Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/171

 Rh On yet another point his work is marked by a capitulation in the struggle between the two antagonistic elements and principles. As I have already remarked (p. 20), the causes constituting slavery, as recognised by custom and by the Code of 1497, were restricted by that of 1550. Thus, children born before their parents became slaves were to be free; enslaved parents were forbidden to sell their children born out of slavery; all contracts of servitude were to be signed in the presence of certain high officials, and that only in the towns of Moscow, Pskov, and Novgorod, etc. But at the same time, and with a quite opposite tendency, the Code gave the peasants power to leave the lands they worked at every season, if they desired to barter their own freedom and sell themselves as serfs; and, further, the new law, by increasing the dues on his dwelling-house, tightened the rope that was already strangling him round the husbandman's neck.

The personal inclinations of the Sovereign probably did not affect these last provisions in any way. A series of proposals, drawn up for presentation to the assembly in his name, prove his own leanings to have been very different. But the man who was some day to jeer at Batory's limited power did not venture, as yet, to make use of his own omnipotence. He was too young, and too uncertain of his ideas and convictions.

As regards civil rights, the new Code left the order of succession untouched. It was not till 1562 that an important change was to mark the triumph of the political programme sketched above: the hereditary domains of Princes, in the absence of male heirs, and the hereditary properties of boïars, failing immediate heirs or testamentary dispositions, were to go back to the State. Ten years later, the right of succession was limited to vottchiny in the original deed of concession of which this power had been specially stipulated for, and only direct heirs and collaterals to the second degree were allowed to enjoy even these truncated rights.

The Code of 1550, indeed, like that of 1497, was above all things a rule of procedure, and in this respect it constitutes a distinct advance on its predecessor. Measures for insuring greater regularity in the course of justice, severe penalties for careless or dishonest judges, the putting down of bribery, the regulation of the use of torture and of the judicial combat—nothing calculated to correct vices unfortunately all too inveterate and obstinate, was overlooked. In another order of things it may be credited with a capital innovation—the establishment of a fixed and graduated rate of fines for offences. But taking it all in all, the conservative party came out victorious, and Ivan was left face to face with the triumphant army of his unruly boïars, who had kept