Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/63

 Rh the policy of Moscow invariably tended to replacing freeholds by fiefs, putting life grants in the place of hereditary domains. On the lands annexed to the Empire by force of arms this process of substitution was far easier, and was rapidly accomplished. The laws of war, admitting, as they did, of wholesale confiscation and the distribution of the confiscated lands, provided for it. Twenty years after the annexation of Novgorod we find, in a document dated 1500, that in the two districts of Ladoga and Oriéchek 106 pomiéchtchiki held half the arable land between them; most of these were of the humbler class, artisans and servants, and consequently all the more docile. The judicial ancestor of the ordinary type of landed proprietor of that country in the sixteenth century is the dog-boy of the appanaged Prince of the fourteenth—obedience is in his blood.

Elsewhere, in countries where the work of unification had been done with a gentle hand, the vottchiny were still in the majority. They were much less manageable, and against them the furious onslaught to which the Terrible owes his title was to be launched.

The pomiéstia class, which spread still more generally as the result of this struggle, laboured under another drawback. Owing to that insufficiency of land at the Sovereign's disposal, to which I have already alluded, a landed proletariat came into existence. One pomiéchtchik called out for military service complains that he has not the means to provide himself with a horse. Another, who, while he awaits the promised allotment of land, performs the functions of a church chorister, does not even possess the wherewithal to serve on foot. Yet the numbers are kept up, after all, and the Sovereign's army costs him nothing.

But he must have an administration besides, and this costs nobody but the governed anything at all. To administer meant, in those days, to exercise justice and keep criminals in order—nothing more—and those who did it were fed. Here, too, the general system was the same. By virtue of ancient privilege on most allodial properties, by virtue of special charters on other lands, the owners, soldiers, or even Churchmen, sat in judgment—in other words, they traded, on their own account, on the rights of justice, which they turned to their personal profit. They pocketed the proceeds of pettifoggery, minted into taxes and charges of various kinds, and the proceeds of public prosecutions, in the shape of fines paid by convicted persons, or, failing them, by their communes. On lands which escaped this jurisdiction the trade in judicial matters was divided between the direct agents of the State, acting for it, and other service men,' to whom the State