64 EARLY CHOSON DYNASTY
subject altogether because as a descendant of a Northerner, he would have risked
execution. I would suggest he sought to solve the problem by transcending it,
by examining more fundamental issues including revising the way that men were
selected for office and changing the organization of the central bureaucracy to
create the possibility of a bureaucratic check on despotic and arbitrary decision-
making. It was not until the eighteenth century that some statecraft writers felt
secure enough to discuss the problems created by factional politics.
GROWTH OF LANDLORDISM
Changes in the Administration of PrebendsThe kwajon land reform was, as we have seen, far less than what the idealistic
Neo-Confucians like Chong Tojon had advocated because it provided only for
a system of prebendal tax collection privileges for men granted official rank (but
not necessarily office) by the king. What took place throughout most of the fif-
teenth century was the deterioration of this system in the struggle for control
between the yangban prebcnd holders and the state for control of tax revenues.
The net result was an apparent victory for the king and the central government
and the loss of prebendal income by the yangban.
At the beginning of the dynasty the king granted power to prebend holders to
collect taxes, fees, and levies from the owner-cultivators of the prebendal lands,
and to administer the assessment of tax reductions on the basis of crop damage
from natural disasters. The central government chafed at the sacrifice of rev-
enue to the prebend holders and their exploitation of the peasant cultivators. After
the beginning of the fifteenth century King T'aejong shifted tax collection rights
from some prebend holders back to the state, and exempted Kyonggi peasants
from certain charges. In I4 I7 he transferred responsibility to collect taxes on
prebends to district magistrates, sent special crop assessors (Kyongch'agwan)
to assess crop damage, and shifted one-third the area used for prebends from
Kyonggi to the southern provinces to enable greater control over the land sur-
rounding the capital until 143 I, when he returned prebend allotments to
Kyonggi.3
Nevertheless, the chOnju, who continued to hold the prebends in Kyonggi
Province and had begun to regard them as their own private property, struggled
to recover the direct collection of the cho tax throughout King Sejong's reign
to the middle of the fifteenth century.4 On the other hand, despite the increase
in the number of candidates for prebendal allotments, the kings refused to increase
the amount of land granted for prebends, transferred some prebends to new aspi-
rants by arbitrary and often unfair decision, took over some prebends to pay for
military expenses, and reduced the size of the prebendal grants. In 1440 King
Sejong reduced the amount of land used for prebends to individuals from 84, 100
to 68,000 kyi5/.5
The government also held the lid on land granted for prebends by granting