THREE LUTHERAN CIVIL WILLS FROM PRESSBURG RELATING TO LONDON

Abstract

Social historians have long agreed that estate records and wills offer rich and diverse opportunities for studying 18th- and 19th-century societies. This view is supported by numerous conference volumes, source editions and studies, as well as doctoral dissertations written as part of the doctoral program associated with the Hajnal István Circle at the Department of Economic and Social History at the Eötvös Loránd University. Building on this approach, the present article publishes three civil wills originating from Pressburg (Pozsony), today Bratislava in the Kingdom 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 value of wills for the history of social relations – and broadens the corpus of published wills by including German-language sources. It is probably no exaggeration to state that the upper strata of the German Lutheran community belonged to the most daring, ambitious, and mobile inhab- itants of the pre-industrial Kingdom of Hungary. The evidence presented here confirms that young men born into the German Lutheran bourgeois community and socialized within its norms and institutions possessed not only a European outlook, but also actively sought career opportunities in major European cities. In the three cases presented, we are not simply witnessing emigration: as the act of making a will indicates that ties between family members who remained at home and those who settled abroad decades earlier were preserved. In two cases, the migrant men even returned to the Kingdom of Hungary in old age and spent remainder of their lives there, while children born in England continued to live here for a time. The family histories presented further suggest that these move- ments were not isolated, individual migrations, but that the settlement in London and the pursuit of careers there were supported by the cooperating bourgeois fam- ilies –an issue that will require further research in detail.