In the area of trade the seventeenth century saw significant codification, in response to Russian merchants' petitions against foreign competition and as manifestation of the state's developing mercantilism. The Ulozhenie of 1649 devoted little attention to foreign trade, but it addressed some domestic trade and taxation issues. It regulated tolls, ferry fees and bridge fees, assuring exemption from them to servitors and foreigners and prohibiting fraudulent tolls (chapter 9); it established a sliding scale of rates to ransom Russian captives in war according to social status (chapter 8); it regulated illicit taverns, production of spirits and sale and use of tobacco (chapter 25).
Soon after the Ulozhenie, trade regulations of 1653 addressed issues of foreign trade. They instituted a single trade tariff for the transit of commercial goods for domestic merchants, and a higher, uniform rate for foreign merchants. These norms were included in the much broader 1667 New Commercial Regulations. Authored in part by the progressive reformer A. L. Ordin-Nashchokin, the articles also removed trade and the customs service from the jurisdiction of local governors, and further restricted foreigners to trading at the border towns in a limited range of goods and only at certain times of the year. Its protectionist norms remained in force until 1755.[165]
Peasants and slaves suffered most from seventeenth-century social legislation. The Ulozhenie culminated the process of enserfment that began in earnest in the late sixteenth century. By the seventeenth century, laws forbade peasants to move from their landlords; the Ulozhenie capped the process by ending the statute of limitations on the recapture of runaways (chapter 11). Thereafter the state committed significant resources into sending investigators (syshchiki) to chase down fugitive serfs and townsmen. In the second half of the seventeenth century peasants could sue and be a witness in courts; they paid taxes, could be tried for crimes and could hold local elected offices. But gradually, in a process that reached its apex in the eighteenth century, peasants fell into more servile dependency on their lords. Serf owners could judge and corporally punish their peasants for all but criminal offences, they could force their serfs and slaves to pay their debts and, although serfs were legally supposed to be tied to their lands, de facto landlords moved them at will.
Even more dependent on their lords were slaves. Of the many categories of slavery cited in Muscovite sources, in the seventeenth century the most common was limited contract slavery (kabal'noe kholopstvo). In the seventeenth century this was hereditary slavery for the life of the owner. The state's interest in slavery in the seventeenth century was to reap fees from the registration of slaves and to limit the phenomenon, since slavery deprived the state oflabour power and tax revenues. The Ulozhenie devoted its second-longest chapter to slavery (chapter 20). After 1649 the state captured more of the productive power of slaves by including rural slaves in taxation when the household basis was introduced in the late 1670s and by merging household slaves with serfs in 1722.
Social legislation in the seventeenth century mobilised productive resources by binding people to a limited number of social ranks. Practice, however, often contradicted this trend. Slavery persisted, despite attempts to keep individuals from selling themselves into it. Peasants fled from serfdom to the frontier and to Siberia; contract servitors on the frontier transgressed the monopolies on landholding, serf ownership or trade guaranteed to other groups. Fanatic in the heartland at tracking down runaway serfs and townsmen and fixing people to social categories because of its great needs for labour and income, in the colonies the state tolerated social and legal diversity. Seventeenth-century legislation did not pursue a single goal of social control or Polizeistaat uniformity, but profited from an expedient diversity.
Nevertheless the state's ambition to aggrandise its stature through the law is striking in seventeenth-century legislation. The first several chapters ofthe 1649 Ulozhenie constitute an innovation. Borrowed from the 1588 Lithuanian Statute and motivated most likely by the social unrest of the 1640s, they introduce the concept of lese majeste, focusing on assaults to the state's dignity, embodied in the Church hierarchs and cathedrals, the tsar and his palaces, and in seals and official documents representing his authority (chapters 1-6).
Criminal law became harsher in comparison with sixteenth-century codes, under the influence of foreign, probably Byzantine, law codes (Ulozhenie chapters 21 and 22; 1669 New Articles). Harsher corporal punishments were introduced - burying alive, nose-splitting, branding and other forms of mutilation. Torture was prescribed more widely, the death penalty was applied to over sixty crimes (almost twice that number in codes of Peter the Great's time). Public floggings and executions were prescribed to deter others but the death penalty was not used as widely as in some West European countries of the time and was not carried out with such 'spectacle of suffering'.[166] Executions were usually performed by hanging within a day of sentencing. The Church schism in the second half of the century elicited an escalation in corporal punishment. Secular courts judged schismatics as traitors as well as heretics and inflicted extreme punishments. Similarly punishments for witchcraft and sorcery, as well as for recidivist crime, were harsher than those for less charged criminal acts.
For lesser crimes, the death penalty was often commuted to exile to capture the labour power of criminals. Long-term imprisonment was rarely used as punishment, but towns kept jails for the detention of criminals awaiting trial and people could stay in prison many years paying off fines from court cases (21: 92).
In the seventeenth century various principles affecting responsibility for crime were introduced into Russian law that were developed more thoroughly in the eighteenth century. Notions of intent, negligence and malice first appeared; the law found defence of self and property to be exonerating, and punished unintentional assault and homicide more leniently than intentional. Drunkenness was considered a mitigating circumstance (21: 69, 71, 88). In the realm of civil law, unlike criminal, much regularisation but little substantive change occurred. Chapters in the Ulozhenie (14,15,18) concerned oath- taking, settled cases and fees for documents. The Ulozhenie's longest chapter (10) addressed judicial corruption, courtroom procedure and civil suits. By the end of the century Moscow's legal heritage was rich and complex, but scattered in a panoply of thematic compendia and individual decrees and precedents.
Society interacted with law in a multitude of ways in seventeenth-century Muscovy. Traditional distributive justice shaped adjudication; the multiplicity of norms and venues undermined judicial consistency. But the trend was nevertheless towards a greater rationalisation. Codification was proceeding, standardised norms of record-keeping were being established; standards of evidence favoured rational proof. Scholars have deemed these trends 'absolutist'. So also might one term the concept of'the common good' that appears in the law by the end of the century. The concept that the state uses law to serve the public good came to court circles from Ukraine by the 1680s and inspired many of the projects of military and bureaucratic reform of that decade. Despite its complexity, seventeenth-century law provided Peter the Great with a firm foundation when he launched his bold effort to standardise law and administration on the 'well-ordered police state' model in the next century.
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Pieter Spierenburg,