# {505.} Songs of Farm hands and Rural Servants

We know relatively few of these songs of farm hands (cseléddal) and rural servants (szolgadal), because collecting them began only after they had nearly sunk into oblivion. However, the songs we do know expose the hard life on the large estates, where the indigent labourers were not counted as human beings (cf. pp. 87–90). The peasantry did not take over these songs, since they expressed sentiments, questions, sufferings unknown to them. As a rule, they consequently did not become known in wider circles, being at most perhaps carried over certain areas by the agricultural labourers who were compelled to change their place of work frequently.

There are relatively few songs telling about the grief of the servants hired at the house of the big peasant farmers:

As a tender boy came I to orphanhood,
When I grew up I fell into servitude;
Then it was I learnt endurance, hardihood:
How to bear this world’s insults and turpitude.
I have tended four oxen all properly,
All four were my master’s beasts and property.
I shall teach these oxen how to bear the yoke:
I, too, plough the furrows of some other folk.
Székelyland

What embittered the young servant men most was that no matter how much they worked from dawn to dusk, they were given poor provisions and little payment in kind:

Grapes they are growing,
Vines are a-groaning
Under their heavy weight.
Two needy farmhands
Want to go ploughing
But have no bread to take.
’Tis but some onion
They have to munch on;
It has a bitter smack.
Shallow the ladle,
Long is the table,
What a poor, meagre snack!
Roguish the master
Chases girls after;
Keeps of the ‘days’ no track.
But the day lab’rer,
Every poor neighbour
Gets but a meagre snack.
Generally known

Continual moving on was hardest to take for the agricultural labourer, farm hand, and servant. He never knew, once the year was over, when {506.} the farmer might send him away, not because of his work, but perhaps because he had talked back to him. Most servant songs deal, in one way or another, with this theme:

Servant I am, servant,
Soon I must engage me.
With the new year coming,
Comes the cart to fetch me.
Sure I’ll miss my oxen,
And my iron yoke-pin,
Ornamented goad stick,
And my nutbrown darlin’.
Oxen stray in meadow,
Barrow’s left in furrow;
Cowherd mine still farther;
Myself in the csárda.
Rábaszovát (former Sopron County)

The tobacco growers formed a separate group on the large estates. Although they were tenants and entrepreneurs, they still depended entirely on the landlord. Their hard work was never really repaid. Only a few among their characteristic songs have survived:

Uncle Pista goes out to the drying-shed,
Takes an armful baccy leaves right off the peg.
“Why, tonight you not sleep, my lazy souls,
Till you tied this heap of baccy up in rolls.”
“Uncle Pista, come out to us, come out please,
Bring with you our papers and dismissories.
Write me one discharge ticket too, signed and sealed,
Well enough we toiled on your tobacco field.”
Verpelét (Heves County)