The origin of local land tenure. Service system Local system and service people scheme

A. Vasnetsov. Streletskaya Sloboda

Since that time, i.e., from the second half of the 15th century, local land ownership has developed into a harmonious and complex system, and precise rules for the allocation and distribution of lands into local ownership have been developed. These rules became necessary when the government, having created a large armed mass through increased recruitment, began to organize its maintenance with land dachas.

Traces of the intensified and systematic distribution of state-owned lands into local ownership appear already in the second half of the 15th century. The census book of the Votskaya Pyatina of the Novgorod land, compiled in 1500, has reached us. In two districts of this Pyatina, Ladoga and Orekhovsk, according to this book we already meet 106 Moscow landowners, on whose lands there were about 3 thousand households with 4 thousand peasants living in them and yard people. These figures show how hastily the removal of service people proceeded and what development the Moscow estates reached on the northwestern outskirts of the state, in Novgorod land, within some 20 years after the conquest of Novgorod.

In the named districts of the Votskaya Pyatina, according to the indicated book, almost more than half of all arable land was already in the possession of landowners transferred from central Moscow Rus'. We find traces of the same intensive development of manorial ownership in the central counties of the state. From the first years of the 16th century. Several boundary documents have been preserved, delimiting Moscow and the counties closest to it from one another. Along the borders of these districts, charters indicate many small landowners next to the patrimonial lands: these were clerks with clerks, huntsmen, grooms - in a word, the same palace servants who in the 14th century. the princes gave land for use in exchange for service. In the XIV century. service people were sometimes accommodated in whole masses at the same time.

The most famous case of such placement dates back to 1550. For various services at the court, the government then recruited from different districts a thousand of the most efficient service people from city nobles and boyar children. Service people, whom their service tied to the capital, needed estates or estates near Moscow for their economic needs. To this thousand servicemen recruited from the districts for the capital's service, the government distributed estates in the Moscow and nearby districts, adding to this mass several people of the highest ranks, boyars and okolnichi, who did not have those near Moscow.

The sizes of local plots were unequal and corresponded to the ranks of landowners: boyars and okolnichy received 200 quarters of arable land in a field (300 acres in 3 fields); nobles and boyar police children, divided into several articles or categories, received 200, 150 and 100 quarters in each field. Thus, 1078 service people different ranks that year, 176,775 acres of arable land were distributed in 3 fields.

Soon after the conquest of Kazan, the government put the local ownership and land service in order, compiled lists of service people, dividing them into articles according to the size of the local ownership and according to the salaries, which from the same time was brought into correct proportion to the size of the military service. Excerpts of these lists, compiled around 1556, have reached us. Here, under the name of each service person, it is indicated how many estates and estates he has, with how many servants he is obliged to appear for service and in what weapons, and how large the salary assigned to him is. From this time on, manorial ownership is slender and complex system based on precisely defined and constant rules. I will outline in schematic form the foundations of this system, as they were established by the beginning of the 17th century.

Like everything in the Moscow state, local land ownership arose in specific times; it had its original source in the land economy of the Moscow prince. To explain the origin of such land ownership, it is necessary to recall again the composition of society in the appanage principality. We saw that at the court of the appanage prince there were two types of servants: 1) servants freestyle, military, 2) servants yard workers, palace servants, also called “servants above the courtiers.” Free servants made up the prince's fighting squad and served him under an agreement. The obligations they assumed did not extend to their estates: the official relations of free servants were completely separate from the relations of the land. A free servant could leave the prince whom he served and go to the service of another prince, without losing his ownership rights to the estate located in the abandoned principality. This division of service and land relations between free servants was very precisely and persistently carried out in the contractual documents of the princes of the appanage time. Thus, in the agreement between the sons of Kalita in 1341, the younger brothers say to the eldest, Semyon: “And the boyars and servants are free; whoever goes from us to you or from you to us, do not hold us against dislike.” This means that if a free servant leaves service at the court of one brother and goes to another, the abandoned brother should not take revenge for this on the servant who left him. So, free service was not associated with land ownership. Servants under the courtier, the butler, constituted the prince's economic service. This service, on the contrary, was usually conditioned by land ownership. The court servants were housekeepers, tiuns, various palace clerks, huntsmen, grooms, gardeners, beekeepers and other artisans and working people. They were sharply different from free military servants, and the princes in the contracts agreed not to accept them, like black people, i.e. peasants, into military service. Some of these court servants were personally free people, others belonged to the prince's serfs. The appanage prince gave both of them plots of land for use in exchange for their service or to ensure its proper performance. The attitude of such servants to the prince on the land is depicted in the spiritual charter of the appanage prince of Serpukhov Vladimir Andreevich in 1410. The testamentary prince speaks here about his courtyard people, to whom lands were distributed for use, that which of those beekeepers, gardeners, hounds would not want to live on those lands, “you are deprived of land, go away, but your son Prince Ivan does not need them, for whom there will be no full charters, but their lands will go to their son Prince Ivan.” People who did not have full literacy are servants, personally free, not complete slaves. The charter of Prince Vladimir wants to say that for those and other palace servants, both free and slaves, the use of the princes' land was inextricably linked with service in the princely household. Even personally free servants, due to their palace duties, became incomplete; they could not, for example, acquire land as full ownership, on a patrimonial right, on which free servants owned land. In the same spiritual document of Prince Vladimir of Serpukhov we read the condition: “And that my key keepers were not bought, but bought the villages behind my key, my children don’t need the key keepers themselves, but my children need their villages, in whose inheritance they will be.” This means that these key keepers were personally free people; While serving the prince, they bought villages in his principality, that is, they acquired them as property, but this property was not recognized as complete: as soon as the acquirers left service under the prince, they, despite their personal freedom, were deprived of the villages they had purchased. The ancient Russian legal norm “by key according to rural serfs,” without depriving them of personal freedom, limited their right to land ownership. Thus, various types of service at the court of the appanage prince were rewarded in different ways. This was one of the differences between free service and courtyard service. Free servants received from the prince for their service stern And arguments, that is, profitable administrative and judicial positions: according to the contractual charters of the princes, that servant was recognized as free, “who has been in feeding and serving.” On the contrary, court servants were not appointed to such lucrative positions; Their service was rewarded with land dachas only under the condition of service or the right to acquire land by purchase under the same condition. From the half of the 15th century. With the Moscow unification of Northern Rus', important changes took place in the structure of the service class. Firstly, the service of free servants, while remaining military, ceases to be free and becomes mandatory: they are deprived of the right to leave the service of the Grand Duke of Moscow and move to appanages, and even more so beyond the Russian border. At the same time, to military servants who are no longer free, the Moscow sovereign gives lands for their service on a special right, different from patrimonial rights. At first, such lands were not yet called estates, but their ownership was already conditional in nature. This character is especially clearly revealed in one remark in the spiritual letter of Grand Duke Vasily the Dark in 1462. One of the most zealous military servants of this prince in the fight against Shemyaka was a certain Fyodor Basenok. The mother of the Grand Duke Sofya Vitovtovna gave this Basenko two of her villages in Kolomensky district, leaving her son to dispose of these villages after her death. The son is in his spiritual life and writes about the villages of Basenka that after Basenkov’s belly, those villages should go to his Grand Duchess wife. This means that the villages granted to a free servant were given to him only for lifelong ownership - this is one of the signs, and an essential sign, of the ownership of a local man. Finally, thirdly, the palace service, which in the appanage centuries was so sharply separated from the free, military, from the half of the 15th century. began to mingle with the latter, to connect with the military service. Court servants, like former free servants, equally began to be called servants of the Moscow sovereign and went on campaigns along with them. To these and other servants, the government distributed state-owned lands for use on exactly the same right as the court servants of the 14th century received them, only under the condition of military service, which the latter had not previously performed. As soon as these changes took place in service relations and in service land ownership, this land ownership acquired the character of a local one. Landed dachas, due to the palace and military service of former free and palace servants, were received in the 15th and 16th centuries. Name estates.

LOCAL SYSTEM.

So, I repeat, local ownership developed from the land ownership of palace servants under appanage princes and differed from this land ownership in that it was determined not only by palace, but also by military service. This difference becomes noticeable from the middle of the 15th century; no earlier than this time, the estate acquires the significance of a means of providing both palace and military service - however, then both of these types of services merge and lose their legal distinction. Since then, the legal idea of an estate has arisen as a plot of land that provides public service for a service person, military or palace - it makes no difference. Since that time, i.e., from the second half of the 15th century, local land ownership has developed into a harmonious and complex system, and precise rules for the allocation and distribution of lands into local ownership have been developed. These rules became necessary when the government, having created a large armed mass through increased recruitment, began to organize its maintenance with land dachas. Traces of the intensified and systematic distribution of state-owned lands into local ownership appear already in the second half of the 15th century. The census book of the Votskaya Pyatina of the Novgorod land, compiled in 1500, has reached us. In two districts of this Pyatina. Ladoga and Orekhovsky, in this book we already meet 106 Moscow landowners, on whose lands there were about 3 thousand households with 4 thousand peasants and courtyard people living in them. These figures show how hastily the removal of service people proceeded and what development the Moscow estate reached on the northwestern outskirts of the state, in the Novgorod land, within some 20 years after the conquest of Novgorod. In the named districts of the Votskaya Pyatina, according to the indicated book, almost more than half of all arable land was already in the possession of landowners transferred from central Moscow Rus'. We find traces of the same intensive development of manorial ownership in the central counties of the state. From the first years of the 16th century. Several boundary documents have been preserved, delimiting Moscow and the counties closest to it from one another. Along the borders of these districts, charters indicate many small landowners next to the patrimonial lands: these were clerks with clerks, huntsmen, grooms - in a word, the same palace servants who in the 14th century. the princes gave land for use in exchange for service. In the 16th century service people were sometimes accommodated in whole masses at the same time. The most famous case of such placement dates back to 1550. For various services at the court, the government then recruited from different districts a thousand of the most efficient service people from city nobles and boyar children. Service people, whom their service tied to the capital, needed estates or estates near Moscow for their economic needs. To this thousand servicemen recruited from the districts for the capital's service, the government distributed estates in the Moscow and nearby districts, adding to this mass several people of the highest ranks, boyars and okolnichi, who did not have those near Moscow. The sizes of local plots were unequal and corresponded to the ranks of landowners: boyars and okolnichy received 200 quarters of arable land in a field (300 acres in 3 fields); nobles and boyar police children, divided into several articles or categories, received 200, 150 and 100 quarters in each field. Thus, 176,775 acres of arable land in 3 fields were distributed to 1,078 servicemen of various ranks that year. Soon after the conquest of Kazan, the government put the local ownership and land service in order, compiled lists of service people, dividing them into articles according to the size of the local ownership and according to the salaries, which from the same time was brought into correct proportion to the size of the military service. Excerpts of these lists, compiled around 1556, have reached us. Here, under the name of each service person, it is indicated how many estates and estates he has, with how many servants he is obliged to appear for service and in what weapons, and how large the salary assigned to him is. Since that time, estate ownership has been a harmonious and complex system based on precisely defined and constant rules. I will outline in schematic form the foundations of this system, as they were established by the beginning of the 17th century.

SYSTEM RULES.

The land structure and all land relations of service people were in charge of a special central institution - Local an order as an order Bit was in charge of their military-service relations, to the extent that those and other relations were then differentiated. Service people owned land local services as they served local, where they owned the land - this is how the word can be understood estate, whatever the origin of this term, it seems that we understood it in the same way in the old days. The service tied service people either to the capital or to a well-known region. Therefore, service people were divided into two categories. The first group included the highest ranks who served “from Moscow”, as well as choice from the cities we have already discussed. The second category consisted of lower ranks who served “from the cities,” city or district nobles and boyar children. Moscow officials, in addition to estates and estates in distant districts, were required by law to have dachas near Moscow. City nobles and boyar children received estates mainly where they served, that is, where they were supposed to defend the state, forming a local landowning militia. The official duties of a serving man fell not only on his estate, but also on his estate, therefore, the service was not local, but land-based. In the half of the 16th century. the very measure of service from the ground was precisely defined, that is, the burden of military service that fell on a serving person on his land. According to the law of September 20, 1555, from every 100 people of good, pleasing arable land in the will, i.e. from 150 acres of good arable land, one warrior was supposed to appear on a campaign “on horseback and in full armor,” and on a long campaign - with two horses. Landowners who had more than 100 quarters of arable land on estates and estates took with them on a campaign or, if they did not go themselves, a number of armed servants commensurate with the arable land. Local salaries or allotments were assigned “according to the fatherland and service,” according to the birthplace of the serving person and the quality of his service, and therefore were very diverse. Moreover newbie, Those who began their service were usually given not the entire salary at once, but only part of it, with subsequent increases in service. That's why salaries differed from dacha The sizes of both were determined by different conditions. Salaries were directly proportional to rank: the higher the rank of a service person, the larger his local salary. The size of the dacha was determined by the size of the estate and the duration of service; dachas were inversely proportional to estates: the more significant the estate of a serviceman, the smaller his estate dacha, for the estate was, in fact, a support or replacement for the estate. Finally, both the salary and the dacha were made additions by duration and serviceability. All these conditions can be schematically expressed as follows: salary - according to rank, dacha - according to patrimony and service age, addition to both salary and dacha - according to the quantity and quality of service.

LOCAL SALARY.

These are common features local system. Turning to the details, we find indications that people of higher ranks, boyars, okolnichi and Duma nobles, received estates from 800 to 2000 quarters (1200 - 3000 dessiatins), stolniks and Moscow nobles - from 500 to 1000 quarters (750 - 1500 dessiatinas). During the reign of Michael, a law was passed that prohibited the awarding of local salaries of more than a thousand quarters to Moscow stewards, solicitors and noblemen. The salaries of provincial nobles and boyar children were even more varied depending on ranks, duration of service, density of the serving population and the supply of land convenient for placement in one or another district; for example, in Kolomna district, according to the book of 1577, the lowest salary is 100 quarters, the highest is 400; 100 quarters, as we have seen, were recognized as a measure, as if a unit of measurement for the official duty of a serving person. If we use the same book to calculate the average salary of a Kolomna serviceman, we get 289 dessiatines of arable land, but in the Ryazhsky district, which had a denser service population, the average salary drops to 166 dessiatines. However, the size of the local salary was very conditional, even fictitious economic importance: the manor's dachas were far from matching him. According to the Kolomna book of 1577, the first boyar son on the list, as the most serviceable, was assigned the highest salary of 400 quarters of arable land, but in fact, in the Kolomna estates that belonged to him, there were only 20 quarters of actual arable land and “fallow land and overgrown with forest” - 229 quarters. The arable land was used for fallow land and even for handicrafts and forests due to the lack of economic means, implements and labor from the farmer, but even then it was taken into account for the arable allotment when assigning the local salary and when calculating the ratio of the local salary to the dacha. Let’s step a little beyond the boundaries of the time being studied in order to more clearly see the difference between salaries and dachas. According to the book of the Belevsky district of 1622, 25 people are listed choice, who constituted the highest rank of district service people; These were the wealthiest and most serviceable service people in the county, who received the highest local salaries and dachas. According to that book, salaries for Belevsky elected nobles were assigned in the amount of 500 to 850 chety. The salary amount of land assigned to these nobles reaches 17 thousand quarters (25,500 dessiatines); meanwhile, in the dachas, that is, in actual ownership, they had only 4,133 cheti (6,200 dessiatines). This means that dachas accounted for only 23% of the salary. Let us also take the books of two counties that were part of the same economic zone with Belevsky to see how, under the same or similar geographical and economic conditions, local dachas diversified: the average estate in a dacha for all city children of the boyars of Belevsky district is 150 dessiatinas, Eletsky - 123 dessiatinas, Mtsensky - 68 acres. Finally, from the books of the same districts one can see the ratio of patrimonial to local land ownership, at least in the same Verkhneoka districts: estates accounted for 24% of the total urban service land ownership in Belevsky district, in Mtsensky - 17%, in Eletsky - 0.6%, and in Kursk, let us add, even 0.14%, while in Kolomna district, judging only by the Big Camp, the Kolomni residents and boyar children of other cities were listed, according to the scribe book of 1577, as the estates of 39% of all service city landownership, not counting what church institutions and people of the highest ranks of the capital owned there. So, the further to the south, into the depths of the steppe, the more the patrimonial possession receded before the local one. Let us remember this conclusion; it will explain a lot to us when studying the social structure and economic relations in the southern and central counties of the state.

CASH SALARY.

The local salary was usually supplemented by a monetary salary in a certain proportion. Herberstein, whose news dates back to the time of Grozny’s father, already speaks about monetary salaries for service people; it is possible that this support for local service was done earlier, even under Grozny’s grandfather. The size of monetary salaries depended on the same conditions that determined local salaries, so there must have been a certain relationship between the two. According to documents of the 16th century. it is difficult to grasp this relationship, but in the 17th century. it becomes noticeable. At least in the lists of service people of that century we find the remark that famous person“The local salary is adjusted against the cash salary.” At the same time, the rule was established to increase the monetary salary in connection with the local one: “there is no monetary supplement without the local one.” Orderly person half XVII V. Kotoshikhin says that the monetary salary was set at a ruble for every five quarters of the local salary. However, the documents show that this proportion was not consistently maintained even then. And monetary salaries, like local ones, did not always correspond to actual dachas and were associated with the nature and course of the service itself. People of the highest ranks, constantly employed in the capital service or mobilized annually, received the monetary salaries assigned to them in full and annually; on the contrary, the children of the boyar policemen received them during Herberstein two years later in the third, according to the Sudebnik of 1550 - either in the third or in the fourth year, and one Moscow monument of the early 17th century. notes that city boyar children, when there is no service, are given a cash salary once every five years and even less often. In general, cash salaries as an adaptation to local incomes were given to service people when it was necessary to put them on their feet and prepare them for a campaign. When the burden of service weakened, the salary was given with a decrease, for example, by half, “in half”, or even not given at all if the serviceman held a position that gave him income or exempted him from military service. About servicemen of the highest ranks, who received an annual salary, it was written in the books that they “receive a salary from the city,” and about low-ranking policemen, “they receive a salary from the city.” Under fours This meant financial orders, between which the salary of service people was distributed. These were the Ustyug, Galitsk, Vladimir, Kostroma, Novgorod families. City boyar children received a salary “with the city” when it was necessary to prepare them for mobilization.

LOCAL LAYOUT.

Already in the 16th century. noble service became a class and hereditary service. According to the Code of Law of 1550, only those boyar children and their sons who had not yet entered the service and who were dismissed from service by the sovereign himself were free from this duty. At the same time, the procedure for transferring this duty from fathers to children was established. Landowners who served from estates and estates, if there were any, kept them with them until they were old enough and prepared their sons for service. Nobleman of the 16th century usually began his service at the age of 15. Before that he was listed in undergrowth. Having arrived for service and being included in the service list, he became newbie Then, depending on his first service experiences, typesetting estate, and for further successes and salary newbies to which there were then additional benefits for service, until the newcomer became a real service man with a full; accomplished cash salary. The layout of the newcomers was twofold: in retraction and in allowance. The eldest sons, who arrived in time for service when the father still retained the strength to serve, were assigned to the allotment, separated from their father, endowed with special estates; one of the younger ones, who arrived in time for service when his father was already decrepit, was allowed to join him on the estate as a deputy, who, upon the death of his father, along with the land, was supposed to inherit his official duties; Usually, even during his father’s life, he went on campaigns for him, “served from his father’s estate.” Sometimes several sons jointly owned their father's estate, having their own shares in it.

LIVING.

These were the main rules of local layout. Over time, measures were developed to provide for the families left behind by serving people. When a serviceman died, his estate was already in the 16th century. They were often left in charge of underage orphans if there was no unfathomable adult son, to whom, along with his father’s estate, upon the death of his father, he was also given care of his young brothers and sisters. But certain shares were allocated from the estate for living(pension) to the widow and daughters of the deceased, for the widow - until death, remarriage or tonsure, for daughters - until they were 15 years old, when they could get married; in 1556 it was stated “not to hold estates for girls for more than 15 years.” But if by that time the girl had found a groom from among the service people, she could spend her living on him. So, in a service family, all the children served: having reached conscription age, the son went on horseback to defend the fatherland, the daughter went down the aisle to prepare a reserve of defenders. The size of the living depended on the type of death of the landowner who left the pensioners. If he died a natural death at home, his widow was allocated 10% of his estate, his daughters - 5% each; if he was killed on a campaign, these subsistence salaries were doubled.

These are the main foundations of the local system. Now let's study its action.

LECTURE XXXIII

The immediate consequences of the local system. - I. The influence of the local principle on patrimonial land ownership. Mobilization of estates in the 16th century. - II. The local system as a means of artificial development of private land ownership. - III. Formation of district noble societies. - IV. The emergence of the service agricultural proletariat. - V. Unfavorable influence of local land ownership on cities. - VI. The influence of the local system on the fate of peasants.

Related information.

Simultaneously with the formation of the princely aristocracy in the Moscow state, other class groups began to take shape. At a specific time, during the period when the settlement of the northeastern principalities by the Slavic tribe was still being completed, the composition of society in these principalities was very uncertain. In the general flow of colonization that came from the Dnieper and the Ilmen rivers to the Volga region, the population did not immediately find a settled place, moved and wandered, gradually moving in an eastern and northeastern direction. Only the princes, the owners of the appanages, sat motionless in their appanage possessions. Forced to run their own household and maintain a squad under the condition of continuous mobility, the “fluidity” of the entire population, the princes developed special methods of farming and management. They could not immediately stop the migration flow, detain the population in their volosts and attach it to their inheritance. People came to their inheritance and left it freely, without telling the prince and without his permission. The princes therefore tried to secure individuals to themselves. They either accepted them into free service under a contract (these were boyars and free servants), or bought them and enslaved them as slaves (these were their “people”, or slaves). Of these and others, the prince’s “court” was formed, corresponding to the squad Kyiv period(§ 20). With the help of this court, the appanage prince managed his estate, defended it and ran his household. The boyars and free servants were his advisers and commanders, and the “people” made up the army and were workers in his arable land and fields. Princes often invited poor free people to settle on princely land with the condition of serving and working for the prince, and if such a servant did not fulfill his duties, he was deprived of the land given to him. Of these servants “under the court” (that is, subordinate to the princely courtier, or butler), a special, middle category of princely people was formed - not serfs, but not completely free either. Only the listed categories of servants, from boyars to serfs, were directly subordinate to the prince; and of these, only “people” were subjects of the prince in our sense of the word, that is, they were in forced dependence on him. The rest could leave him for another prince, either losing their land if they were servants under the court, or keeping their lands if they were free servants.

This is how the relationship of appanage princes to those who served them was structured. All other persons who lived in the prince’s estate bore the general name “Christians” or “peasants”, and were not at all personally dependent on the prince. Both in cities (“posads”) and in rural volosts they were organized into communities, or “worlds.” The prince knew that in some of his volosts (which occupied, for example, the valley of some river) peasants lived. There he ordered the number of peasant households to be counted, assigned one common tax payment from all of them, “tax,” and instructed the peasants themselves to deliver their taxes to him at certain times (on Christmas, on Peter’s Day). People came to this volost and left it without the knowledge or permission of the prince. The peasant “world” accepted them and released them; he imposed a tax on them in the general salary; elected “elders” collected this tax and took it to the prince. And so it went from year to year, until the prince ordered (noticing the decline or profit of peasant households in a given volost) to re-register the households again and reduce or increase the amount of worldly payment. In this order, the peasants knew not the prince, but the peasant “world”; and the prince could be indifferent to the fact that one or another of his peasants would go to the neighboring prince. There was no direct damage from this for the prince. Peasants enjoyed the same freedom of movement on private boyar lands. Coming to the land, they drew up a lease condition, “a decent one,” and determined their duties and payments to the master in a decent one; leaving the master, they “renounced” the land in a certain manner. Law and custom considered the normal deadline for refusal to be “Autumn Saint George’s Day” (November 26). If we add that the transition of a person from one category to another - from peasants to townspeople ("posad people") or to serfs and back - was very easy and accessible to everyone, then we will understand that the social structure at that particular time was very uncertain and formless.

Such uncertainty could not be maintained during the transition from specific life to state life. The Moscow sovereigns were the first to take up the reconstruction of their “court.” We saw that they laid their hands on the lands of their serving princes and demanded that these lands “not go out of service” (§ 54). The same rule was applied to all estates in general: everyone who owned land was obliged to participate in the defense of the state. From each estate, military men, “horses and weapons,” were supposed to appear at the first call of the sovereign. The princes and boyars who owned large estates brought with them entire “armies” of their people. Small patrimonial owners went to work on their own “on their own” or with one or two slaves. But since during hard wars with the Tatars, Lithuania and Germans a larger one was needed military force, then the usual army was not enough, and the Moscow sovereigns began to intensively recruit service people, “kind and portly” (that is, fit for battle), and settle them on state lands, because there were no other means for maintaining military people, except for lands, then did not have.

Previously, such lands were given to servants from the prince’s private estates, from his “palace.” Now there were no longer enough “palace” lands, and servants began to be given “black” lands (that is, taxable, state lands). Previously, such lands given to servants were called “servant lands”; now they began to be called “estates”, and their owners - “landowners”, “children of boyars” and “nobles”. Unlike estates, which were partly the hereditary property of the votchinniki, estates were temporary possession. The landowner owned the land as long as he could serve; the service was terminated due to negligence or the death of the landowner - and the estate was returned to the treasury. At the beginning of the 16th century. landowners were already counted in the thousands, and the local system had already covered the entire southern half of the state. On sovereign service a lot of people were “killed”; the new landowners were given land near the borders: in Novgorod Pyatina, in Smolensk, in the Seversky Territory, on the Oka River and, finally, in the central regions around Moscow. For the management of estates in Moscow, a “Local Izba” was established, and for the management of the service of patrimonial landowners and landowners - the Rank.

In addition to the local lands, service people were given cash salaries from time to time, and the most noble of them were given “feeding”. This meant that they were sent to some city as a “governor” or to some volost as a “volostel”. They ruled, judged the court, kept order and received “feed” and “duties” from the population for this. The food took the form of gifts at certain times (for major holidays); and duties are payment for the court and for any other actions of the feeder in favor of the population. This management with the right to take income from the volost or city in its own favor was called “feeding”. This was the structure of the new service class. This class now consisted of: 1) the princes and boyars who made up the aristocracy, 2) the nobles and children of the boyars - patrimonial owners and landowners, and 3) the garrison people (streltsy, pishchalnikov, gunners), recruited for small plots of land in special “settlements” in fortified cities.

The development of the manorial system led to the fact that large areas of land occupied by peasants were transferred to landowners and, thus, on these lands the dependence of the peasants on the landowners was created. Because the landowner served the state from his land, the peasants were obliged to work for him, plow his arable land and pay him rent. It was no longer convenient for either the landowner or the government to allow the peasants to freely leave the land they occupied, and therefore they tried to keep the peasants in place. They were recorded along with their lands in special “scribal books”, and those who were included in the book were considered attached to the land on which it was recorded. These “written” peasants were no longer allowed to leave their places; Only “non-literate” people, that is, not recorded in books, could move from place to place. But the landowners themselves, having accepted such peasants under “contract” records, tried to secure them on their land by various means, especially by lending them money, seeds, draft animals and, thus, obliging them to stay with them until will not pay off the debt. The right to move to St. George's Day, however, was not abolished, and it was used by those peasants who were not yet “outdated” by their landowners. It should be noted that with the strengthening of state order, not only landowners began to fight the vagrancy of the peasants, but also the peasant communities themselves did not release the “Tyaglovtsy” from their midst, because the departure of tax payers made it difficult to collect and correctly deliver the tax salary to the sovereign. Those who left did not pay anything; and whoever remained had to pay for himself and for those who left. Therefore, the peasant worlds themselves asked the sovereign for the right not to release written peasants from the community. So, little by little, measures were taken to attach the peasants to their places, to make them into a settled tax-paying class, obliged to pay taxes to the sovereign (“pull taxes”), and on service lands also to work for the landowner.

, Russian historical dictionary, Terms

LAND SYSTEM, a system of distribution by the feudal state in Russia of lands to nobles (landowners), subject to their military and administrative service. The local system developed during the formation of the Russian centralized state on the basis of various types of conditional land ownership of the previous time - small patrimonial land ownership, conditioned by service (for example, homeowners), and land ownership of unfree servants. The first mass distribution of land on the estate was carried out in Novgorod and other annexed lands. The economic importance of the local system lay in the economic development of new lands, especially in the south of the country, in the expansion of feudal relations. The socio-political meaning of the local system was that it served the purposes material support nobility, which was the main social force that supported state power in its fight against feudal fragmentation. Legal basis The local system was developed in the Code of Laws of 1497 (Articles 62-63). The local system reached its peak in the middle. XVI century, when the Service Code of 1556 regulated military service both landowners and patrimonial owners. According to the Code, for every 100 quarters of “good” land in one field, the owner of an estate or fief had to field a fully armed equestrian warrior; control over the implementation of Code 1556 was carried out by the Rank Order and the Local Order. The local system grew due to the confiscation of the lands of boyars and monasteries (Novgorod region), as well as through the distribution of palace and black-plow lands to landowners (central and northern districts). The rapid growth of the local system occurred during the years of the oprichnina, but then the first signs of its decline were noticed. The development of corvée and the enslavement of the peasantry are closely related to the spread of the local system. The landowners expanded their ploughing, received from the state the right to arbitrarily increase peasant duties, and waged a fierce struggle for workers. They achieved by the 16th century. prohibiting peasant exit and organizing the search for runaway peasants. Council Code 1649, the exchange of estates for estates was allowed, subject to registration of transactions in the Local Order. Simultaneously with the process of legal rapprochement between the estate and the estate, there is a process of both relative and absolute reduction of estate lands. The government began to reward the nobility for their service by granting estates to estates and, to replenish the treasury, sold estates to estates.

The Code of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich legitimizes principles in relation to the inheritance of estates that are identical with the principles of inheritance of patrimonial lands: with the death of a serving person, the estate passes to his family, in its absence - to the clan, and in the absence of the latter, it is distributed to the nobility of a particular district. Thus, the first and very significant steps were taken towards the equalization of estates with estates; Further Russian legislation brought both forms of land ownership even closer together, allowing first the cashless alienation of half of the estates, and then its sale to the plaintiff or relatives of the defendant in the event of the latter’s insolvency for debts. The decree of Peter I of March 14, 1714 on primordacy equated estates with estates under one general name of “immovable estates”