In the seventeenth century the law proliferated. Moscow chancelleries kept books of laws and precedents that guided their work; these were occasionally compiled and then added to; at mid-century they became the basis for relevant portions of the 1649 Ulozhenie. Such ustavnye knigi from the first half of the seventeenth century are known from the Felony, Slavery, Great Palace, Moscow Administrative, Service Land and Postal chancelleries.[161]
Local governors made do with handwritten copies of the sudehniki and of decrees they received from the centre. The 1649 Ulozhenie was the first law code to be issued in print (about 2,500 copies by 1651) and it was distributed to local governors. Another body of law relevant in the seventeenth century comprised charters granting immunities and privileges to various corporate entities, as we have seen.
The 1649 Ulozhenie codified the preceding half-century of law and added some innovations, based on legal sources enumerated above. It was massive - in twenty-five thematic chapters, it included 967 articles. The second half of the century saw feverish legislation, presaging Peter the Great's legislative blitz of the early eighteenth century. By one count, 1,583 new decrees were issued in the second half of the seventeenth century, reflecting the state's desire to regulate society and mobilise resources through the law. Many new decrees concerned public order, reflecting European concepts of Polizeistaat.
New compendia appeared in various fields: in 1653 and 1667, tariff and trade regulations; in 1669, a new criminal code; in 1676,1680 and 1681, codifications on service tenure and hereditary land.[162] General codifications to replace the Ulozhenie were ordered in 1681 and 1695, to no avail. In 1700 Peter the Great created a commission to codify the laws but it too was fruitless. The Ulozhenie remained the standard in most areas of the law until late in the eighteenth century.
The most significant changes in positive law were made in the realm of social legislation.[163] Laws defined social groups and limited access into privileged ranks and egress from dependent ranks. The Ulozhenie's list of compensation for insult to honour is telling: longer (almost eighty articles) than those of the 1550 and 1589 sudehniki, it included ecclesiastical and lay social ranks from the patriarch and boyars to peasants and slaves (10: 26-99). Its guiding principle - that all people have honour, but higher ranks deserve greater compensation - reflects the law code's resolute emphasis on social hierarchy.
The military service class cemented its position with the Ulozhenie by the full enserfment of the peasantry, a particularly direct benefit to the provincial gentry, strapped for land and labour. Wealthy landholders (including the Church) were inconvenienced by the Ulozhenie's new prohibitions on their taking in runaway peasants or purchasing lands in the provinces, but were by no means severely hampered in their social and economic ascendancy.
The Ulozhenie devoted significant attention to the needs and duties of the privileged military elite, Moscow-based and provincial. Chapter 7 ofthe Ulozhenie concerned itself with their conduct during service, including strict punishment for desertion from service and from battle. Laws prohibiting gentry to sell themselves into slavery were repeated, as was the requirement of mandatory service (it was gradually reduced in the last quarter of the century, only to be reinstated by Peter I). Landed servitors enjoyed economic and legal privileges: preferential access to the grain market in time of shortage, lower tax rates on many commercial transactions, a higher rate of ransom if captured in war.
Major attention was given to landholding in the Ulozhenie (chapters 16 and 17) and legislation of 1676, 1680 and 1681. Norms, generally more theoretical than enforceable, were established for land grants to servitors. Over the course of the century service tenure and hereditary types of land converged in law and practice; there was an active market in the sale, mortgaging and devolution of service-tenure land and purchased hereditary estates. Norms of inheritance recognised this, and widened women's access to landholding despite legal attempts to limit it. By law widows and minor children and unmarried daughters were granted portions of their deceased husband's or father's pomest'e for upkeep but had very limited access to hereditary lands. As Valerie Kivelson has shown, however, families disregarded the law to ensure that widows, sons and daughters were taken care of. Practising partible inheritance, they awarded almost as much land of all types to women for upkeep or dowry as to male
kin.[164]
Other groups - the Church, merchants - benefited from legal change in the seventeenth century. Since the mid-sixteenth century the state had been legislating against donating votchina land to the Church; these laws were repeated in the Ulozhenie, but ignored. Church landholding boomed in the seventeenth century. Church institutions continued to enjoy immunities from the local courts, despite the brief tenure of the Monastery Chancellery. Laws of the seventeenth century extended the privileges of Moscow merchants (gosti) and the other two merchant corporations (gostinnaia and sukonnaia sotni). Of the three groups, only gosti could trade abroad. Otherwise, all enjoyed the right to own hereditary land, to be immune from governors' courts, to distil and keep spirits and to enjoy various tax breaks and privileges. The tax privileges of the musketeers and cossacks were affirmed in the Ulozhenie as well (chapters
23-4).
The townsmen, like the provincial gentry, received significant attention in the Ulozhenie (chapter 19), resulting from their persistent petitioning to the state in the first half of the century. It provided that townsmen who had fled to join other social groups - musketeers, cossacks, merchant corporations - should be returned to their taxpaying town commune. Laws forbade townsmen to put themselves in dependent status. Most importantly, the Ulozhenie abolished the tax-exempt neighbourhoods of Church and wealthy landlords that had caused unfair competition to urban taxpayers, awarding taxpaying townsmen monopolies on urban trade, manufacturing and landholding. But, on the other hand, townsmen were in effect enserfed by the Ulozhenie - they were registered in their town commune and the statute of limitations to track down runaway townsmen was abolished. They had become a hereditary social class, but, like the peasants, an immobile one.
161
162
1669 criminal law and land decrees: PRP, vyp. vii:
163
Richard Hellie, 'Muscovite Law and Society: The Ulozhenie of 1649 as a Reflection of the Political and Social Development of Russia since the
164
Valerie A. Kivelson, 'The Effects of Partible Inheritance: Gentry Families and the State in Muscovy', RR 53 (1994): 197-212.