text: Differences in the nobles' wealth increased in the second half of the 15th century. About 30 families owned more than a quarter of the territory of the kingdom when Corvinus died in 1490. A further tenth of all lands in the kingdom was in the possession of about 55 wealthy noble families. Other nobles held almost one third of the lands, but this group included 12–13,000 peasant-nobles who owned a single plot (or a part of it) and had no tenants. The Diets regularly compelled the peasant-nobles to pay tax on their plots. Average magnates held about 50 villages, but the regular division of inherited landed property could lead to the impoverishment of aristocratic families. Strategies applied to avoid thisfamily planning and celibacyled to the extinction of most aristocratic families after a few generations.
  The Diet ordered the compilation of customary law in 1498. The jurist István Werbőczy (d. 1541) completed the task, presenting a law-book at the Diet in 1514. His TripartitumThe Customary Law of the Renowned Kingdom of Hungary in Three Partswas never enacted, but it was consulted at the law courts for centuries. It summarized the noblemen's fundamental privileges in four points: noblemen were only subject to the monarch's authority and could only be arrested in a due legal process; furthermore, they were exempt from all taxes and were entitled to resist the king if he attempted to interfere with their privileges. Werbőczy also implied that Hungary was actually a republic of nobles headed by a monarch, stating that all noblemen "are members of the Holy Crown" of Hungary. Quite anachronistically, he emphasized the idea of all noblemen's legal equality, but he had to admit that the high officers of the realm, whom he mentioned as "true barons", were legally distinguished from other nobles. He also mentioned the existence of a distinct group, who were barons "in name only", but without specifying their peculiar status.