Agrarian Society

In most respects, Transylvania's social structure showed greater stability between 1770 and 1830 than it had over the preceding sixty years. However, this very consolidation and stabilization aggravated some old tensions and generated new ones as well.

The new aristocracy had taken a lasting shape by the beginning of the period. A few additional families came to swell its ranks, and a few brilliant careers led to social advancement, but the class had become consolidated in its status and assets. Aristocratic rank was generally associated with large estates (the exception being families of officials and officers who had won baronies in the preceding period without attendant grants of property), and it fitted into the hierarchy of officialdom (with a few exceptions that proved the rule). The office of lord lieutenant was normally held by a member of the family with the largest estate in the county. His deputy, the county's chief justice, and the other senior officials came from the 'county nobility', whose members owned a few hundred hectares of land. Apart from the posts reserved for the Saxon 'nation' or, in the case of the Treasury, filled by foreigners, the higher offices and councillorships in Transylvania's central governing institutions were held by aristocrats and a sprinkling of the wealthier 'county nobles'.

{2-653.} Some of the best-educated and ablest aristocrats became the mainstay of the Habsburgs' enlightened absolutism in Transylvania. The system instituted by Joseph II in Transylvania rested primarily on such key figures of the old aristocracy as György Bánffy, Sámuel Teleki, János Esterházy, and Ádám Teleki, and only secondarily on equally able but more recently elevated aristocrats. Through their participation in government, these enlightened aristocrats, many of whom reached a ripe old age, managed to preserve the more positive features of Josephinism into the early 1820s. The quality of government suffered a marked decline after they passed from the scene.

The same aristocracy, along with those close to them in wealth or official status, provided, after 1790, the core of a political opposition that rose above traditional feudal quarrels to pursue more modern objectives. The political lines had not yet been formed in 1751, at the time of the debate on the Teleki–Dobosi plan, when both the regime's supporters and its opponents displayed a rigid conservatism. Political groupings did appear after 1790–91 but, due to certain factors, they did not clearly divide along conservative and progressive lines. After 1810, a new movement emerged, first in the sphere of culture, then in active politics, then, again in the social sphere, with a growing tendency toward liberalism. The social composition of this movement was broader than that of its predecessors, for it included not only aristocrats but also Székely military officers, intellectuals, and the sons of civil servants issuing from the lesser nobility; middle nobles — una eademque nobilitas — were noteworthy for their absence.

Indeed, the 'county nobility', possessed of comparatively small estates, failed to carve out an independent role. It remained, as in the era of the principality, the dutiful follower of one group or other of aristocrats. Even when county nobles took an oppositional tack in pursuit of collective grievances, they would allow themselves to be led by an aristocrat who shared — or pretended to share — their grievances.

{2-654.} The reorganization of the border guards brought about a great change in the lives of this agrarian society's free members, though not without some backlash. The Székely border guards resisted giving up the rights acquired during the principality. In 1779, some of the Háromszék guards disobeyed orders to march across the border and headed home from Marosvásárhely. The reprisals included six death sentences; thirty-two of them were forced to run the gauntlet (which was conducted so brutally that many received fatal injuries), and a further 212 were caned. The demands of the Székely guards were debated in the 1790–91 diet. The estates were prepared to disband Székely frontier regiments, but their proposal was never implemented. In the Romanian border regiments, it was mainly Hungarian lesser nobles who, after 1790, wanted to be relieved of their duties, but to no avail. The contrary tendency was also in evidence: in certain villages, or, at more turbulent moments, in entire regions, peasants would seek to take up arms as frontier guards and thereby escape villeinage. The broadest of these movements was the Horea-led rising (see below), but the demands to take up arms would recur, notably in 1790 at several Udvarhelyszék villages, in Alsó-Fehér County in 1794, in some villages of the Mezőség in 1797, in Hunyad County in 1804, in Alsó-Fehér County again in 1809, in the counties of Alsó-Fehér and Hunyad as well as the Fogaras district in 1817, and in Kolozs County in 1820. However, the frontier guard was not an 'open' institution; there was neither free access to, nor ready exit from service.

There was little change in the circumstances of the other free groups in the Hungarian and Saxon 'nations'. The ecclesiastical nobles, the armalists, the Székely nobles (lófő) and guardsmen (darabont) who had not been recruited into the frontier guard, and the Romanian boyars in Fogaras all remained subject to taxation, and the estates' efforts after 1790 to modify this obligation proved fruitless.

{2-655.} The situation of villeins will be considered in the context of political history, but a few aspects must be noted at this point. The provisions tying villeins to the soil were abrogated in 1785, but there remained some restrictions on their freedom to move. Despite several attempts by the government and the estates, there was no comprehensive reform of socage. Competing demands for land gave rise to tensions in this period between landowners and villeins, evoking the similar tensions between free Saxon and Romanian peasants of the Királyföld in the 1750s. The landowners did not drive villeins from their plots; indeed, they tried to find new villeins to settle on uncultivated land. But the landowners did nibble away at the villeins' plots. They would trade less fertile plots for good land; appropriate the villeins' cleared land, with or without compensation; and exercise their legal title to woodlands by exacting services from villeins who wished to use the woods for grazing and feeding pigs on mast. In some places, landowners exploited the loose prescriptions of the 'Certain Points' (or even went beyond these) to increase the level of corvée. In the preceding period, villeins would commonly escape unreasonable burdens by running away. Now, they felt less mobile, partly because they had become more committed to the cultivation of land, and partly because a more efficient public administration made it easier for the landowner to track them down.

These rising tensions were reflected in the great peasant revolt of 1784, although that event owed to some particular circumstances. After that rising, the last of its kind in the pre-1848 period in Transylvania, there would be only minor manifestations of un-rest, limited to one or a few villages. In 1819–20, at the time of the last attempt in the period to reform socage, peasant protests erupted in various parts of the country (notably in the counties of Doboka, Alsó-Fehér, Felső-Fehér, Kolozs, Küküllő, and Zaránd). While this fell short of a 'permanent agrarian revolution', tensions between landowners and villeins did become accentuated, and a reform of socage, however modest, was clearly overdue.

{2-656.} Despite Joseph II's concivilitas decree, discussed below, agrarian society in the Királyföld underwent little change in this period. The free Saxons generally prevailed in the ongoing competition for scarce land. As before, free Romanian peasants complained that the Saxons barred them from communal land and woodlots, appropriated their cleared lands, and restricted or abrogated their grazing rights on municipal pastures. The Romanians were excluded from municipal office and from sharing in communal revenues. They had to pay tithes to the Lutheran clergy, yet received neither financial help nor building sites for their churches and schools; in many localities, their priests did not receive the canonica portio that was supposed to provide them with the necessities of life. In some instances, notably in the Szebenszék, in 1776, the Saxons tried to expel the Romanian population, and the government had take decisive action to abort such initiatives.