as easily converted into a means of preventing his
departure if he wished to change his domicile. We need not enter into
further details. The proprietors were the capitalists of the time.
Frequent bad harvests, plagues, fires, military raids, and similar
misfortunes often reduced even prosperous peasants to beggary. The
muzhik was probably then, as now, only too ready to accept a loan
without taking the necessary precautions for repaying it. The laws
relating to debt were terribly severe, and there was no powerful
judicial organisation to protect the weak. If we remember all this,
we shall not be surprised to learn that a considerable part of the
peasantry were practically serfs before serfage was recognised by law.

So long as the country was broken up into independent principalities,
and each land-owner was almost an independent Prince on his estate, the
peasants easily found a remedy for these abuses in flight. They fled
to a neighbouring proprietor who could protect them from their
former landlord and his claims, or they took refuge in a neighbouring
principality, where they were, of course, still safer. All this was
changed when the independent principalities were transformed into the
Tsardom of Muscovy. The Tsars had new reasons for opposing the migration
of the peasants and new means for preventing it. The old Princes had
simply given grants of land to those who served them, and left the
grantee to do with his land what seemed good to him; the Tsars, on the
contrary, gave to those who served them merely the usufruct of a certain
quantity of land, and carefully proportioned the quantity to the rank
and the obligations of the receiver. In this change there was plainly
a new reason for fixing the peasants to the soil. The real value of a
grant depended not so much on the amount of land as on the number of
peasants settled on it, and hence any migration of the population was
tantamount to a removal of the ancient landmarks--that is to say, to a
disturbance of the arrangements made by the Tsar. Suppose, for instance,
that the Tsar granted to a Boyar or some lesser dignitary an estate on
which were settled twenty peasant families, and that afterwards ten of
these emigrated to neighbouring proprietors. In this case the recipient
might justly complain that he had lost half of his estate--though the
amount of land was in no way diminished--and that he was consequently
unable to fulfil his obligations. Such complaints would