Nagy_Agoston_A_jobbagytelken_ulo_nemesseg

A significant portion of Hungarian nobility held aristocratic credentials but was forced to reside in urbarial plots in return for urbarial contract and services, such as socage, tithe, ninth, and so on. Based on the local usus of taxation, in some counties they also had to pay the military tax for the state (contributio). At the same time, their status was not politicized on a national level for a long time. The king’s resolution in the Diet of 1825–27 proposed conducting a census to assess the taxpaying entities of the country, in order to proportionally redraw the existing tax distribution per county. The proposal also included compiling a list of nobles who used urbarial plots (based on the status of their land) with the aim of keeping them as taxpayers. The latter led to heated debates. Some argued against the census and taxing these nobles by appealing to the (fictitious) principle of ‘one and the same liberty’ and demanded the abolition of taxation of all noblemen. Others wanted to tax them, emphasizing that tax immunity applied to the ‘noble person’, not the ‘peasant plot’. The prolonged debate was fought mainly by means of the political language of the ‘ancient constitution’ and delved into the domain of ‘old laws’. Raising fundamental questions concerning the rights and duties of the nobility, as well as the idea of their (legal) unity—as of the self-professed political community or ‘nation’—this discourse transcended itself. The present study, primarily based on original records of the Diet, traces the formation of the image of this inferior ‘class’ of nobility, and uses it to reconstruct the well-to-do county delegates’ perceptions of the Estates society in general.