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# {2-780.} 6. TRANSITION TO THE REFORM PERIOD

To return to the political history of Transylvania, the 1810s and 1820s proved to be less eventful than the preceding decades. There were no meetings of the diet, and political life was dominated by reactionary policies associated with the name of Emperor Francis. The same period nurtured political forces that would come to play an important role in Transylvania (and Hungary) after 1830.

One significant political development in Transylvania during the 1810s was the fifth attempt to settle the question of socage. The proposal drawn up by the standing committee in 1790–91 failed to get full consideration at the diet 1810–11. However, in 1813, famine struck, and many villeins migrated to the Romanian principalities, to Hungary, or to more prosperous regions of Transylvania. On 13 December 1813, Francis I requested a plan for the reform of socage from Chancellor Sámuel Teleki, and, within two weeks, the chancellery submitted a reworked version of the system that had been implemented in Hungary. This sudden initiative was followed by years of procrastination, during which government agencies did little more than argue over provisional measures.

In 1817, Francis I made a tour of Transylvania and observed the famine at its worst. At his urging, the elderly governor, György Bánffy, assembled a committee composed of senior officials from the Gubernium and local government to reconsider the issue of socage. The committee proposed that the 1790–91 committee report be ratified by the diet.

Instead, the state council once again took up the matter, excluding the Gubernium from the process. On 17 May 1819, it decided that a new census should be conducted before new regulations were issued governing the size of villeins’ plots. At the same {2-781.} time, the Staatsrat ruled that landowners could either let their villeins keep cleared woodland or, by following prescribed procedures, retrieve it; and that, in the future, woodland could not be cleared without the express permission of the landowner. Villeins would be allowed to collect deadwood, and only if none was available could they fell trees. Where villeins already had the right to trade in firewood, the practice could be maintained. Villeins would have to pay a levy for the privilege of feeding their pigs on mast in the proximate woods, but at a lower rate than outsiders.

Perhaps the most significant decision of the Staatsrat was to end fifty years of procrastination and apply to Transylvania the same socage that was in effect in Hungary: one day of labour with draught animal, or two days without, per week. The measure lightened the load of Transylvanian villeins, though they were still disadvantaged by the fact that their plots were smaller than those of villeins in Hungary. The obligation to provide long-distance cartage was also reduced, to a basic annual rate, per four villeins with full plots, of one, or at the most, two days. Villeins were obligated to do three days of hunting each year. Other burdens — tithes, ninths, datias — were left essentially unaltered.

In Transylvania, the new regulations met with general dissatisfaction. Having been partly responsible for the prolonged failure to effect a reform of socage, György Bánffy did not want to shoulder the burden of settling the matter at this stage. The task of chairing the Gubernium’s new committee on socage was assumed by János Jósika, a future head of the Gubernium. To oversee the reform’s implementation by the Transylvanian estates and public officials issuing from their ranks, the central government dispatched a team of royal commissioners, drawn from Hungary’s civil service, and led by the deputy chairman of the Hungarian chamber, Antal Cziráky.

Nor was the landowning nobility satisfied with the reform. In protest, county assemblies passed a series of resolutions invoking {2-782.} relevant clauses in Hungarian public law, the sources ranging from the laws of King István I to the Hármaskönyv (Tripartitum), the Approbatae, the Compilatae Constitutiones, and the Diploma Leopoldinum, all the way to the laws of 1791. Opposition figures included people who would play a leading role in the Transylvanian liberal movement of the 1830s, notably the younger Miklós Wesselényi, then at the start of his career, and Ádám Kendeffi. The conflict over the urbarium brought into play both conservatism, reflected in unwillingness on the part of the landowning nobility to make concessions to villeins, and an ambivalent constitutionalism that led the estates to demand that the matter be settled by the diet. To be sure, after the crisis of 1819–20, the landowning nobility would gradually split into two camps, conservative and liberal. The latter, which included Wesselényi, eventually took the initiative to reform the status of villeins.

The villeins manifested their dissatisfaction in a series of protest movements concentrated in Doboka County, the eastern fringe of Kolozs County, and the counties of Küküllő, Alsó-Fehér, and Felső-Fehér. The villeins’ principal grievance involved the size of their plots; they demanded new surveys of land tenure and cited the injustices suffered in previous redrawings of boundaries. However, many villeins called for prompt implementation of the urbarium’s lower prescriptions for socage, while others wanted to enrol in the frontier guard.

Once again, circumstances conspired to block implementation of socage reform. As late as 1835, the relevant documents were awaiting action by the chancellery. The government did not attach great urgency to the problem, and considerable time would pass before the more progressive elements of the landed nobility recognized the imperative of reform.

Noble landowners who participated in the opposition movement of the 1790s may have transmitted some of their experiences to the next, reform-minded generation, which reached political {2-783.} maturity in the 1820s. That new elite took its bearings from the circle around Kazinczy and Döbrentei, and the political forums in which it spread its wings lay more in Hungary than in Transylvania. The outstanding figure in this generation was the Miklós Wesselényi Jr. Thanks to the patronage of Kazinczy and Berzsenyi, the young aristocrat soon came to be regarded as the great hope of the two Hungarian motherlands. He was endowed with exceptional intelligence, and, in keeping with the fashion of the era’s avantgarde, he had engaged in a variety of activities to develop his physical prowess. Wesselényi was István Széchenyi’s closest friend, and he figured consistently as the ‘second man’ in the reform movement that emerged in Hungary during 1820s; in Transylvania, he was second to none. He was at once a model farmer, a published expert on economics, and an uncommonly skilful organizer. Among those active in politics, Ádám Kendeffi is generally ranked next to Wesselényi, but his merits were matched by those of Sándor Bölöni Farkas. The son of a Székely border guard, Bölöni Farkas had enjoyed the patronage of Döbrentei and joined the staff of the Gubernium. His qualities as theoretician would be fully revealed only after 1830.

For these reformers, the period before 1830 was largely one of preparation. In 1825, Wesselényi displayed great tactical and organizational skills in establishing, at Kolozsvár, a horse-market that was designed to promote Transylvanian horse breeding; together with Sándor Bölöni Farkas, he founded a casino (gentlemen’s club) in 1828, also at Kolozsvár. Wesselényi was assiduous in helping the recently-built national theatre to overcome difficulties. In 1827, Calvinists among the liberally-oriented landed nobility led a reform of the consistory that governed their Church in Transylvania; as a result, lay members (who belonged to the political opposition) acquired a much greater say in the management of Church affairs. These were but the first manifestations of a burgeoning movement for political reform.

{2-784.} The champions of the new liberalism were girding for struggles that would absorb their energies for close to twenty years. Meanwhile, the majority of opposition-minded, noble landowners ‘defended the constitution’ in protest against infringements of their traditional privileges. The first major battle of the coming era would be fought over the convening of a diet. The opening shots were fired by Dániel Zeyk, an elderly defender of the estates’ constitutional rights, when, in 1829, he addressed the Kolozs county assembly. The nature and outcome of the battle would depend in large measure on the progressive wing of the landowning nobility and on their allies among the intelligentsia.