The Reform of civil registration system and The Change of Household’s characteristics in 1461

During the reign of King Sejong, the maintenance of the civil registration system(戶口制), which had been carried on since the reign of King Taejong, had reached the stage of completion. Based on this, Sejong established the 5-grades’ Household class system of determining the rich and poor based on their property of land, and used it as the basis for the distribution and receipt of tribute and corvee labor. However, Sejong was negative about implementing the Identification Law(號牌法) or expanding the fixed number of household(戶摠), as some of his subjects claimed. That is, if all the household hiding for tax evasion(隱漏戶) were rounded up and subjected to military service and taxes, the civilian population would have no time to rest. From this point of view, the 1461 civil registration system reform was not really an ‘revolutionary reform’ but rather an unreasonable policy with the goal of ‘expanding the number of soldiers’ in mind, which was Seijo&quots own goal through an excessive increase in the number of households. The aftermath of this policy was an overstatement of the civilian military capabilities, which increased the burden on the household, the basis of military unit(軍保), and adversely affected the household as a tax-bearing unit. After the reform, military service even if a large number of soldiers were produced within the household or if the members of the household were single. In addition, as the size of farmland owned by individual households shrank due to the multiplication of the total number of households without any significant change in the size of the farmland, it is believed that the high, middle, and low class households(大中小戶), which played a pivotal role in bearing taxes, were disintegrated and incorporated into the underclass and more-underclass households(殘殘殘戶).