The Noble Servitor and His World 49the natural economy, made it hard to secure a regular income from their lands.
Under the Romanovs their assets increased. In 1637/8 Duma members were
said to have an average of 520 peasant households on their estates (excluding
those in Mu~ww uisirict), as against a mere 5 or 6 each ror provincial deli
boyarskiye.^55 This wealth was, however, unequally distributed within the
group. Some metropolitan nobles pleaded that poverty prevented them from
serving without a cash grant.^56 Their claim need not have been entirely
groundless, for a survey taken that year of 303 moskovskiye dvoryane showed
that their (nominal?) holdings ranged from 1,464 quarters to 142.57 Figures for
1647/8 show that 10 boyars each owned an average of 1,827 peasant households;
the wealthiest land-owner after the tsar, his kinsman N. I. Romanov, had
7,012.^58 The Soviet demographer Vodarsky offers a table5^9 purporting to show
that average holdings of dumnye chiny peaked in 1653 (1,045 households), as
against 584 in 1638, 469 in 1678 and 572 in 1700; however, the number of indi-
viduals covered varies in each year; the polls were taken for different purposes
and in different circumstances, and so are not readily comparable.
For the provincial servitors, fortunately, we have rather more trustworthy
calculations. One recent investigator has concluded that in the sixteenth cen-
tury fulfilment of the obligations imposed by the 1556 code would have cost
20 per cent of the rent a pomeshchik could extract from an area equivalent to a
JOO-quarter entitlement. Even for high-ranking servitors, he notes, 'the real
cost of service from their land was considerably greater than the norm laid
down by the service code' .ro In the Starorussky district of Novgorod, where
joint ownership of property was the rule (195 land-holders shared title to 104
pomestya), 90 per cent of the servitors had too little land to meet their obliga-
tions.61
Nor did the-:situation of provincial servitors change radically for the better
after the Troubles. Landless gentry at Odoyev, on the southern border, affirmed
in 1638 that they had to buy all their equipment on credit at high rates of in-
terest and were 'dragging ourselves from one household to another [that is,
begging for alms] and dying a hungry death, for we have neither food nor
drink' .62 Some allowance must be made for rhetorical exaggeration-such
phrases were de rigueur in petitions-but the records abound with similar
to equip himself for service: Rozhdestvensky, S/uzh. zemlevladeniye, pp. 78-83; cf. Ross, Adel,
p. 19.
ss Eaton, 'Censuses', p. 76; Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors, pp. 114-15.
S6 DRVxvi. 328-31 (1632).
57 Stashevsky, Zemlevladeniye, pp. 40ff., nos. 19 (T. Bezobrazov), 40 (D. V. Baryatinsky). The
fact that much of their land will have been waste or thinly settled accounts for these differences
and impedes their analysis. The average of 24 households per man (ibid., p. 31) seems far too low
and must surely reflect concealment of their properties' true state.
" Rozhdestvensky, 'Rospis"'; cf. Got'ye, Ocherk, p. 58 and Zamosk. kray, pp. 283-4; more
recently Rexhauser, Besitzverhllltnisse, p. 5.
S9 Vodarsky. 'Prav. gruppa'. p. 74. 60 Alekseyev, 'IS-rub. maksimum', p. 115.
61 Degtyarev, 'Dokhody', pp. 88-9.^62 AMG ii. 158.