Rosspen, 1998), pp. 483-5; Z. A. Ogrizko, Iz istorii krest'ianstva na Severe feodal'noi Rossii
XVIIv. (Osobyeformykrepostnoizavisimosti) (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1968), pp. 26-57;
Aleksandrov et al., Krest'ianstvo, p. 154.
the binding process began on 29 January i649, and continued indefinitely into the future. No definitive explanation for the difference has ever been offered, but one may surmise that the Odoevskii commission believed that townsmen were involved in a trade whose disruption would be economically deleterious, whereas peasants moved their agricultural site regularly because of soil exhaustion and thus transportation back to a legal lord's estate would be little more disruptive than moving to a new site on the same estate in slash/burn (assartage) agriculture, or rotating around in the three-field system. Of course the explanation may have been more political than economic, that the delegates from the middle service-class cavalry at the Assembly ofthe Land were more persuasive/intimidating than were the urban delegates.
A major issue that concerned all three population categories was that of marriage. If one or two fugitives wed while one or both were in flight from their lawful owners or places of residence, what should happen to the couple? The Russian Orthodox Church was adamant that marriage was inviolable. In response to this simple dogma, a simple solution for fugitives was found: receiving fugitive slaves, serfs and townsmen was illegal, so whoever received the fugitive was penalised by losing the couple. However, the family was not inviolable, so that if they had children, the law-breaking harbourer of the fugitive could keep the offspring born while in his 'care' even though he (or it: a town) lost the parents. If the fugitives married while on 'neutral ground', such as on the frontier where there were no lords, then the lords cast lots to determine possession. The winner got the couple and had to pay the loser 10 roubles. If a female fugitive serf married a frontier serviceman, he could keep her for 50 roubles. This was an impossible sum, presumably meant to deter servicemen from marrying fugitive women and the women from fleeing to the frontiers.
One final issue, the abasement of the person of the serf which began in the reign of Ivan IV (see Chapter 12 above) remains to be discussed. The Ulozhenie surprisingly has little to say about that, even though the chapter on slaves is the second longest in the law code and thus the Odoevskii commission cannot be suspected of having been squeamish on this topic. One may surmise that the legislators wanted to concentrate on the principle at hand, the perpetual binding of the peasants to the land, not its possible derivative which could easily enough turn into its opposite, the binding of the peasant to the person of a lord. The culmination of this fate of the serfs waited until the early eighteenth century, to last until 1861. But the forebodings of what was to come are evident in the Ulozhenie. Ominous is article 3 of chapter i5 which permits a hereditary landowner (votchinnik) to issue a manumission charter freeing his serf, but denies that privilege to a service landholder (pomeshchik). This, of course, equates one category of serfs with slaves, both of whom can become freedmen (nearly the sole category of free people in Muscovy). This also served as a vehicle for an owner of a hereditary estate to transfer his peasants to another holding. Article 7 of chapter 16 permits outright someone who acquired waste lands to move peasants from his other lands to populate those waste lands. Nothing is said about the consent of the serfs in this process, which probably enhanced economic efficiency at the expense of the personal freedom of the serfs.
Another ominous sign of the abasement of the peasant is in article 141 of chapter 10. It had long been assumed that a slave was an extension of his owner, and that putting pressure on a slave would force his owner to comply with the law. This article extends that provision to the serf: if a defendant hid from a bailiff, the bailiff could detain either his slave or his serf to force him to appear. Chapter 10, article 161 establishes the procedures for conducting a general investigation (poval'nyi obysk). Members of the middle service class (dvoriane and deti boiarskie) were to be interrogated separately, and their testimony was to be recorded separately from that of their slaves and serfs. Notice here that again the serfs are linked with slaves, and both are less full witnesses than their masters. (Further on, however, article 163 decrees that serfs who lied in such investigations were to be fined a rouble, but nothing was said about slaves who lied at all; their owners were fined 30 roubles for their own perjury. Article 261 contains further evidence that slave status had not yet been fully extended to serfs. A member of the middle service class who did not pay his debts could be placed in a righter (pravezh), a form of stocks, where force would be used to compel the debtor to pay. His slave could be put in the righter instead of the debtor, but this did not extend to serfs.) On the other hand, debts could be collected both from the slaves and the serfs of a landholder or estate owner (art. 262). In 1642 peasants had been denied the right to make contracts which, upon default, would have led to their formal enslavement.
At the request of the provincial cavalry delegates to the Assembly of the Land, apracticeborrowedfrom the history ofthe townsmen was soon adopted: the mass dragnet. The difficulty of finding fugitive serfs in the condition of constant labour shortage and the willingness of other lords to take them in was a constant theme of Russian history.[134] The same was true, of course, for townsmen, except that townsmen were likely to flee from one town to another;
the number of urban settlements was limited, and it was comparatively easy for a dragnet to go through urban areas and identify those who did not legally belong there. The magnitude of the difficulty of such endeavours in the vast Russian countryside and the new frontier areas can only be imagined. It was modestly facilitated by the Russian practice of living in villages, however, rather than on isolated farmsteads. Be that as it may, after the Ulozhenie, the government formed dragnet teams which scoured the countryside for fugitive peasants.[135] No doubt the legal practice ofthe mass inquisition (poval'nyi obysk) gave the Russian government practice in running dragnets; the mass inquisition could be called for by litigants, and a team of investigators would go out to the area to survey the region to ask up to several hundred people such a question as, 'Who owned the spotted cow with the crooked horn?' Whichever litigant got the majority won the case. When hunting for fugitive serfs (slaves were thrown in, too), the interrogators asked everyone to prove that he/she lived where he/she was at the moment. If no proof could be offered, the assumption was that the object of the inquisition must belong somewhere else. Torture could be used to find out where that somewhere else was. Then the fugitives were loaded on carts and returned where they belonged. Records survive revealing that some investigators returned more than a thousand runaways.
Creating a legal caste of peasant serfs, the Ulozhenie forbade them to leave their caste. Earlier, a down-and-out peasant could sell him/herself into slavery, but this was now forbidden. The government was always short ofmilitary personnel, and occasionally peasants joined the middle service-class cavalry or the lower service-class musketeers, artillerymen or cossacks. That was also categorically forbidden. Becoming a townsman had also been an option. It is doubtful that the townsmen reproduced themselves, and they always welcomed additions to their numbers who would share the tax burden. Moreover, there were no guilds to keep interlopers out. But rural to urban migration was also forbidden. Nevertheless, it persisted, in spite ofthe law. After the Ulozhenie, the townsmen on several occasions asked that amnesties be granted to fugitive peasants currently living in their midst. The government, anxious to collect the cash taxes paid by townsmen, agreed in 1684,1685 and 1688 not to return fugitive serfs who had been registered in a town in the 1678 census. In 1693, this date was moved up to 1684.43 Regrettably, I know of no way to calculate the economic cost to the Russian economy up until 1689 of the prohibition against rural-urban migration, but there must have been some - just as there unquestionably must have been economic costs from the stratification of the entire society. The fact was that the Muscovite state exhibited its maximalist tendencies in the social sphere, regardless of the economic costs.
134
Richard Hellie, 'Migration in Early Modern Russia, I480s-i780s', in David Eltis (ed.),
135
This practice continued for years thereafter, for without continuing enforcement the legal stratification of society would have been a farce. The distinguished Leningrad/St Petersburg historian A. G. Man'kov claimed that the fifty-two article decree of 2 March 1683 to the state's fugitive serf and slave hunters was the most important legislative document of the second half of the seventeenth century (RZ, vol. iv, p. 79).