Introduction
Hungarian social anthropologists have tended to assume that in pre-industrial times Hungarian peasants lived in large households containing at the same time families of parents and several married children. But when the size and structure of households were investigated by historians by means of listings of inhabitants of villages and of large estates in past centuries, the average size was found to be small. Using the published summarized results of the first census in 1784–7, J. Tamásy, a demographer, found that the average size of households in Hungary, Transylvania and Croatia together was 5.28 persons.
Laslett found that in England and in parts of north-western Europe, contrary to the assumption of many sociologists and historians, the average size of households was small and the proportion of households with a complex structure – that is, extended- and multiple-family households – was also low. On the other hand, research into the nature of Serbian households revealed that in Serbian society complicated households of the zadruga type were very common, while Peter Czap's chapter in the present volume presents results on nineteenth-century Russia showing very large and complex households among serf peasants (see chapter 3).
Thus the type of household structure and the size of households prevalent in pre-industrial Hungary are open questions, and it would be interesting to ascertain whether Hungarian household structure resembled the western rather than the eastern European pattern. The question is complicated by the fact that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the populations of Hungary, Transylvania, and Croatia were very heterogeneous in social status (serfs, cotters, artisans, etc.), ethnicity, and religion.