The peasant's agricultural inventory was his personalproperty and its nature was determined by agricultural conditions and his crops. Because the podzolic soil was so thin, there was no need for a plough that would turn over a deep furrow. The famous two-pronged scratch plough (the sokha) was adequate to stir up the soil for planting. It was smoothed out by a harrow, a lattice of four or five boards crossing each other at right angles out of which protruded a peg at each intersection to break up the clods of dirt. Both the scratch plough and the harrow were light implements which could easily be pulled by one horse, unless it was so mal-nourished that it could barely walk. The horse was also employed to pull a sleigh in the winter, and a four-wheeled cart in the summer. The peasant also possessed a scythe and sickle for harvesting grain and cutting hay. It is likely that they were almost the only metal items in the peasant's possession, along with a flail, a chain at the end of a stick used to beat the grains out of the stalk. Instead of stacking the harvested grain in shocks to dry, the peasant probably put it into a drier, where moving air removed the moisture while keeping post-harvest rain, hail and snow off the cut grain. An axe completed the peasant's inventory; this he used for cutting down trees in the forest, fashioning logs for his house, cutting firewood for the stove and preparing other wooden objects. Peasants living near navigable bodies of water typically owned a variety ofvessels: canoes, barges, flat-bottomed boats and so on. Water mills are known to have appeared at least as early as the thirteenth
century.[54]
The nature of peasant farming changed significantly more than once during the period covered by the timespan of this chapter. At the end of the civil war between Grand Prince Vasilii II and first his uncles and then his cousins in 1453, population density throughout Muscovy was very low, which led to the initiation ofthe enserfment process. For our purposes right here, however, this meant that free land was everywhere, a fact observed by foreign travellers. This allowed slash-burn/assartage agriculture to be practised everywhere. While it involved quite a bit more strenuous labour than other forms of agriculture, it was also more productive. A peasant moved into a plot of forest and cut it down. He could use the felled trees for housing and fuel. The main point was, however, that he set fire to what remained after the logs had been removed. The resulting ashes produced a comparatively rich topsoil into which the peasant could broadcast his seeds and harvest a fairly high yield. The high soil productivity lasted about three years, and then the peasant moved on to another newly burned-over plot. It took about forty years for the soil to recover its fertility in this extensive slash/burn agriculture, but while there was free, forested land available, it was the most profitable form of farming available to the Russian peasant.
With the rise of Moscow and the consolidation of the Muscovite state in the decades after I453, internal wars ceased and the population began to expand. The years 1480-1570 are generally termed in the literature as a period of economic upsurge.[55] Extensive agriculture of the slash-burn type became less possible. That this was happening was readily observable by 1500.[56] By 1550 the movement from slash-burn agriculture[57] to the more intensive three-field system had progressed to the point that it was expressed in the Law Code (Sudebnik) (see Chapter 16).[58] In the traditional three-field system, one field was planted in the spring and harvested in the autumn; a second field was planted in the autumn and harvested the following summer; and the third field was fallow. What is here called 'the second field' produced the highest yields because there was no frantic rush to plant in the spring or to harvest in the autumn because of the short growing season, but rather leisurely sowing could be done in the summer/autumn and rather leisurely harvesting in the mid-summer. In the winter field the sown seeds typically sprouted before snowfall; in the absence of snow cover, the sprouts might freeze and die, but this happened infrequently enough so that it was not a major risk factor. Article 88 of the Sudebnik of 1550 permitted peasants who had moved on St George's Day (26 November), after the winter crop had been sown, to return in the following summer to harvest that crop.[59] Historians assume that the use of the three-field system was fairly widespread by 1550. Along with this went a system of strip-farming in which fields were divided into long, narrow strips. The strips were allotted to the peasants in a fashion which spread the risks of farming (insect infestations, blights, hail storms) equally among the peasants of a given locale.[60]
This, however, was not fated to last. Paranoid Tsar Ivan the Terrible launched his psychotic oprichnina in i565 in which he split the Muscovite tsardom into two parts: the oprichnina, which he ran himself, and the zemshchina (the rest of the state), run by the seven boyars who typically were in charge of the state when the sovereign was absent. Ivan's henchmen, the notorious oprichniki, among their many barbarous acts 'collected as much rent from their peasants in one year as usually was collected in ten years'.[61] By 1572 this put the peasants to flight, much as had done Vasilii II's civil war, as the agriculturalists moved north of the Volga,[62] east of Kazan' into the Urals and Siberia, south along the Volga and to some extent into the lands south of the Oka. The result was that ensuing censuses found up to 85 per cent of the heartland of Muscovy, especially around Moscow and Novgorod, abandoned and the right ofpeasants to move on St George's Day was gradually abolished.[63] Also often abandoned was the three-field system of agriculture, which was not to become widely used again until the second half of the eighteenth century.[64]
Slavery and the beginnings of enserfment
The vast majority of the population in the years 1462-1613 were peasants who were becoming serfs, perhaps 85 per cent. Of the rest, perhaps 5 to 15 per cent were slaves.[65] Relatively insignificant numbers of townsmen, clergy and government servicemen comprised the rest of the population. This balance reflected the very low productivity of agriculture, which required nearly everyone to farm. Even townsmen, most clergymen and even many servicemen raised much of their own food.
55
A. L. Shapiro,
I987), p. 3.
56
G. E. Kochin,
59
Richard Hellie (ed. and trans.),
60
Donald N. McCloskey, 'Scattering in Open Fields',
61
Richard Hellie, 'What Happened? How Didhe Get away with it? Ivan Groznyi's Paranoia and the Problem of Institutional Restraints',
62
Relatively precise numbers for the beginning and middle of the sixteenth century the 1580s, and 1620s can be found in Shapiro et al.,
63
Richard Hellie,
64
Gorskaia notes that in the 1570s and 1580s much of the land lay fallow, but contends that this was only because of a shortage of labour and did not represent an abandonment of the three-field system per se (Gorskaia,
65
Richard Hellie,