Wealth distribution and Paretoʹs law in the Hungarian medieval society

The distribution of wealth in the medieval Hungarian aristocratic society is studied and reported. Assuming the wealth of a noble family to be directly related to the size and agricultural potential of the owned land, we take the number of owned serf families as a measure of the respective wealth. Our data analysis reveals the power-law nature of this wealth distribution, confirming the validity of the Pareto law for this society. Since, in the feudal society, land was not commonly traded, our targeted system can be considered as an experimental realization of the no-trade limit of wealth-distribution models. The obtained Pareto exponent (α=0.92–0.95) close to 1, is in agreement with the prediction of such models.