Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/68

 44 of these associations, and was called a volost. This in no way resembled the institution now known by this name. The ancient volost, which was something between the canton and the commune in France, and somewhat approached the American township, possessed far more extensive privileges. The assembly which represented it at this period had power to issue decrees (by-laws); it chose the mayors (golovy) and the elders (starosty) of the commune; it allocated the direct taxes imposed by Government on trade and agriculture; it appointed the members of each commune who were to help the judges to exercise their functions, or play the part allotted to the schöffen in ancient Germany, and to the nemd in Sweden; and finally, through freely-elected magistrates, it kept order and defended the common interests before the judges.

Such, at least, is the state of things of which traces are discoverable on the 'black' lands, owned by free peasants. But it is impossible to assert that the same condition existed on lands of the other class, concurrently with that judicial and police organization amidst which the privileged magistrates wielded their authority. On the other hand, and on these very lands, even in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, signs and rudiments of collective possession or holdings have been detected. In the centre of the country more especially, the documents of the period make frequent reference to husbandmen, called sossiédy (neighbours), skladniki (from skladat, to put together), or siabry, who seem to have been peasants associated together to work a certain stretch of land. Monsieur Serguiéiévitch, though he interprets the name and manner of life of these husbandmen in a different sense, believing them to have bound themselves together for the payment of their obligations only, grants, in his 'Judicial Antiquities' (1903, vol. iii., p. 61, etc., and 119, etc.), the existence of other agrarian communities. On the lands held by the higher clergy and by the monasteries, the history of which is much better known, the enjoyment of certain hired areas seems to have been common to all the tenants, inasmuch as the lot given to one family, the vit, or sokha, as in the case of the English virgate, did not constitute a right to occupy one particular space, enclosed within certain limits, but that to occupy and till five diéssiatines, for instance, in each of the three fields belonging to the manor. On one property belonging to the Troïtsa monastery (Serguiéiévitch, ibid., p. 440) we note, quite as an exception, the tillage in common of parcels of ground made over to associations of peasants. And on the lands confiscated by the father of Ivan the Terrible after the annexation of Novgorod, lands taken from boïars and given to qualified peasants, a common ownership in