Russia under the Old regime

98

The bulk of tiaglo-bearers consisted of peasants, shopkeepers and artisans. But there was also a small category of military personnel which rendered full-time service and yet did not belong to the service estate, among them, the musketeers (streltsy), Cossacks and artillery gunners. These people formed a hereditary caste, in the sense that their sons had to follow their occupations, but they were not privileged; their ranks were wide open to newcomers and they lacked access to land. They supported themselves largely from trade carried out between campaigns.

Free movement proved more difficult to terminate among commoners than among servitors. A landowner could be discouraged from going into someone else's service by any of the methods enumerated above; and there was always his landed estate or that of his clan to provide collateral. But it was a different matter to try to keep in place farmers or tradesmen who had no title to the land which they tilled, no career status to worry about, and for whom nothing was easier than to disappear without trace in the endless forest. The only solution to the problem was to attach the commoners permanently to their localities and to their tiaglo communities; in other words, to enserf them.

We have noted in connection with the Russian fief that it came into being not during the age of 'feudal' decentralization, as had been the case in western Europe, but at the height of monarchical centralization. The same can be said of serfdom. Serfdom emerged in western Europe in the wake of the collapse in the early Middle Ages of public authority. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with the liquidation of the feudal order, serfdom also disappeared in most of western Europe, as one-time serfs became tenants. In Russia, on the contrary, the bulk of the rural population ceased to be tenants and turned into serfs between approximately 1550 and 1650, that is at the very time when the monarchy, freed from the last vestiges of appanage particularism, emerged as the absolute master of the country. Like compulsory service for the landowning class, peasant serfdom represented a stage in the transformation of Russia into a royal domain.

Russia's non-service population was not enserfed overnight. It was once believed that in 1592 Moscow had issued a general edict forbidding peasant movement, but this view is no longer held. Bondage is now seen as a gradual process, extending over a century or more. One type of procedure was used to tie to the land peasants of black and trading communities, another to bond peasants on private estates. Sometimes economic factors were decisive, sometimes political.

Until the middle of the sixteenth century, the peasant's right to move was rarely interfered with. The few recorded instances of such interference were made in response to complaints by influential monasteries or boyars; in 1455 and 146a, for example, the Great Prince authorized