Parishes and Hides: The Transformation of the Kingdom of Hungary around 1300

In the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, the development of both the parish network and the peasant hides took place in the thirteenth century and all of their components were present at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The number of hides at the time of the papal tithe list (1332–37) had reached that of the late Middle Ages (c.430,000). By 1300, the size of the hides, including their common rights, was about 33.6 to 48 hectares and they covered about 45 to 60 per cent of the country’s area. Tithes paid by the peasants per hide provided village priests with about the same standard of living as their parishioners. Each parish had an average of 100 hides, ranging from 80 to 120 hides in most cases. These two systems, the hides and the parish network, made up the basic structure that shaped the landscape of the kingdom until the end of the Middle Ages. Demographically, the number of inhabitants per parish in early fourteenth-century Hungary roughly corresponded to that in France, and the average household was around five people. By around 1500, the average size of peasant households per hide had risen to 6.5 people. At the same time, the non-agricultural population grew from c.5 per cent to c.20 per cent of the population. Much of this non-agricultural population provided labour for the cattle trade and mining, and was also the source of a growing urban population and for the increasingly important military in the fifteenth century. In Hungary, however, the rise of urban centres began about a century-and-a-half later than in Western Europe because of a much lower population density and better conditions for the peasantry.