Moscow's Men on Horseback 25Both in making such promotions and in settling precedence disputes the
criterion adopted was otechestvo, which can be roughly translated as seniority.
Yet this was a vague term, open to various interpretations. Etymologically, it
derived from otets (father), and at first probably meant genealogical descent.
But with time greater weight seems to have been accorded to one's ancestor's
service record. This was certainly the case by the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, when the system became more routinized and chancellery officials
played a greater role in deciding such matters. A family of ancient lineage·
whose members failed to perform a service, or performed it badly, would lose
status-would 'grow thin' (zakhudet · ), as the terminology of the day put it
expressively. When filing precedence pleas, men would lay less emphasis on
their family origins than on their forbears' achievements in the tsar's service.37
Crummey cites the extreme case of a contest fought in 1623 between members
of two branches of the Buturlin clan: the oko/ 'nichiy F. L. Buturlin successfully
withstood his challengers by arguing that, although their branch could indeed
claim genealogical seniority, its members had served as provincial nobles inNovgorod rather than in the capital, and so had lost status. (^38) Plaintiffs also
came to make a further distinction between purely administrative assignments
and those in the military domain. The latter, termed 'Razryad service' (raz-
ryadnaya sluzhba), was accounted more meritorious. To complicate matters
even more, military service in one region might be considered more honourable
than that in another, even though its actual character had been much the
same.^39
Noble servitors were under constant pressure from other members of their
clan to avoid loss of status by inadvertently carrying out some dishonourable
task. The more ambitious engaged in a kind of informal surveillance over the
conduct of their kinsmen and, so far as they could, over people in other clans
as well. To this end families would compile unofficial genealogical records
(rodoslovtsy) in which details of all service rendered would be noted down;
these records would be conserved carefully, like buried treasure. They often
contained errors, some of them deliberate, even though they might be based in
large part on official documents. It was of course these latter sources alone
that counted when a dispute came up for adjudication. This gave a great deal
of power to the officials who controlled the information in the various
registers. They had a professional interest in restricting the number of contest-
ations and so tended to pass judgements that went against the plaintiff. They
were not, however, necessarily opposed to mestnichestvo on principle, partly
because such cases gave them power (and sometimes profit) and partly because
it was an element of the 'ancient tradition' (starina) that Muscovites valued so
highly. Although officials took much trouble to verify the precedents, there
was a great deal of arbitrariness in the settling of disputes, especially when the
37 Ostrogorsky, 'Projekt', pp. 89-90.
38 Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors, p. 35.
39 Bobrovsky, 'Mestnichestvo', p. 249.