The starting point of the modern agriculture in Hungary was the emancipation of the serfdom in 1848. While by the end of the 18th century some landlords had begun to convert their farming to the "Junker" type of farming, such a conversion now became virtually compulsory for every landlord after the emancipation. A small number of landowners who owned large estates of more than some thousands of holds (1 hold=0.57 ha.) could raise funds for the conversion by leasing out the lands or by bank credit, and this stratum ruled the Hunarian agriculture, and then Hungary itself. For the middle or lesser landlords, however, this conversion meant so great a difficulty that the major part of this stratum experienced a failure in their position as landowners and lost their lands in some decades after the emancipation. This declining stratum was the main source of the "gentry" class, which embodied the backwardness of the Hungarian society before the Second World War. On the other hand the small farm of peasants was connected with the communal appropriation of land, which strongly remained even after the emancipation. Nevertheless, among the upper class of the Peasantry some tried to make their farming independent from the communal framework. In the first part of this paper, farming of one peasant, who behaved actively in the new conditions in the second half of the 19th century, is investigated as an example, and it is considered that in what relations with the communal appropriation of land his farm was reproduced. Here we analyze the field system and the regulation of cultivation (Flurzwang) in the arable lands, the custom of joined grazing in the communal pastures, and the total balance of the farming accounts, which takes the income and expenses in kind into consideration. In the second part, a more general picture of the relations between the peasant farming and the land community is drawn. Here we conclude that the smaller the farm is, the more dependent or the more closely related it is on or with the communal appropriation of land, and that the upper class of the peasantry, who might have had a possibility to play a leading role in breaking up the traditional framework of the land community was so small in number that they could not form a socially significant force.
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