On the Social Structure of the Kingdom of Hungary According to the Records of the Regestrum Varadinense

LYSÝ, Miroslav.On the Social Structure of the Kingdom of Hungary According to the Records of the Regestrum Varadinense.The current paper concerns several elements of social structure as defined within the records of the Oradea Register (Regestrum Varadinense).This collection, known in the literature for almost five centuries, has been studied as a source of legal proceedings, ordeals or substantive law of the high Middle Ages in the Kingdom of Hungary.It was later explored as a source of topography, personal names and Hungarian and Slavic elements in medieval Latin.In the 19 th century, the collection also became an important source on the history of medieval Hungarian society and administration.As such, social structure and social relations are not based on class definitions only.Records of the Oradea Register show interesting differences between men and women in law; while in legal proceedings, there were not any substantiated important differences, in substantive law, we find a different structure of delicts related to women.For many reasons, the Oradea register became an important role for studying societal stratification (udvornici, iobagiones, castrenses, servants, dusnici, et al.).In reflection with other diplomatic material from the Kingdom of Hungary in the first third of the 13 th century, we are witnesses of a society on the verge of great changes, before the completion of the nobility and before the creation of medieval towns.T he Oradea Register (Regestrum Varadinense) is one of the most well-known collections of legal documents from the Kingdom of Hungary.Its records come from the years 1208-1235, 1 that is, from the period of the reign of one of the most important Hungarian kings, Andrew II, who is mentioned many times in the collection.The most telling feature of the register is the very frequent use of a red-hot iron court as the so-called ordeal before the Chapter of Oradea (Hung.Várad, Slovak Varadín), i.e., a means of evidence toThe present work was supported by the VEGA grant 2/0017/23: Právna norma verzus súdna prax.Historickoprávne, diskurzívne a sociálne aspekty súdnictva, zločinu a trestu v období stredoveku a raného novoveku. 1The work was preserved from a written edition dating back to 1550.Further editions (by Matthias Bel, Stephan Ladislaus Endlicher and Kabos Kandra) were based on this initial one, and only the critical edition by János Karácsony and Samu Borovszky brought innovation by arranging the records in chronological order, which was not preserved in the first four editions.In the 1903 edition, they justified the difficult task of chronological arrangement in detail with references to previous attempts by