Kósa László (szerk.): A Cultural History of Hungary. From the Beginnings to the Eighteenth Century (1999)
Chapter 3. Iván Bertényi: Hungarian Culture in the Middle Ages
Life in Villages, Market Towns and Towns had a maritime fleet which was built in the coastal towns under the command of a royal flag officer. For shipping cargo downstream, freight-carrying boats were sometimes made only for a single journey, to be dismantled and sold on reaching their destination. It was cheaper to build new vessels in the upper reaches of the rivers than to tow them back upstream. Ferries and bridges served to cross waterways where they intersected the roads. It is no wonder that such places, especially where wider waterways could be crossed, were held dear by people in the Middle Ages. The author of the earliest extant chronicle, Anonymus, makes mention of a number of ferry-crossings, such as Abád, Bőd, Dorogma and Rakamaz. Apart from playing an economic role by generating revenue from tolls, bridges were often of strategic importance. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for instance, the entire huge Turkish armies setting out on their campaigns against Hungary crossed the bridge over the Dráva at Eszék [Osijek], Tolls had to be paid when crossing either by ferry or by a bridge, which represented a major source of income for the owner. By the eighteenth century it was an established practice to prohibit the building of a new bridge near an existing one or even to forbid crossing the river by boat, on the natural grounds that such practices would have diverted part of the traffic, thus decreasing the income of whoever maintained of the original bridge. At the end of the fourteenth century, the minimum distance at which a new river crossing could legally be established was approximately one mile. Customs tariffs were high at the end of the fourteenth century; at the bridge on the river Lucska in 1393, two denarius were paid by each person with his mount or cattle, one denarius for one pedestrian and each pig, six garas for a wine barrel or cloth cart, and 40 denarius by a villein moving to another location. Until 1351, when it was prohibited by law under King Louis the Great, it was customary to demand the payment of one mark from a nobleman who crossed the bridge while taking his new wife home after the wedding. Life in Villages, Market Towns and Towns The majority of the agricultural population lived in villages. Hungarian laws of the eleventh century describe the village, whose confines were fixed, as the dwellingplace of commoners led by a village elder (villicus), later the magistrate. Those who kept livestock, and at times also some of those who cultivated the land, could set out and move elsewhere. However, the decrees of kings Ladislas (the Saint) and Coloman restricted full emigration (which meant leaving the parish) by fixing criteria according to which villagers were allowed to seek new fallow land instead of worn-out fields. In time the numbers of villagers grew and the settlement of land on the outer edge of the marches gained momentum from the twelfth century onwards. The size of villages varied greatly, just as it did later. In the twelfth century, the number of families inhabiting a village averaged 20-25, ranging from 15 71