Legal Customs and Customary Law in the Jászkun District 1682–1876

Abstract

Based on archival documents and supplementary ethnographic collections, this study reviews the autonomous community customs and legal traditions of the Jászkun people, starting in the 17th century and autonomously evolving among the jász [Jassic] and kun [Cuman] people in Hungary for centuries and preserved in certain peculiar Jászkun terms and vernacular expressions up until the 20th century. In view of legal ethnography and activity-oriented social history, my study has been divided into four parts: Kun, Jász, Jászkun; Legal customs and customary law before the Redemption (1745); The legal culture of the Jászkun District after the Redemption; The enacted customary law of the Jászkun: the Jászkun Statute. I specifically focused on the 18th century, for at the end of it the Jászkun Statute, the written customary law of the district, approved by the palatine, had been promulgated. The statute incorporated the legal customs practiced by the people of the Jászkun District before 1799 and facilitated the long-term survival of the specific unique features of local society and the high degree of differentiation of their legal practice. The customary laws of the Jászkun are history now, but in more than one aspect they still affect the everyday lives of late descendants.