REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH 333
departed from the chOnsi!c.va system in two ways. He explicitly provided for
land grants to commoner peasants in the fashion of the Chinese equal-field sys-
tem, and he specifically mled out the allocation of woodland to officials and
declared it to he commons (kong) for the peasants. Yu was willing to use the
chonsikwa system as a model because he thought of it as a rcplica of the Tang
system, but he was not a simple-minded copier of early Koryo institutions.
SlavesPrivate slaves in the seventeenth century consisted of two components: domes-
tic servants, and those who tilled the land of their masters as tenants, living either
in rooms in the master's quarters or in their own homes at some remove from
the master's house - wherever the family's scattered parcels of property hap-
pened to be located, sometimes in faraway districts. Total manumission of slaves
would, of course, have converted all of them to commoncrs, making them eli-
gible for Yu's standard one-kyong grant. Since Yu could not bring himself to adopt
such a radical position, he sought to work out a compromise by which slavery
would be retained and yet slaves could be guaranteed basic land grants and
required to perform military service for the state. Nonetheless he required a levy
of military service on private slaves that was twice as heavy as commoners (see
chap. IO).65
Each official slave who was either subject to service for officials (kwalli noye)
or holders of specific posts (yuyokcha) would receive a land grant that would
be returned to the state at the age of sixty when he retired from his post, and his
widow would be entitled to a support grant or kubunJon.^66 He did not specify
the size of a land grant for official slaves with posts, but it was undoubtedly sup-
posed to serve as remuneration for service.
Yu did not make clear whether he expected private slaves, who would now
be the recipients of a land grant, to continue to pay sharecropping rent in the
form of personal tribute to their masters in addition to a tithe to the state, but
judging from the overall context of his discussion he probably did. It is hard,
therefore, to see how private outside resident slaves would have been better off
under his new system.
Yu admitted that a "tme king" ought to abolish hereditary slavery (nobi se-
ji-bOp), but circumstances prevented it.
Until it is abolished, we have no choice but to grant them land [sujonJ, which
will make things easier for them than before. The reason, however, that they
will be unable to avoid excessive burdens is because this is the way things are.
There is nothing that we can do about it. In making plans for the present. we
only ought to carry out eljuitably the matrilineal slave succession law [chong-
moblip] so that the problem of an excessive slave population will disappear and
the system of the early kings can can accordingly be restored.he