Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/76

 52 But at the close of the century the proportion drops to about 20 to 24, and it is impossible to fix it with any precision.

The price of labour naturally depended on the price of corn. In 1598, we find peasants binding themselves to furnish sawing-wood, to be cut and carried for the building of a bridge, for an agreed price of a diénga and a half. In 1573, an obja, a piece of ground which one man could till with a horse, was to be bought for between 8 and 10 roubles. A house cost 3 roubles. Four cows and twenty sheep were to be had for 4 roubles 16 altines, and a horse for from 1 to 3 roubles.

Crops were taken in a three-years' rotation—rye, oats, and fallow. The peasant who settled on an obja sowed two and a half to three and a half tchetviérti of rye and as much barley, and, if his harvests were good, made as much as 3 roubles a year. His keep having been taken out of this income, he still had to dress himself. A full suit cost him half a rouble, without the belt and gloves, indispensable in cold weather, and for which he had to give 24 kopecks and 6 kopecks. Then he had his taxes, some 75 kopecks to 1 rouble, as it seems, by a reckoning taken in 1555.

But all this only relates to the 'black' lands, on which the free peasants lived. On the 'white' lands the advances given by proprietors towards the farmers' preliminary expenses, and the succour they distributed in times of famine or murrain, made the husbandman's life easier, but endangered his freedom. The peasants settling on communal lands generally obtained a remission of taxes for the first four or even eight years of their tenancy, but they could not reckon on any other advantage. The monastery lands were looked on as an El Dorado, and I have already explained why. Yet, though the monks, less heavily burdened themselves, were in a position to be more lenient with others, the name strada (stradat, to suffer), commonly applied to the forced labour demanded by these landlords, would seem to prove their El Dorado was no paradise.

I have already mentioned one of the causes which acted as an obstacle to the development of the agricultural industry. That celebrated household book, the 'Domostroï,' composed by Pope Sylvester in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, to which I shall make further reference, sheds a curious light on this point. According to this book, all industrial activity seems to have been essentially domesticated. Under the roof of every boïar of that period we see a cluster of workshops, which supply all the home needs of the establishment, and make any external development of the same trades a matter of impossibility.

Yet carpentering, joinery, boat-building, that fashioning of small wooden utensils and objects which has attained such extensive proportions in the particular form of industrial