Court and countryside 1200–1600the Muromachi period. Nishitani Mashahiro points out that by the Kamakura period, the con-
nections between estates and their proprietors in the capital had attenuated. Proprietors sought
agents who would loyally support their own priorities, while warriors and other on- site estate
managers sought to cement control over local territories. Late Kamakura judicial decisions
resolved these and other conflicts by transforming many estates into single proprietorships
(ichien).^4
Other historians identify as pivotal the Muromachi period, which witnessed an increase in the
recourse to violence, the growth of warrior lordship, and commercialization. Warrior lords
expanded their direct control over estates and public lands as the imperial court surrendered its
powers of adjudication of land rights to the shogunate. Although they sometimes retained influ-
ence as patrons, and remained powerful in the capital region, traditional proprietors gradually
ceased to play an active role in the provinces, and warriors appropriated extractive, judicial, and
police powers.^5
Muromachi- period estate administration reflected intensified commercialization; shiki became
less tied to inheritance or status and more commoditized. Proprietors auctioned off managerial
offices to entrepreneurial experts such as monks, local warriors, financiers, powerful villagers,
and pirates, who tied estates to markets, toll barriers, and commercial trade in order to turn a
profit. Studies of this commercialization have debunked older models of estates as hermetically
sealed, institutional hierarchies. Estates were integrated into subsistence exchange networks;
periodic markets developed by the Kamakura period, and commercial exchange enabled estate
residents to pay rents in cash or bills of exchange instead of kind.^6
Conceptual changes that accompanied the breakdown in central authority in the fifteenth and
sixteenth century are another common thread among historians. Keirstead and others suggest
that the estate as a system ended sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, as specific titles
within estates acquired new significations tied to lordship and dominion by local elites.
By the Ōnin War (1467–1477), villages replaced estates as loci of identity; the term hyakushō
(which originally signified persons without court rank—that is all persons liable for taxes) tied
commoners to villages instead of proprietors. “Ryōshu” a term originally applied to estate propri-
etors, now came to indicate instead the unitary power of a single military lord. For Fujiki Hisashi
and Mary Elizabeth Berry, the ubiquity of conflict in post- Ōnin War society legitimized a culture
of “self- redress” (jiriki) wherein multiple tiers of society turned to violence, instead of the judicial
apparatuses of the court and shogunate, for the resolution of disputes.^7
Yet another school of thought pushes the end of the estate system to the late sixteenth century,
when Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s land surveys swept away previous landholding arrangements and
identified a single owner for each territory. Nevertheless, although estate terminology survived
in the sixteenth century, it did so in no standardized way, mixing interchangeably with words
such as “village.”^8
Warriors
Warriors, whether defined as landowners, specialists in military arts, or as loci of patronage rela-
tionships connecting capital to countryside, remain a central focus of studies of local autonomy.
Warrior identity remained fluid and open until the early modern unification, with villagers,
shrine workers, pirates, and others all claiming the mantle of samurai (“we who serve”) as a
marker of status. As warfare became endemic and violence a way of life, “samurai” became con-
ceptually tied to violence, but the term did not become equated with a “warrior class” until the
early modern period.^9