432 MILITARY REFORM
If a person has sons, grandsons, or close relatives [ch 'inch ok], he may transfer
his land [to them] and pass on his responsibilities [to them]. If he has no sons or
grandsons and wants to keep his land and drop down to the [position of] support
taxpayer, then allow him to do so. After a person reaches the age of seventy,
grant him kubunjon [mouth-share land, i.e., retirement land] in the amount of
twenty myo. He will return the leftover portion [of eighty myo]. On this twenty
myo of land he will also pay a support rice tax of one-fifth [the crop]. After he
dies, all his land will be given to a substitute serviceman. 102These regulations and, in particular, the misuse of the T'ang term for the basic
equal-field allotment, kubunj6n, to mean a small retirement grant were all fea-
tures of the early Kory6 ch6nsikwa system. Yu also noted that the same regula-
tions would also apply to clerks and runners who had service obligations. Thus,
what Yu really had in mind was some variant of the chOnsikwa system, which
contained provisions for hereditary occupations, military service obligations,
and land grants subject to state approval.
Privileged Exemption from Military Service
Yu's respect for hereditary privilege was also manifest in the selections he made
for privileged exemption from military duty itself. His list included all officials
(taebusa), those who passed selection examinations (ches6n), close relatives of
the royal family (yuch 'in), those who inherited the right to office without exam-
ination (the urn privilege) because of the high rank of their fathers or ancestors,
clerks and runners, and "in general everyone who has a post or service [yuji-
gy6kcha]." 103
Yu thus exempted the elite of his ideal society from military service, but as a
group it was somewhat less hereditary and aristocratic than that of seventeenth-
century Korean society because exemption of descendants of nobility and high
ranking officials under the urn privilege was far more limited than the open-ended,
de facto exemptions and evasions of military service by yangban at the time.
And the exemption of clerks and runners probably provided more status and
protection to commoner and low-class functionaries than they enjoyed in the
seventeenth century. In fact, this exemption also is reflective of the early Kory6
chOnsikwa system. Not that early Kory6 society was egalitarian; it was just that
the early Kory6 local gentry and soldiers had more status than they did five or
six hundred years later. On the other hand, the pattern of exemptions also sup-
port previous findings that Yu's egalitarian proclivities were always modified by
a degree of respect for status and traditional discrimination.
Inner [Palace} Forbidden Guards: Excluded Social Categories
As will be explained later, Yu made special plans to retain the Inner [Palace]
Forbidden Guards (Naegumwi) at a reduced quota of 200 men. 104 Although he