Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/44

 20 alone, or almost alone, will preserve a regular supply of labour, settling most of these bobyli, together with another class of unqualified peasants, the 'children of the monasteries' (monastyrskiïé diétiénychy), in their own villages and hamlets. These last were peasants of an inferior class, but free in their own persons, and not serfs at all. Were there no serfs, then, in this country, which, till the middle of the nineteenth century, was the last stronghold of European serfdom? Yes, indeed. But in the sixteenth century they formed an almost imperceptible element in the mass of the population.

Even at a later period, the conversion of war captives into slaves was considered a natural law, and there were other causes of slavery besides, such as marriage with a slave, slave birth, bankruptcy, certain domestic functions, and even the deliberate laying down of his own liberty by any man. Down to the fifteenth century the man who performed the duties of a tivoune (turnkey) was necessarily a slave, and until the seventeenth, an insolvent debtor was made over to his creditor, and remained his slave until the debt was paid.

To these constituting causes of serfdom the sixteenth century added a new custom—the kabala, or, after an Arab word, the contract made by a man who borrows a sum of money and undertakes to pay the interest with his labour. This transaction did not in itself involve loss of liberty, and in Germany and Southern Italy similar contracts did not produce this consequence. The kabalnyï could free himself by paying his debt. In Germany and Italy the man thus conditionally permitted to recover the power of his own person generally made use of the possibility. In Russia, as a rule, the fulfilment of the conditions was impossible, and the whole history of serfdom, as finally established in the country, rests on this fact.

Ivan IV.'s Code noted four classes of slaves: full slaves (polnyié)—that is to say, those whose slavery, like that of their offspring, was unconditional—senior slaves, whose slavery, no doubt, was limited, according to a fashion unknown to us; slaves called kabalynié; and slaves known as dokladnyié, enslaved by virtue of a doklad, another form of free contract. But the legislator, while thus noting a state of things created by the action of the past, sought to reduce the proportions of this legacy from barbarous times, to restrict the causes constituting a state of slavery, and to encircle their application with formalities which in many cases became prohibitive.