Folyómeder-dinamika és birtokhatár-változás a középkori Magyarországon
River-Bed Dynamics and Changing Estate Borders in Medieval Hungary

Summary/Abstract: Medieval estate boundaries generally followed natural borders, frequently running along hills, ditches, or forests. In order to fix them clearly, border marks were erected, earth piled up, trees marked with a sign, or other means of marking the border were used. Among all these natural borders, rivers seem at first sight to constitute the most constant topographical element. Yet if one looks at antique or medieval legal collections or summaries of customary law, the picture looks much more ambiguous. Estate borders connected to waterways frequently led to legal disputes. Exploring the practice mirrored by the late medieval Hungarian source material, the paper seeks to answer the question of whether the property right of a given landed estate changed when the course of a waterway that served as estate boundary changed, with a piece of land so to say floated from one bank of the river to the other.

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