224 SOCIAL REFORM
only then would the female slaves realize that there would be nothing to be gained
by marrying commoner males.^66
Although Sejong decided to ban the marriage of base women to good men
in 1432, he made an important exception to the rule if the father were a regu-
lar civil and military official, a passer of the civil, military, or saengwon exam-
ination, a male heir of an official with the protection privilege, or an ordinary
commoner who by the age of forty did not have any sons, a virtual definition
of most yangban.^67 Some scholars have interpreted this act as reestablishment
of the matrilineal succession rule, but Sejong did not explicitly mention the matri-
lineal principle. He simply tried to block slave women from gaining commoner
status for their children by falsely representing the fathers of their children as
commoners, but he protected the ability of yang ban to maintain a harem of slave
concubines and keep their nothoi offspring commoners instead of slaves. For
Sejong, establishing a uniform law was less important than catering to the needs
of the yangban as a class.
During the debate of the 1420S and 1430S the matrilineal rule seems to have
been held in disfavor by all, but for different reasons. The Neo-Confucian offi-
cials, who felt it was anti-Confucian in spirit, preferred the patrilineal rule of
T'aejong. Both T'aejong and Sejong remarked that the matrilineal rule of Koryo
was flawed because it had contravened "Heaven's principles" by in etIect cre-
ating a system of hereditary slavery. Sejong was caught between conflicting
desires: he sought to allow for the expansion of the commoner population by
continuing T'aejong's policy of allowing inheritance of good status in some cases
of mixed marriage, but he was also persuaded by his officials that his father's
patrilineal rule provided too many loopholes for mixed marriages, which threat-
ened to undermine the clarity of social status groups, so important to the main-
tenance of moral order. His final solution was to outlaw intercourse or
intermarriage between people of good and base status except for yangban men
and their slave concubines. Since he never explicitly repealed the patrilineal suc-
cession law. the children of the latter were the only ones that could look for-
ward to good status.
In 1468 during the reign of King Sejo a degree-holder attacked the patrilineal
rule of 1414, which had never been abolished, on the issue of excessive false
paternity claims, an indication that King Sejong's ban on marriages between slave
women and commoner men had not worked. Although Sejo was told that the
patrilineal rule had increased the commoner population and the number of men
eligible for military service, while the matrilineal law might permanently increase
the slave population, he was persuaded to restore the matrilineal rule because he
could offset an excessive conversion of commoners to slave status by allowing
individuals to purchase their children's freedom (soksin). As a result, the law
code of 1469, the Kyongguk taejon, included the matrilineal law of succession
for the offspring of mixed slave/commoner marriages with the exception that