Recent historians have, however, swept away these theories regarding the Szeklers’ origin, and explained it in different fashion. The most ancient records of the Magyars do not date farther back than the sixth century after Christ, when they are mentioned as a semi-nomadic race living on the vast plains between the Caucasian and Ural mountains. A portion of them quitted these regions in the eighth and ninth centuries to seek a new home in the territory between the rivers Dnieper and Szereth. From here a small fraction of them, pressed hard by the Bulgarians, traversed the chain of Moldavian Carpathians, and found a refuge on the rich fertile plains of Eastern Transylvania (895), where, living ever since cut off from their kinsfolk, they have formed a people by themselves. According to the most probable version, these fugitives would seem to have been the women, children, and old men, who, left unprotected at home in the absence of the fighting-men of the horde, had thus escaped the vengeance of Simeon, King of Bulgaria. “At the frontier,” or “beyond,” is the signification of the Hungarian word Szekler, which therefore does not imply a distinctive race, but merely those Hungarians who live beyond the forest—near the frontier, and cut off from the rest of their countrymen. One Hungarian authority tells us that the word Szekler, meaning frontier-keeper or watchman, was indiscriminately applied to all soldiers of whatever nationality who defended the frontier of the kingdom. Later, when the greater body of Hungarians had established their authority over this portion of the territory as well, the two peoples fraternized with each other as kinsfolk, descended indeed from one common family tree, but who had acquired certain dissimilarities in speech, manner, and costume, brought about by their separation; and despite sympathy and resemblance on most points, they have never quite merged into one nationality, and the Szeklers have a proverb which says that there is the same difference between a Szekler and a Hungarian as there is between a man and his grandson—meaning that they themselves came in by a previous immigration. The Szeklers had this advantage over their kinsfolk in Hungary proper, of never at any time having been reduced to the state of serfdom. They occupied the exceptional position of a peasant aristocracy, having, among other privileges, the right of hunting, also that of being exempted from infantry service and being enlisted as cavalry soldiers only; whereas the ordinary Hungarian peasant was, up to 1785, attached to the soil under conditions only somewhat lighter than those oppressing the Russian serf. Curiously enough, though the system of villanage had already been formally discarded by King Sigismond in 1405, it was taken up again some years later; and, in point of fact, up to 1848 there was scarcely any limit to the services which the Hungarian peasant was bound to render to his master.