Researching the names of local sites and landmarks is a
significant contribution to a determination of the social structure of a village
as Weidlein has demonstrated.
The village settlements in Swabian Turkey --as the maps
indicate--were either clustered villages or all the houses were laid out along a
single street. While the old Hungarian villages (especially those in the Hegyhat District and the forested mountainous regions) that survived the Turkish
wars were clustered villages, the kind that also spread to the large settlements
in the interior of Tolna County with its propensity to steep inclines and slopes
unlike the Batschka and the Banat.
With the resettlement and redevelopment of the ruined
Hungarian villages the new village was not implicitly built on the site of the
former village not did it replicate the former village's pattern. The documents
associated with the Domains and Estates identifies some special designations
like "old homestead", "old village", "older village site", "old meadows," and
"old gardens." The villages that had been Hungarian cluster villages during the
Middle Ages that were settled with Germans became "Strassendӧrfer" (all of the
houses were alongside each other on a single street) with few exceptions. But
even in those cases they followed the regular contours of the landscape and
terrain--especially in the broad valleys, as was the case in Murga, Tevel, Mucsi
and Bonyhád which were normal valley villages and a deviation from the typical
one street pattern. Hӧgyész is a combination of a one street and a valley
village with a main street along with various side streets.
The villages that fell into ruin during the Turkish wars
were not all resettled or redeveloped in the 18th century. In many cases two to
three and sometimes even more of their boundaries that existed in the Middle
Ages were combined into one village. Today's Hӧgyész consists of the former
Hӧgyész, Csefӧ, Csicsó and Csernyéd as well as the southern portion of
Hertelend. The designations for many of the sites and locales bear these
earlier names, such as the open prairies next to Hӧgyész named the Csernyéd
Puszta and Csicsó Puszta (called "Bründl by the Germans) and the "Csefӧ Heights"
and the "Csefӧ meadow." In order to explain why only two of the village
names--namely, Csernyéd and Csicsó--have been maintained while the third has
been degraded to identify a local feature in the landscape we need to concern
ourselves with a settlement document that is dated July 27, 1722 signed by Count
d'Mercy. Point three in the document said that the German settlers had the free
use of the adjoining prairies of Csefӧ while the Domain would retain the other
two (Csicsó and Csernyéd which were first developed in 1726). Residences for
administrators working for the Domain were erected quite early on both of the
open prairies on the sites of the ruined villages and the manor houses were
named after the former villages.
Not every administrator's residence bore the older name of
the locale because most of them were built in the Tolna and Baranya in the
middle of the 19th century after the abolition of serfdom in Hungary. Following
the partitioning of the lands of the estates and domains (through the Urbarial
Regulations) the domain received a large portion of the community forest and
meadowlands in every village. By 1860 the land was cleared and the houses of
the Administrators of the domains were first erected. These new landed estates
was named after the owner or the old designation for the site: Apponyi-Puszta
or the Nana Moorlands.
The names of streets provide a valuable contribution to
the history of the communities and helps to answer the question of whether a
village was a newly founded or built on an old Hungarian site or had been
inhabited by Raizen prior to the settling of the Germans. For example in Gyӧnk
both a "Hungarian" and a "German" village exist; in Murga there was a "Slovak
Street". If we find ourselves confronted by a "Kleinhäuslergasse" (the street
of the Cotters = families without farmland) as we would in Gyӧnk and Kisdorog we
discover first hand evidence of the social structure in the life of the
villages. The designation "Cotters' Street" is a reference to the existence of
various social groups among the colonists in the village and they were primarily
of two classes: an older, well established group of farmers and a younger,
poorer landless cotter element that had come later after the sessions of land
had been distributed. A surviving document from the year 1742 indicates that in
Kisdorog that in addition to the older established people there were new people
without land, colonists who moved in later and lived apart from the original
settlers on a separate street, the Cotters' Lane. There are other cases where
the homesteads of the farmers are on the site of former ones, as is true in
Csibrák and Závod while the Cotters' Street is in the highly shaded northern
section of the village. In Kalaznó the cotters had to dig 35 metres deep to
reach water for their wells while the farmers built their homesteads on the
valley floor that was much closer to the water table.
These cotters or "housed residents" as they were also
called, were an element in the population in all of the Domains. Because there
was no land available for them to earn a livelihood they were assigned to work,
cultivating the lands of the Domain owner. This cotter "class" first appeared
in the German village of Ladomány in Swabian Turkey in 1735 and from then on
they were a regular element in all of the German Hungarian villages. With
regard to the farmers who had a full session of land and those with only a half
session they were both counted equal socially but differed in that the those
with only a half session worked as day labourers for the Domain and those with
full sessions during the major working season of the year during the summer and
autumn.
For all of that, the customary inheritance practices also
affected the original owners of small and smaller parcels of land. The
cherished inheritance custom that the firstborn received the homestead and major
portion of the land was well in place in the Banat and southern Swabian Turkey.
The siblings received a quarter or less of the land to survive on and could only
expand their holdings through an advantageous marriage or through any future
inheritance.
Next:
The
Farm Homestead and Agricultural Pursuits
