42 EARLY CHOSON DYNASTY
verted into ordinary taxable land. The taxpayer, who was the legal owner of his
land, referred to most frequently as "people's land" (minjon), was now liberated
from the claims of the holders of sajon prebends.^45
On the other hand, Yi Songgye created a new system of prebendal allotments
in I391 under the name of "rank lands" (kwajon), granted to all individuals with
official rank (but not necessarily office).4^6 Since all but a minority of incum-
bent, high ranking officials of the Koryo regime made the transition to the new
Choson dynasty, they retained their right to prebendal allotments but only lost
control over the specific parcels of land and their owners or cultivators that they
had prior to I390.
A number of officials like Cho Chun, the drafter of the government's land
reform program in I388, Yi Haeng, and Cho In'ok, deplored the expansion of
prebendal sa;on throughout the country by the late Koryo period and its con-
version into inheritable property instead of its return to the government for reas-
signment after the death of the recipient. Cho also criticized the proliferation of
prebendal tax collectors on the land of single peasant cultivators and the col-
lection of taxes beyond the legal limits as well as the loss of tax revenue col-
lections by the central government.^47 His solution for this was not, however, either
the nationalization of land and the rotating distribution of it to all peasants or
the elimination of prebendal tax grants to individuals in principle, but rather the
abolition of inheritance of prebends by the sons and later descendants of the
recipients and the accumulation of prebendal holdings by single individuals. His
idea of perfection was to reinstitute what he thought was the original Koryo sys-
tem of distributing "land" only to officials, soldiers, and those performing duties
for the state, and then requiring that it all be returned to the state after their deaths.
The "land" he referred to, however, has generally been accepted by most schol-
ars to mean prebends, livings, or tax allotments only rather than the land itself.
As corroboration for this interpretation, we find that when Cho advocated that
the provisions of the chi5nsikwa prebendal system of early Koryo be copied, he
used thc tcrm, kubunjl5n, which under the T'ang equal-field (kyunjon) system
originally meant a basic grant of land to all peasant families based on the age
and sex of the family members. To Cho, however, kubunjon meant a lifetime
(prebendal) grant (of tax collection rights) only for princes of the royal houses
and capital officials of ranks I through 9 whether or not they held actual posts,
for their widows with surviving children who remained faithful to them and
refused to remarry after their deaths, for their orphans, and for local district and
monastery officials.^48 This principle of prebendal distribution was confirmed
when King Kongyang ordered the adoption of the kwajon system in I 39 I .49 Fur-
thermore, Ho Ung in the eighth lunar month of I388 remarked that the essen-
tial element of the new system was primarily "the provision ofland [i.e., prebends]
to the class of officials, the sadaebu," not the ordinary peasantry.5"
Even though the system of rotating prebends granted by the state to private
individuals and returnable to the state at death was different from the T'ang "equal-
field" system of distribution and redistribution of land to all peasants, some Kore-