Három londoni vonatkozású polgári végrendelet Pozsonyból

Tóth, Árpád (2025) Három londoni vonatkozású polgári végrendelet Pozsonyból. LEVÉLTÁRI KÖZLEMÉNYEK, 96. pp. 177-214. ISSN 0024-1512

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Abstract

Social historians have long agreed that estate records and wills offer rich anddiverse opportunities for studying 18th- and 19th-century societies. This view issupported by numerous conference volumes, source editions and studies, as wellas doctoral dissertations written as part of the doctoral program associated withthe Hajnal István Circle at the Department of Economic and Social History at theEötvös Loránd University. Building on this approach, the present article publishesthree civil wills originating from Pressburg (Pozsony), today Bratislava in theKingdom of Hungary.The study introduces analytical perspectives that have so far been little or par-tially explored in this type of source base – most notably migration and the valueof wills for the history of social relations – and broadens the corpus of publishedwills by including German-language sources. It is probably no exaggeration to state that the upper strata of the GermanLutheran community belonged to the most daring, ambitious, and mobile inhab-itants of the pre-industrial Kingdom of Hungary. The evidence presented hereconfirms that young men born into the German Lutheran bourgeois communityand socialized within its norms and institutions possessed not only a Europeanoutlook, but also actively sought career opportunities in major European cities. Inthe three cases presented, we are not simply witnessing emigration: as the act ofmaking a will indicates that ties between family members who remained at homeand those who settled abroad decades earlier were preserved. In two cases, themigrant men even returned to the Kingdom of Hungary in old age and spentremainder of their lives there, while children born in England continued to livehere for a time. The family histories presented further suggest that these move-ments were not isolated, individual migrations, but that the settlement in Londonand the pursuit of careers there were supported by the cooperating bourgeois fam-ilies –an issue that will require further research in detail.

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