This is the second post in the Historicizing Adaptation blog series, introduced here by series editor Shannon Stunden Bower.
There is a paradox in the history of commons in 19th century land-use. For the contemporary mainstream of liberal thinkers and professionals, this form of land-use is judged as a backward and harmful residue of feudal-style of entitlements and pre-modern communities. Yet research into the environmental history of various regions globally has revealed that commons often were a sustainable means of organizing economic activities ranging from energy production to fishing and pastures. This paradox holds true for the Kingdom of Hungary, which was evolving into a constitutional monarchy within the Habsburg Empire in the first half of the 19th century and reached a special political compromise with the imperial centre in 1867, following war and retribution. The legal system creating private property was imposed among the post-war measures of the 1850s, but had a decades-long prehistory. The issue of turning forests into private property was a particularly difficult and lengthy process that was not resolved with the introduction of the Hungarian Forest Law of 1879.
During the 19th century, notions about the interaction between states, land, and landowners underwent changes that facilitated the maximization of extraction, be it through agricultural production, mining, forestry, or other means. The key to these changes was the demise of commons, in which land and resources were collectively managed by communities. As historical research has revealed over the past fifty years, there were many factors driving the demise of commons. It is widely known that the surge of wool business as a result of continental wars contributed to the state-backed enclosure process in Britain.1 The ending of feudalism in the French Revolution meant the ending of contractual relationships that allowed for the common use of pastures in France.2 If we consider the idea of manifest destiny in North America or colonialism in Australia and New Zealand that involved conflicts with Indigenous peoples’ collectively-held land rights, as well as the setting up of state-run colonial administration in South Asia, we can recognize the global nature of the enclosure process.3 The global move to enclose the commons had impacts in Central Europe during and after the revolutions of 1848.
Throughout the 19th century, countless numbers of communities had to address, confront, and adapt to changing notions about appropriate interactions between states, lands, and landowners, as well as to the introduction of state legislation that reflected these changing notions. In what follows, I feature examples of responses to these changes from communities in a hilly area of Central Europe, namely the Tara Oasului (in Hungarian: Avasság). This area was administratively situated in Szatmár County, in the 19th century Kingdom of Hungary. The village communities in that area responded to the enclosure process in particular ways because of their positioning in a semi-peripheral region rich in timber and mineral resources. Also relevant was the fact that community-members were Romanian speakers of the Greek Catholic faith, and so were positioned outside of the social networks that were dominant in the Kingdom of Hungary at that time.4 Many areas subjected to the enclosure process were zones of cultural contact and resource frontiers. Additionally, the villages of Szatmár experienced brutal inter-ethnic violence in 1848 and 1849, as the Hungarian Revolution manifested as civil war in many multiethnic areas.
The written material produced by county level administration in Szatmár contains examples of the conflicts the emerged within village communities, as well as between forestry authorities and village communities upon the introduction of the Hungarian Forest Law of 1879 (Law no. 31 of 1879). The Forest Law was part of a series of 19th century laws aimed at creating suitable conditions for commodity and land markets, as well as for the accumulation of private capital and wealth in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Forests were the most debated type of land in the process of dividing land between former landlords and former serfs. The Forest Law created a clear demarcation between privately owned forests and forests owned by legal entities such as foundations, Church and municipalities. Legal entities were obliged to submit forest management plans to the Ministry of Agriculture, while private owners were free from this obligation. This arrangement reinforced that private property owners could do whatever they wished. It also meant that some lands were subject to restrictions on access and use, with exclusions particularly targeting domestic animals and the collection of fodder. The restrictions were especially strict if the forest land was classified as soil that must remain under forest cover, a new category created under the Forest Law.
Through the enclosure process, some village communities in Szatmár County were left without pasture but they still had an obligation to pay compensation to their former landlords. In this context, communities sought to commodify the local forest plots and to convert these areas into pastures. In some locations, villagers disagreed about the desirability and timing of cutting the forest, with some villagers preferring payment in the form of ongoing access to forest produce while others preferring immediate cash income.5 At times, the local (mostly Greek Catholic) churches also decided to sell their forest plots that were important for grazing, thus causing further conflict over land use.6
To make things more complex, the Forest Law of 1879 prohibited village communities from selling their forests unless the Hungarian national forestry authority, operating as part of the Ministry of Agriculture, gave permission. Clear cutting was expressly forbidden. Village communities could obtain permission to cut any area only after they had an approved management plan in place. Importantly, communities could not arrange to divide the land on their own, even if they would have done so prudently. This latter prohibition caused conflict in a village called Buzesti in Romanian (in Hungarian: Oláhújfalu and later Szamosújfalu). The village planned to finance its obligation to pay 1500 forints to Count Lajos Károlyi by selling forty-four cadastral acres of oak forest next to the village.7 A complaint about the cutting reached the authorities so many years after it had taken place that it was hard to date the event to a certain year. In fact, by 1891 there was already a young mixed forest stand in the same area. Curiously, neither the estate of Count Károlyi nor the village administrators were able or willing to reveal the actual contract about the division of the land. The contract might have clarified whether the arrangement was made before or after the passage of the Forest Law of 1879, which was important because the action may have violated the terms of the Law. Eventually, the village received a moderate fine and had to pay for the preparation of a management plan for the new stand. Village leadership agreed to do so when they received permission to sell the leftover older oak trees.
Restrictions on land use often weighed heavily on communities, but local grievances did not always immediately come to light. For example, a petition addressed to the Hungarian authorities in May 1919, at the time when post-World War I border changes were already in sight, makes clear that a village called Iegheriste (in Hungarian: Alsóhuta) was left without sufficient firewood and sufficient pasture as a result of settlement in former commons carried out in the 1860s and 1870s. The local representative claimed that the Count Károlyi family had in the 1860s enclosed 1400 cadastral acres of forest that had previously been used as emergency pasture for cattle and as a source of lumber and timber.8 The forestry authority in the city of Debrecen ultimately dismissed the matter, claiming it had been addressed as part of legal proceedings between the village and the Count in the 1860s.
Conflict between village communities and authorities also occurred when foresters designated certain areas as protective forest belts, thereby denying villagers access to any forest products. Paragraph two of the Forest Law of 1879 made it clear that while both the landowners and the county administration could make proposals bearing on land access, it was the forestry administration under the Ministry of Agriculture that made final decisions. In locations where prospectively protective areas had been alternately used as pasture and arable land, the situation was particularly concerning. The mostly Hungarian inhabitants of the village of Kőszegremete (Remetea Oașului in Romanian) suggested a compromise: they would plant walnut trees (Juglans regia spp.) in the area that the state authorities wished to see protected so that the soil would be preserved and the two-year system of agriculture could also continue.9
Common land was vital to the economies of village communities in Tara Oasului in the 19th century. Cows could not survive without feeding on common pastures while common forests were the source of energy and timber. Enclosure proved a disruptive process. The rural populations in these villages adapted to enclosure and to limitations on their ability to commodify timber by acting in their own interest, even in the face of fines and even if their actions caused conflict within the village. Efforts by villagers to assert their interests contributed to public alarm about the potential loss of forests and helped prompt the enactment of the Forest Law of 1879. When the newly-established forestry authority pushed the villages further by establishing protective forest belts, villages put forward creative solutions. In time, rural persistence paid off. Eventually, the forestry authorities operating within the Kingdom of Hungary’s Ministry of Agriculture recognized that diminished pastures threatened both economic viability and subsistence prospects, and tacitly consented to re-categorizing forest land as areas that may be turned into pasture.
Notes
1. Gordon E. Mingay, Parliamentary Enclosure in England: An Introduction to Its Causes, Incidence and Impact 1750-1850 (Routledge, 1997)
2. Rafe Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (Oxford University Press, 2016)
3. Mark Hickford, Lords of the Land. Indigenous Property Rights and the Jurisprudence of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2012); Neeladri Bhattacharya, The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World (Permanent Black, 2018)
4. Robert Nemes, Another Hungary. The Nineteenth-Century Provinces in Eight Lives (Stanford University Press, 2016)
5. Hungarian National Archives, Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg County Archives, Fond VII/329/1907.
6. Romanian National Archives, Cluj County Department, ACSM Actele Comitetului Admin 1906 vol. 1. Fasc. VII. Jeder.
7. Romanian National Archives, Cluj County Department ACSM Actele Comitetului Admin. 1891 vol. I. 220-249.
8. Hungarian National Archives, Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg County Archives, IV. 757/b. box no.69. 305a/1919.
9. Hungarian National Archives, Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg County Archives, IV. 757/b. Alispáni iratok, VII/2255/1913.
Feature image: A group of Romanian villagers in the village of Călinești [in Hungarian: Felsőkálinfalva] in present-day Maramureș County of Romania, 1940. Credit: Fortepan Photo Archives, fortepan.hu
