought home the importance of the ‘peasant question’: the cholera uprising of 1831 and the more violent jacquerie in neighbouring Galicia in 1846. Ever louder voices from within the Hungarian nobility had been condemning the legally inferior and economically unviable status of the peasantry as the greatest impediment to the ‘liberal society’ they wished to create.1 Prior to emancipation,