As a rule, Ivan III limited judicial immunities further as he desired that his own officials should be able to collect the fees from all legal cases. His immunities granted to monasteries at the end of the 1480s and beginning of the 1490s typically reserved for the prince only murder trials, but in such documents issued to lay lords the area of exclusion was larger: murder, robbery and red-handed theft.[237] In the period of Ivan IV's minority, 'the period of boyar rule', the issuance of immunities was renewed to the point that 238 such documents are still extant.[238] Most of them were tax and customs immunities, but many were judicial as well. A really generous judicial immunity would allow a monastery to hold trials involving all offences, a more limited one would reserve the major felonies for the officials of the grand prince. In 1551 all immunities were reviewed and those not renewed lapsed.[239] Immunities were revived during the oprichnina (1565-72), but Ivan's death in 1584 marked the end of an era for immunities.[240] Although both article 43 of the 1550 Sudebnik and article 92 of the 1589 Sudebnik forbade the granting of immunity charters and demanded their recall, limited immunities continued to be granted into the seventeenth century, but essentially they died out with the strengthening of the Muscovite chancellery (prikaz) system.
The Muscovite Sudebniki
Nothing is known about the origins of the Sudebnik of 1497. The succession crisis had just passed. Civil disorders were a frequent reason for the compilation of law in Russia, but almost certainly not that time. A number of rulers liked to see themselves as latter-day Constantines orJustinians, but there is no evidence that the declining Ivan III could be included in those numbers. All we know is that the document is extant and that it initiated certain threads which were to be central in Middle Muscovite law, such as serfdom and the claim that officials could not make law: when the law did not give a precise solution to a precise problem, the case had to be sent to Moscow for resolution. We must also recall that there is only one copy extant of the 1497 Sudebnik, whereas many pre-1550 copies of the Russkaia pravda are still available. The number of surviving texts is assumed to correspond to the use of the relative law codes. The compiler (someone in the circle of Fedor Vasil'evich Kuritsyn) of the code borrowed eleven of its articles from the Pskov Judicial Charter, two from the Russkaia pravda, and a dozen of them from grand-princely orders to provincial governors working on three-year rotations in the 'feeding' system (kormlenie).
The 1550 Sudebnik (two-thirds of which originated in the 1497 code) does not have anyone's signature on it, but the assumption is that it was one of the fruits of attempts to restore order after the chaos of Ivan IV's minority, which included uprisings in Moscow. Around 1550 Ivan's inner kitchen cabinet (known in the literature as 'the chosen council') instituted a number of reforms, both military and judicial. The 100-article Sudebnik was one ofthe reforms. Another seventy-three supplemental articles were added between 1550 and 1607. These 173 articles were the basis of Russian law until the Ulozhenie (Law Code) of 1649, supplemented by the chancelleries' scroll records of their own practices. About fifty copies of the 1550 code are extant.
In 1589 people in the Russian north (the White Sea littoral region, also known as the Dvina Land) decided that they needed a Sudebnik to meet their needs. They produced a short version (fifty-six articles, which were conceived of as an addition to the 1550 code) and an expanded version (231 articles). They might have been ignored were it not for the fact that surviving evidence indicates that the 1589 Sudebnik was used for conflict resolutions whose paper trail ended in Moscow. About 64 per cent of the expanded version came from the 1550 predecessor, a handful of others from various statutes of 1556, and 27 per cent were compiled to meet the needs of the north. They are largely grouped at the end of the code.
The last Sudebnik was presumably compiled in 1606 by the invading Polish forces accompanying False Dmitrii I to the Moscow throne. This 'Composite Sudebnik', as it is known, was probably never used anywhere by anyone - although the fact that it now exists in five copies implies that people were sufficiently interested in it to copy it. The 1606 document made an effort to group the articles into logical categories that comprised twenty-five chapters. The West Russian Lithuanian Statute of 1588 contained twenty-five chapters, and it is possible that some West Russians had a hand in drafting the 1606 code. Incidentally, the great Ulozhenie of 1649 also had twenty-five chapters. The Composite Sudebnik incorporated the 1550 code and its supplements mentioned above, decrees of 1562 and 1572 on princely estates, and laws of 1597, 1602, and 1606 on slaves and peasants. Anachronistically, it ignores the two major 1592 pieces of social legislation: (1) the 'temporary' repeal of the right of peasants to leave their lords on St George's Day (26 November) and (2) the placing of a five-year-statute of limitations on the right to sue for the recovery of fugitive peasants. Peasants were not free in the Rzeczpospolita, and so this was not a 'comparative oversight'. Perhaps the invading Poles hoped to woo the Russian peasants to their side by pitting them against their masters and the officialdom of Boris Godunov. This is something we will never know.
The Sudebniki were primarily court handbooks. Thus it is not surprising that fees which could be charged for judicial services were among their major concern, as well as who those officials were who were entitled to collect the fees.[241] Procedures were prescribed,[242] and almost incidentally the delicts which were subject to the prince's jurisdiction.[243]
238
S. M. Kashtanov, 'Feodal'nyi immunitet v gody boiarskogo pravleniia (1538-1548 gg.)',
240
For a superb history and analysis ofjudicial immunities, see Marc David Zlotnik, 'Immunity Charters and the Centralization of the Muscovite State', unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1976, pp. 113-64.
242
243