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# The Social Stratification of the Peasantry

The vast stratum of the peasantry formed the base of the social pyramid. It was composed of former villeins, cotters, and frontier guards; of peasants long free; and of the lowest ranks of the nobility, those who lived a peasant's life on a farm of less than 57 hectares. The bottom layer, several hundred thousand strong, included marginal peasants who owned tiny fragments of land, and a destitute rural proletariat. The absolute number of peasants rose steadily, while their number falling in proportion to the population, most sharply between 1890 and 1910. Despite many changes, the fundamental structure of peasant society evolved more slowly in Transylvania than in the rest of Hungary. Smallholder peasants stood their ground better, there were fewer wage-labourers, and the rural proletariat was smaller; on the other hand, the proportion of marginal dwarf farmers was only exceeded in the northeastern corner of Upper Hungary.

The number of village-based peasants, 1.8 million in 1880, was found in the 1910 census to have passed 2 million in historical Transylvania. Approximately three quarters of the agrarian population (compared to a bare two thirds in the Temesvár–Szatmár strip, {3-585.} west of Transylvania) owned or leased land; the others were landless. The peasant farms varied in size at the beginning of the period, and the ongoing process of fragmentation only widened the range of holdings. Transylvania's arable land was divided into 8.9 million plots in 1857, and 10.6 million in 1879. Local statistics published in the periodical Erdélyi Gazda confirm the acceleration of the fragmentation in the 1870s and 1880s. In Kolozs County, the number of landowning peasants was 19,806 in 1861, and 24,960 in 1883, a 26 percent increase; the greatest increase, 78 percent, was in the number of poor peasants owning half or a quarter of a plot. This fragmentation was due in large part to a system of inheritance that settled an equal share on each male child — and, by the 1880s, complaints were heard that 'today even girls ask for a share of the inheritance.'[28]28. Erdélyi Gazda, 15 February 1886. There is no data on the scale of this distribution of shares, and of land sales. However, the aggregate number of properties did not change significantly. In 1867, the number of landowners — according to Károly Keleti's analysis of tax data — was slightly in excess of 500,000, and at the turn of the century, estimates were in the same range.

The peasants were differentiated according to the size of the farm and number of livestock, to the methods of production and to historical traditions. The division of landowners into distinct categories is problematical, for statistical surveys inflated the number of dwarf holdings by including the vegetable gardens of townspeople. This distortion can be partially corrected by reference to the 1904 statistics on land ownership by male adults who earned their living from agriculture (which, however, exclude widows and younger landowners). A further obstacle to generalization is that farm size was but one of the important differentiating factors; soil quality, marketing opportunities, equipment, livestock, and traditional patterns of production all had an impact on productivity. The productivity of agriculture varied within Transylvania, and it made for a sharp distinction between that region and the rest of the country. {3-586.} At the turn of the century, the mean net income per hectare farmed in Transylvania was half the national level, and one third the level in Transdanubia (but twice the level in Bukovina). Transylvania was one of the Hungarian regions where traditional farming continued to prevail; the extensive form of development predominated over the intensive, for the historical shift to the latter was only beginning. In the villages, the scale and speed of change differed by social stratum.

Wealthy peasants were distinguished from the majority of the peasantry by the fact that most of the work on their farms was done by servants and hired hands. (Part of their land was commonly given over to share-cropping, but at least half of the annual wages of their full-time hired hands was paid in cash.) Wealthy peasants came from various backgrounds. Some were petty noblemen who by the 1850s had learned to farm efficiently; others had been well-off villeins or middle peasants who were enterprising enough produce for the market. The peasantry's growing differentiation and the landowning nobility contributed to the consolidation of a class of wealthy peasants — those owning 30 to 60 hectares — after the turn of the century. There were nearly 7,000 wealthy peasant families in 1900, scarcely more than in 1867, but by 1910 their number had grown to 9,000. {3-587.} The wealthy peasants among those who owned 11–30 hectares can be added to this category, but there is no record of their numbers. Prosperous peasants in Transylvania could not match the 'pasha peasants' of the Bácska and Banat in wealth and power, but they did acquire considerable social influence. They, more than noble landowners, set the standards for villagers. Village magistrates and churchwardens came from their ranks. They were the privileged interlocutors of town merchants, electoral canvassers, county officials, officials of the centre for cooperatives, priests and teachers, and of the local lords. They owned the best livestock and implements, acquired up-to-date farm machinery, such as threshers, and in many places ran the village pub or mill. The wealthy peasant shared in the work; he drove his workers hard, and was equally demanding of himself. In lean years, people would borrow food from them, to be repaid — with interest — in services according to a complex calculation.

Middle-class status was generally beyond the reach of wealthy peasants. As a class, they did not evolve into the agrarian bourgeoisie found in Denmark or Holland, although exceptions to this rule became more numerous by the turn of the century. Having consolidated their economic status by limiting family size and taking entrepreneurial initiatives, wealthy peasants strove to improve their children's chances of social mobility, primarily by having them educated for white-collar jobs. Two wealthy Székely peasants, one a village magistrate, the other a miller, became members of parliament, but they were the rare exceptions.

There were ten times as many middle peasants as rich peasants: more than 75,000 active workers belonged to this category. On the middle peasants' farms, most of the work was done by family members. In case of pressing need, wage-labourers were hired; at other times, the middle peasants themselves (mainly younger members of the family) would do wage work with their draught animals. Middle peasants, Saxons apart, tended to stick to traditional methods of farming and fell behind wealthy peasants in the adoption of modern ways, but their socioeconomic status remained comparatively stable until the turn of the century. They maintained the economic balance of their farm by breeding a few cattle in addition to their draught animals. The first signs of decline came after 1900. Meanwhile, the more prosperous middle peasants made an effort to secure a secondary education for at least one of their sons; the annual fees, some 400 crowns at the turn of the century, probably represented the family's largest single expense, overshadowing the 30–40 crowns paid in state and municipal taxes.

The category of small peasants — comprising, in 1900, 401,000 active workers — accounted for nearly half of the agricultural {3-588.} population. Their farms, generally under 12 hectares, were worked exclusively by the family. Family members regularly took on wage work, preferably in their own village, in order to cover their annual demand for grain and the purchase of the odd new pair of boots. By the early 1900s, the children of small peasants in market-oriented areas seemed to be much more resourceful and energetic than the middle peasants' children, who tended to stay at home; unlike the latter, they frequently went off to work for wages and thus escaped from the father's authority. Their wages also allowed them to frequent an important venue for social life, the village pub.

The smaller landowners often owned a multitude of tiny plots (in Mezőpanit, for instance, the 8–11 hectare property of some peasants was dispersed over 40–50 plots in 1871). They preferred this pattern to the consolidation of fields, for it allowed them to keep livestock, their main livelihood, on open pasture. This was already the case in 1867, and it did not change; statistics show that, at the turn of the century, the owners of 6–11 hectares kept twice as much livestock in proportion to land as did the middle peasants. On the other hand, sometimes it was wealthy peasants who, because they had substantial livestock, opposed the ploughing up of common land; the authorities, more concerned with keeping the peace than enforcing the law, acquiesced. In any case, by the 1860s, the modernization of the system of crop rotation was under way, and the insufficiency of natural hayfields drove the more resourceful Székely farmers to sow alfalfa and medick — a decisive step towards the stabling of livestock, which gradually imposed itself as a necessity. Between 1860 and 1900, the annual expenses of the typical Székely peasant owning 6 hectares increased by a factor of four or five, to over 500 crowns; three quarters of this was covered by the sale of livestock or animal products. Small-scale farming continued to develop but remained barely economical. The economic expert of a Székely county administration wrote in 1902, 'When an epizootic disease strikes and wipes out hogs and sheep, {3-589.} or when an ox, a cow, or a steer is killed by a bear, the delicate balance is upset, and the [small-scale] farmer becomes dependent on the savings bank,' which, in his case, heralds the beginning of the end.[29]29. Nagy, Csík vármegye II, p. 28; I. T. Nagy, 'Csík megye közgazdasági leírása,' offprint, (Budapest, 1902), p. 20. Cited in A megindult falu: Tallózás a régi erdélyi faluirodalomban, 1849-1914, ed. by Á. Egyed (Bucharest, 1976), p. 115. In late 1900 and early 1901, twenty-three of Csíkmenaság's 488 families had to have their entire property (260 hectares in all) auctioned off to other villagers; the landless peasants then emigrated to Romania with their families or took a job at the lumber mill. Even the poorest of the small peasants kept a couple of cows for ploughing and draught; but then the animals could not be calved, and without additional livestock the owners had little chance of improving their lot.

The small farmers' precarious existence did not wholly exclude them from participating in municipal administration, for they constituted the most numerous peasant stratum in Transylvania (in greater proportion than for Hungary as a whole), as well as the entire population of many villages. Their numbers earned them some consideration even in the context of parliamentary elections. Although most of the small farmers did not have the right to vote, they all heard the canvassers' speeches, formed an opinion, and — particularly when national politics took a lively turn — were in a position to exert pressure on those who could vote.

The situation of small farmers varied by region and nationality (see table 26). Once again, the Saxons were the most successful, and in some areas the Romanians were better off than the Hungarians. At the turn of the century, in Maros-Torda County, the average Romanian farm was approximately 25 percent larger than the Hungarian one, and this was the case with their livestock as well.

The bottom stratum of landowning peasants (who might be termed semi-proletarians) was recorded in statistics under the rubric 'small landowners/wage labourers.' The proportion of such small 'landowners' was very high in Transylvania; more than 180,000 people, 20 percent of those making a living from agriculture, belonged to this group. Their livelihood was based largely on {3-590.} wage-labour and sharecropping. Their identification with the traditional peasantry owed more to common location and similarity in lifestyle than to the fact that they may have owned a hectare of land; that tiny plot was of some consequence, for it served to supplement their income. References to this stratum date back to the 1850s, when hundreds of poor peasants would journey to town markets to find employment as wage labourers. In historical terms, they were a transitional stratum, destined to join the multitudinous agrarian proletariat; yet their sense of ownership made them identify more with smallholder peasants than with wage-labourers, for they refused to believe that ownership was their past, and wage-labour their future.

Within the general category of poor peasants, the broadest and most defenceless stratum was the agrarian proletariat; its 250,000 wage earners constituted 28–30 percent of the population active in agriculture. This group consisted originally of former cotters who were left landless after the abolition of feudalism, and who accounted for nearly a quarter of the peasantry (but as much as 40 percent in the area stretching from the Banat to Szatmár). Over time, the transformation of agriculture added to their numbers: As a consequence of the reapportionment of landed property, woodlands, and pastures, many people lost their access to land and were reduced to the rank of labourers. However, in districts where significant areas were left in common use, they were not totally divorced from the land, which explains why the agrarian proletariat formed a smaller proportion of the peasantry in Transylvania than on the national scale (39 percent) or in a region such as the Great Plain (53 percent). Their numbers were greater in counties, such as Torda-Aranyos and Kolozs, where there were more large estates, and negligible in the counties of Fogaras and Beszterce-Naszód; in Hunyad County, most of them were absorbed into mining and other industries. One in six still owned a tiny piece of land.

{3-591.}

Table 26: Distribution of the agricultural population according to nationalities in 1910

Type | Hungarian | Rumanian | German | Other | Total population
people | % | people | % | people | % | people | % | people | %
Owner of dwarf holding (tenant) less than 5 cadestral acres | 108652 | 22,0 | 334795 | 27,7 | 30114 | 22,6 | 453 | 1,8 | 474014 | 25,4
Small landowner (tenant) 5-10 cadestral acres | 92548 | 18,7 | 275170 | 22,7 | 33578 | 25,2 | 136 | 0,5 | 401432 | 21,5
Small landowner 5-10 cadestral acres | 128276 | 25,9 | 280988 | 23,2 | 56485 | 42,4 | 93 | 0,4 | 465842 | 24,9
Small landowner 50-100 cadestral acres | 7267 | 1,5 | 8042 | 0,7 | 1951 | 1,5 | 4 | x | 17264 | 0,9
Medium landowner 100-100 cadestral acres | 3825 | 0,8 | 1593 | 0,1 | 457 | 0,3 | 5 | x | 5880 | 0,3
Tenant (more than 100 cadestral acres) | 957 | 0,1 | 364 | x | 125 | 0,1 | 1 | x | 1447 | 0,1
Big landowner (more than 1000 cadestral acres) | 443 | 0,1 | 44 | x | 15 | x | 5 | x | 507 | 0,1
Farm hand | 34681 | 7,0 | 71039 | 5,9 | 2342 | 1,8 | 1378 | 5,4 | 109440 | 5,9
Agricultural worker | 116050 | 23,4 | 237951 | 19,7 | 7902 | 5,9 | 23522 | 91,9 | 385425 | 20,7
Agricultural offical | 2281 | 0,5 | 161 | x | 292 | 0,2 | 5 | x | 2739 | 0,2
Total | 494980 | 100,0 | 1210147 | 100,0 | 133261 | 100,0 | 25602 | 100,0 | 1863990 | 100,0

Note: x means data under 0.1%.

Source: M. Stat. Közlemények. Új sorozat, Vol. 56.

{3-592.} Manorial servants constituted the least dynamic but most secure segment of the agrarian proletariat. They were highly differentiated by income, for servants of higher status earned ten times more than the others. The household servants were well looked after — girls were 'given in marriage' by the master — but surrendered all autonomy. Those who worked around the castle as gardeners and senior farmhands also benefited from this paternalism. The servants who lived out on the farms had less security. They were paid in kind and, to an increasing extent, in cash, for the landowners tended to substitute money for traditional grants of a fragment of land, and of the right to keep pigs and cows. In 1900, servants' wages averaged around 300 crowns a year.

Wealthy peasants also kept servants. The latter — village acquaintances, orphaned children of relatives — lived in their masters' house, or at least took their meals there. Their wages, set by custom, consisted of clothing, footwear, a calf or a pig, as well as a little cash. The masters' rights were confirmed in the Servant Act of 1876, and even the updated, 1907 version of the law allowed for some corporal punishment. Housing conditions were poor for the servant class, which numbered in the tens of thousands before the war. They spent much of their lives in crowded accommodation at the manor, or in the stables of wealthy peasants. A few retained ownership of a small plot and managed to exchange the servant's life for that of an independent farmer.

The herdsmen who looked after the villagers' cattle were normally hired for the year and paid in kind. Villagers' flocks were cared for by a shepherd, one or two helpers, and his dog. The shepherd was free to sell his share of newborn lambs, milk, wool, even manure, and led an easier life than the solitary mountain shepherds; in the villages around Kolozsvár, he would get a warm meal from the farmer whose turn it was to receive the milk. Even if he was an outsider, the shepherd earned the respect of the peasant community, for he looked after one of their most valuable assets.

{3-593.} Progressive mechanization reduced the demand for hired hands — by half in the case of threshing machines, by a quarter in the case of harvesting machines, which were beginning to spread, notably around Brassó. On the other hand, the demand for labour was increased by higher production, by more extensive exploitation of woodlands, and by the growing cultivation of labour-intensive plants. (The weeding and preparation of the soil for such plants was generally done in May by children of 10 to 12 years of age.) From spring to early fall, the hired hands worked at fluctuating wage rates to put bread on the table. Staying on the job from dawn to dusk, they earned slightly in excess of one crown a day in 1900, less than in 1880; rates began to rise in 1906, and by 1910 the daily wage was two crowns. Women received two thirds of men's wages, children only a half. In Kolozsvár, hiring was done — daily, and especially during the weekly farmers' market — at a designated 'servants' market.' By 1890, there were proportionately more Hungarians than other nationalities among wage-labourers.

The demand for casual labour peaked at harvest time, when, in the short space of a few weeks, hired hands had to earn a year's supply of grain. Long before the beginning of the harvest, recruiters would sign up entire villages — and not only regular wage-labourers — for this period of intense work, which lasted from dawn to dusk, and which, in the central regions of Transylvania, was often done with a sickle. At such times, many villages were virtually deserted; for instance, around 1900, two thirds of the villagers at Magyarókerék, including people in their eighties, would go off to harvest. Climatic differences allowed them to work for two or three weeks in the central regions before moving on to harvest grain that ripened later on high ground. The largest number of seasonal harvesters were employed in the vast grain-producing belt straddling the counties of Temes and Szatmár. The harvesters travelled far, and each village would have its customary destination: The people of Kalotaszeg went to Bihar, the Great Plain, and the Mezőség, the {3-594.} Romanians to the Arad district, while the Székelys would head for Brassó, the Banat, and Romania. The work was done in pairs (or in threes), and it earned a tenth or an eleventh of the harvested grain, which around 1900 amounted to 700–1000 kilograms of wheat. This could feed the average family for a year, with some left over; the 'surplus' could be sold to repay debts, and in good years the harvesters even ended up with a little disposable cash. In mountainous areas, the farmers paid their harvesters in cash.

The labourers known as summás were, like the harvesters, contracted for a seasonal task, at a set wage, of which a small part was always paid in kind. They were employed in a variety of jobs, ranging from the cultivation of demanding plants such as vines and sugarbeet to those that required no special skills. In 1907, such labourers received 150 crowns for three months' work, as well as accommodation and some bacon, flour, mutton, cottage cheese, vinegar, brandy, and wood. For this, they were ready to do 'whatever agricultural work was required of them.'[30]30. Quoted in Á. Egyed, A parasztság Erdélyben a századfordulón (Bucharest, 1975), p. 182. The uneven distribution of manpower is illustrated by the fact that in the decade before World War I, summás labourers were brought all the way from Upper Hungary to work on sugarbeet fields in the southern district of the comparatively poor Székelyföld.

The use of migrant workers gave rise to some conflicts. When wage-labourers in the Great Plain began to organize in defence of their interests, landowners (with encouragement from the authorities) tried to undermine their efforts by hiring workers from poorer regions, such Transylvania. Over time, regular contact between local and migrant workers led the latter to develop their own sense of common interest. Socialist ideas spread most rapidly in the region between Arad and Szatmár, where the first independent organizations of agrarian workers were formed in the 1890s, just as in the Viharsarok region. In 1891–92, gendarmes fired on demonstrators demanding higher wages, and calm was restored for a few years. But socialist ideas continued to spread, the workers renewed {3-595.} their attempts to get organized, and the first harvesters' strikes broke out in 1897. The movement spilled over into Transylvania, but there the unrest was more localized and isolated, and it encompassed some propertied peasants opposed to the consolidation of land-strips. Transylvania experienced no major conflicts, such as the one that erupted at Élesd in the spring of 1904. (Hungarian and Romanian peasants, mostly landless, and coming from forty villages, confronted the gendarmes; 22 people lost their lives, and 55 were jailed.) There were no repercussions in Transylvania from the massive peasant uprising in Romania in 1907, which was drowned in blood. Transylvania's peaceful stability was founded on a higher standard of living, a smaller degree of social differentiation, and the enduring, traditional cohesiveness of village communities.

Gypsies were the lowest of the low, virtually excluded from recognized society, and considered to harbour some distorted remnants of ancient liberties. Because of their way of life, and for want of a more appropriate category, they can be regarded as a segment of the landless peasantry. Their numbers increased from some 50,000 in 1850 to nearly 90,000 in 1870. The 1893 census enumerated 105,034 Gypsies in Transylvania; over one third had a settled existence, one fifth were nomadic, and the rest were semi-nomadic. Most itinerant Gipsies were found in Hunyad County as well as in the counties of Krassó-Szörény and Bihar; the settled ones resided principally in the Brassó–Vajdahunyad–Beszterce triangle, and in Nagy-Küküllő they accounted for over ten percent of the population. All major religious denominations had Gypsy adherents: three-quarters of them were Uniate or Orthodox, most of the others were Calvinist or Catholic, and a few belonged to the Unitarian and Lutheran churches. Their pattern of linguistic assimilation was similarly mixed. In 1890, according to registration by mother tongue, 42 percent spoke Romany, and 19 percent Hungarian; the rest, apart from a few German-speakers, spoke Romanian. Gypsies engaged in various crafts and trades in towns as well as villages. In 1850, {3-596.} Gypsies accounted for 17 percent of the population of Hátszeg and 28 percent of that of Zalasd; in 1893, the proportions were 12 percent in Fogaras and Felvinc, and 10 percent in Hátszeg and Erzsébetváros. They lived in tents or hovels, and many walked barefoot until the age of ten; only a few managed to rise above this semi-mendicant way of life. Those who did were often musicians, hailed by a contemporary as the 'marvellous exponents of one of our national arts, Hungarian Gypsy music, ... whose magic spell makes Hungarians weep with joy.'[31]31. Magyar Statisztikai Közlemények, new series, IX (Budapest, 1895), p. 39n.

During this period, Gypsies were closely supervised by the state. The police kept constant watch over them. One-third of their children were exposed to compulsory schooling, but the results were minimal. In the 1890s, no more than 4.1 percent of Gypsies were literate. Young Gypsies tried to escape military service by self-mutilation and malingering, which entailed fewer risks than desertion. More than one-third of the men worked at crafts. A declining number panned for gold, but most of them served the modest needs of rural folk by working as journeymen, blacksmiths, metal workers, and by making troughs, bricks, and tiles. At the beginning of the century, the writer István Petelei observed the distinctive lifestyle and values of diligent Gypsy peasants in the Mezőség: 'Some are quite intelligent. They own cattle, pigs, a house. Their homes are a mess. They are a rather industrious people. They can be given difficult tasks, for they are up to it.'[32]32. I. Petelei, 'Mezőségi út,' in A tiszta ház (Budapest, 1981), p. 82. Landowners would give Gypsy cotters a house and garden, a tiny plot for growing corn, food, one pig a year and, on festive occasions, a litre of brandy as well as some wheat. In exchange for these favours, the Gypsies were always available for work, and at a much lower cost than other labourers. The integration of Gypsies into the peasantry would come only later, but their social differentiation and growing participation in regular work foreshadowed that historic shift.