SLAVERY 225the offspring of officials and slave wives or concubines would be regarded as
commoners (yang).68
By the sixteenth century, however, the proportion of slaves in the population
appeared to be increasing because of the rise of commendation by commoners
to escape onerous military and labor service burdens and the practice of slave-
owners claiming ownership rights over the children of mixed commoner/slave
as well as pure slave marriages, obviously to increase the number of their slaves.
The household registers for Ulsan in 1609, for example, indicated that 48.6 per-
cent of the 2,009 persons listed on the registers for a half dozen subdistricts or
counties (myon) were slaves.^69
Methods to prevent the reduction of yang'in or commoners had been discussed
since 15 I 5, and finally in 1543 King Chungjong decided to expand the com-
moner population by amending the above-mentioned rule to allow the offspring
of ordinary male commoners and slave concubines to inherit commoner status.
Even though this amendment was incorporated into the revised law code, the
Taejon husongnok of 1543, it had little effect because it was ignored by both
slaveowners and officials alike.^70
In 1557 an official suggested that proper enforcement of the matrilineal rule
could be used to ensure an increase of commoners, not slaves, but that it would
take a bold king to carry it through against the private interests of the slave-
ownersJ' The compiler of the The Veritable Record of King Myongjong in the
next generation criticized this position severely on the grounds that under early
Choson law the offspring of private slaves would not be allowed to redeem them-
selves by purchase, "unless they were the sons and daughters of the sadaebu
r scholar-officials ]." He defended that law as justifiable not only because it had
a thousand years of tradition behind it, but because it was designed to eliminate
any route by which the base could become good and thus disrupt the social orderY
Although Kings T'aejo, T'aejong, and Sejong did attempt to prohibit inter-
marriage between those of good and base status, they also sought ways to per-
mit escape from inherited slavery to prevent the loss of taxpaying commoners.
On the other hand, the historian did hit upon a key goal of the early system when
he noted that the opportunity for escape from inherited slavery was open only
to the heirs of the sadaebu or yangban, for the adoption of the patrilineal rule
by T'aejong and permission for purchased manumission by Sejo were both
designed as means of favoring the nothoi or sons of yang ban and their slave
concubinesJ3
Despite the matrilineal rule of 1468, however, by the late sixteenth century a
closed hereditary system of slavery had in fact become the accepted standard.
As opposed to King T'aejong, however, the new view was that the matrilineal
rule itself was not at fault; it was the failure to implement it faithfully. It was
now argued that mere enforcement of the matrilineal rule was tantamount to a
radical reform of the existing system of inherited slavery.