Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/42

 18 heavy. On lands, 'black' or 'white,' belonging to the Church, the expenses connected with working the soil were also much lighter, as a rule.

The tenant, wherever he was, could give up his tenancy when he had settled accounts with his landlord, and the landlord had power to put in a new tenant as soon as the old one's lease had expired. The extreme mobility of the popular existence—a universal feature, hereditary, and accentuated at this period—made these migrations matters of frequent occurrence. From the fifteenth century, however, economic necessities had brought about a certain modification of this freedom on both sides. First of all arose a custom according to which no landlord exercised his rights in harvest-time, a moment at which no peasant could dream of using his. This led Ivan III. to fix a period of fourteen days, just after St. George's Day (November 24), for the relinquishment of tenancies and the winding up of accounts with landlords; and in his time the outgoing tenant further paid for his right of habitation (pojiloié) a sum varying, according to the value of the land occupied, between fifty-six kopecks and one rouble six kopecks.

Such was the law. In practice, as may be imagined, many evasions were possible. Labour being scarce and universally sought after, proprietors enticed farmers from one property to another, just like the Sovereigns, on the look-out for 'servants.' Often there were forcible abductions. These were called svoz. Often, too, on divers pretexts, outgoing tenants were called on to pay more than they owed, and thus detained. Yet, liberty, even so fettered and curtailed, was liberty still. What with the dues to his landlord and his commune, the extra charges for judicial proceedings, and the constantly increasing taxes laid upon him, the peasant had a heavy burden. Monsieur Rojkov, in his book on 'Russian Agriculture in the Sixteenth Century' (1899, p. 244), has calculated that the peasant in the northern provinces gave the landlord back one-half of the cereal produce of his holding, and that the other half hardly fed himself and his family for six months. Cattle-raising and some small industries enabled him to make two ends meet, but barely that. Very poor he was, but, like the old Anglo-Saxon ceorl, or the German Markgenosse, he continued to some degree the equal, from the judicial and administrative point of view, of the boïar, the merchant, and the Churchman. The courts of justice were open to him as to others, and such was the equality in this respect, that in a dispute between men of different ranks, amenable, by virtue of their condition, to different jurisdictions, the peasant, like any other subject of the Empire, had a right to choose his judges.