A földközösség újjáéledése az Alföldön a 18. században

The major issue of the territories liberated from the Turks was the resettlement of the destroyed villages and the establishment of a new hierarchy of the settlements. For the individual and family settlers a whole new range of possibilities opened not bound neither by territorial nor by residential issues. Since there were few settlers and plenty of land, a borderland use based on the idea of free land occupation was developed, which did not allow the formation of a real community. However, the arrival of more settlers resulted in the increase of the number of claimants for land. It was not long before the system of free land occupation had led to confusion and disputes. The solution was to limit the rights of the individual and to cultivate a habit of settling disputes together. First, the freedom of ownership (occupation of land at will) was restricted. The system of common land was born out of this era of sporadic settlement, with its new form of land use regulation. At this level, the village collectively decided how the borderland should be divided and used. In other words, they swapped to a three-field system. By the time the landlord appeared in the villages in the 18th century, an arrangement had already been established and finalized in its new form by the peasantry. The initial balance of mutual dependence (the acceptable weight of the landlord’s burden and the sure collection of the landlord’s due) was tipped by the landlord’s increasing financial interest, which instead of the annual reallocation of the land placed the emphasis on the formation of the plot of land, a kind of permanent individual ownership. Thus, the very essence of the common land, the regulation of ownership ceased, and only the three-field system remained from the era of communal land use