The Noble Servitor and His World 45Most servitors were desperately short of capital and knowhow, and thus
unable to contribute much to the agricultural economy (although their wives
might do so).^39 Military duty forced them to neglect their lands precisely dur-
ing the sca5or. whcu lii.: major agricuiturai operations were under way. This
hindered them not only from farming effectively on their own account but also
from enforcing their rights to payment of dues by their dependants. The ser-
vitor was seen by 'his' peasants as an outsider, perhaps even as a parasite; such
patriarchal bonds as had once existed were severed by the sixteenth-century
crisis, which led to the enserfment of the rural population. Although lords
still shared a common cultural background with their serfs, and had many of
the same day-to-day concerns, they were not integrated into the life of the local
community. The reason for this was not serfdom (krepostnichestvo). as many
writers have too easily assumed-still less 'feudalism', which Russia con-
spicuously lacked-but the incessant demands of the service state.
One other important point deserves to be noted in this connection. The
prevalence of the extended family meant that many land-owners and -holders
exercised their rights jointly rather than individually.^40 The original pomest 'ye
grant would indeed be in favour of a certain individual, the servitor who did
duty from that land; but his kinsmen, who might help him work it or look
after it in his absence, considered themselves entitled to a share of its revenue.
The clan spirit also helped to maintain the traditional practice of partible
inheritance, whereby a family's property would be divided up among male
heirs on the death of the paterfamilias. The ensuing fragmentation of property
rights made management extremely complicated, and explains why officials
found it so difficult to discover who held what, and why no general survey was
taken before the late eighteenth century, although demands for one had been
voiced for hundreds of years. The same problem confronted the compensation
entitlement officials and Razryad clerks who endeavoured to reapportion ser-
vice tenures in such a way as to preserve some rough conformity between the
amount and quality of the land and the service due from it.
In theory a pomest 'ye, being a holding, reverted to its ultimate owner, the
tsar, if for some reason it passed 'out of service'. However, confiscations were
rare. Even during the oprichnina dispossession was brought about by crude
direct action rather than by invoking the sovereign's legal rights. Normally the
authorities acquiesced in whatever testamentary provisions the pomeshchik
made, provided that his son (or some other relative) performed service from
the land in question, or else passed on the land to a surviving son on his
death.^41 A complicated body of law grew up to regulate the transmission of
.w The worthy pomeshchilsa Yulianiya Lazarevskaya (Osor' ina), whose biography was written
by her son as a saint's lire, spent most of her day in household toil; her husband, who had 400
quarters in Nizhniy Novgorod, was frequently away on servke. T. A. Greenan, 'lulianiya
Lazarevskaya', Oxford Slavonic Papers xv (1982), 29.
40 Go!"ye, Ocherk, p. 53; Stashevsky, 'Sluzh. sosloviye', P-26.
41 For example, AMG ii. 17 (1635), 63 ( 1636).