Social Transformations in Towns in the South Russian ‘Field’ (Late 16th – Early 17th Centuries)

This article examines the social transformations of the groups of “free” (volnye) people in the 1590s, when they moved to new fortresses on the South Russian ‘Pole’ (English: field), the frontier territory south of the Tula and Ryazan lands. The article discusses their transition to the new status of conscripted military (pribornye sluzhilye) and semi-independent peasants (bobyli), as well as the process of the emergence of social inequality in the southern urban communities in the 1590s–1610s. An attempt is made to identify the ways in which dependent relationships emerged in settler households, and to link this process to the formation of a network of suburban settlements. The research is based on published and archival sources, i. e. documents from the office of the Ambassadorial Prikaz, as well as the archives of the local administrations of Yelets and Voronezh, which are unique sources on the early history of military communities in the Russian south. The logic of the further development of the communities can be traced through the mass sources of the first half of the seventeenth century – the record books of the Domestic Prikaz (dozornye and pistsovye knigi), which make it possible to reconstruct a complete picture of social relations within a given city and uyezd. Assessing the government’s position on the formation of urban societies, the author concludes that priority in their recruitment was given to ‘free’ people who lived in the Russian cities of Tula, Zaoksky, and Ryazan, while in historiography there is a tradition to consider most of them Cossack ‘freemen’ or runaway peasants and serfs. The article shows that the origins of social inequality and relations of dependency can be linked to the widespread practice of accepting newcomers into the households of earlier settlers as so-called zakhrebetniks. Later, with the growth of the agricultural economy, many of them changed their status to bobyli. A conclusion is drawn about the unstable, non-inherited nature of personal dependency relations on the southern frontier in the early seventeenth century.