66 EARLY CHaSON DYNASTYofficials with prebends were no longer able to collect the land tax, they were
still allowed to collect the traditional straw fodder fee until 1478. Nonetheless,
in 1475 King Songjong cut the rate of the straw fee to one-fifth of its former
size, and in 149 I he ordered the district magistrates to collect the cho tax on
monastic and shrine land directly as well. 10
By T 484 the total amount of all types of prebendal land had fallen to about
10,000 kyol from the I 15,340 kyol of rank land and merit subject land in 1400,
or the 68,000 kyol in Sejong's reign (14 I 8-50) out of the total of approximately
150,000 kyol in Kyonggi Province. Since only one-fifteenth of the land in Kyonggi
was used for prebends after 1484, almost all land had been converted to private
property subject to state taxes payable to magistrates or government granaries. I I
Disappearance of PrebendsIn the last quarter of the fifteenth century when the government was hard pressed
for revenue, King Songjong reduced the size of prebendal allotments and took
over as much as half the eho taxes on prebends for the state, and similar mea-
sures were adopted during the reigns of Kings Chungjong and Myongjong to
the mid-sixteenth century.I2 In 1525 the Ministry of Taxation pointed out that
since the grain revenues for the three types of prcbends - office land (chikchan),
merit subject land (kongsinjon), and special royal award land (pyOlsajon) -was
then providing no more than 3,000-4,000 sam a year to the recipients because
the assessments of land fertility had been falling continuously since 1443, the
government would be better off if it abolished all these prebends and simply
provided grain rations to the prebend holders instead.
Mention of office land prebends (chikchan) disappeared from court records
by the mid-sixteenth century, and in 1555 and 1556 when the court was debat-
ing the food crisis created by a series of bad crops, it was mentioned that all the
office land had been taken over by the state some time before. In any case, the
revenue from prebcnds was so low that it became a negligible factor in the income
of high officials. Big landlords were presumably receiving 10,000 sam in rents
compared to the puny 3,000-4,000 sam from the eho tax at a rate of 4 mal/kyO!
(of which 2 mal/kyol had to be paid to the state as the se tax by the prebend
holder). 13 What this meant was that the real contest for the control of land and
revenue between the state and the landlords that had been going on since the
beginning of the dynasty became more obvious now that the dispute over prebends
disappeared.
LandlordislI1, Tenancy, Hired Labor, and Immiseration
A number of Korean scholars have interpreted the disappearance of the system
of prebendal grants as a major transition from incomplete or feudal to complete
or mature ownership relations in Korean history. A corollary to this theory is
that the class conflict between landlords and tenants only emerged with the dis-