be rarely,
if ever, made by the great dignitaries, for they had the means of
attracting peasants to their estates;* but the small proprietors
had good reason to complain, and the Tsar was bound to remove their
grievances. The attaching of the peasants to the soil was, in fact, the
natural consequence of feudal tenures--an integral part of the Muscovite
political system. The Tsar compelled the nobles to serve him, and was
unable to pay them in money. He was obliged, therefore, to procure for
them some other means of livelihood. Evidently the simplest method of
solving the difficulty was to give them land, with a certain number of
labourers, and to prevent the labourers from migrating.

* There are plain indications in the documents of the time
that the great dignitaries were at first hostile to the
adscriptio glebae. We find a similar phenomenon at a much
more recent date in Little Russia. Long after serfage had
been legalised in that region by Catherine II., the great
proprietors, such as Rumyantsef, Razumofski, Bezborodko,
continued to attract to their estates the peasants of the
smaller proprietors. See the article of Pogodin in the
Russkaya Beseda, 1858, No. 4, p. 154.

Towards the free Communes the Tsar had to act in the same way for
similar reasons. The Communes, like the nobles, had obligations to the
Sovereign, and could not fulfil them if the peasants were allowed to
migrate from one locality to another. They were, in a certain sense, the
property of the Tsar, and it was only natural that the Tsar should do
for himself what he had done for his nobles.

With these new reasons for fixing the peasants to the soil came, as has
been said, new means of preventing migration. Formerly it was an
easy matter to flee to a neighbouring principality, but now all the
principalities were combined under one ruler, and the foundations of a
centralised administration were laid. Severe fugitive laws were issued
against those who attempted to change their domicile and against the
proprietors who should harbour the runaways. Unless the peasant chose
to face the difficulties of "squatting" in the inhospitable northern
forests, or resolved to brave the dangers of the steppe, he could
nowhere escape the heavy hand of Moscow.*

* The above account of the origin of serfage in Russia is
founded on a careful examination of the evidence which we
possess on the subject, but