40 EARLY CHOSON DYNASTY
the examinations was not sufficient proof of his generalization. He argued that
three of the nonyangban men who passed the examinations were private slaves
of important members of royalty and high officials who had support from their
masters, that the seven commoners he mentioned might have included some
declasse yangban, that the cases were too small in number to prove a trend, and
that some of them dated from the mid rather than early Choson period. That
they were cited at all in the Veritable Records (Sillak) probably indicated that
they were exceptions to the rule. As Song June-ho has also argued, Yi insisted
that family history and pedigree (munji) was really the basis for drawing the
line between yangban and commoners.^40
In rather rough terms, the yangban could be described as a hybrid between
the contrasting ideals of meritocratic bureaucracy and hereditary aristocracy.4^1
Further analysis of the pattern of examination success in the first century of the
dynasty is needed to see whether it indicates a relative concentration of success
in a few hereditary families or if it did provide opportunities for newcomers.
Another important contribution of Song June-ho to our understanding of the
yangban was his insistence that although the yangban gained their greatest fame
and honor as members of the central government bureaucracy, they generally
moved out from the capital to settle in the rural villages and were primarily a
rural, local, and agricultural elite. Since most of Song's evidence comes from
the period after the late seventeenth century, there might be some risk in extrap-
olating his conclusions backward to the early Choson period, but I believe it is
warranted because, as Duncan has demonstrated, many of the early Choson offi-
cials were carried over from prestigious families of late Koryo.
Song has shown that despite the importance of the pan' gwan (choronym or
locational name) associated with the founder of a lineage, or even the sub lin-
eage designation, families were known generally, and certainly in their home
regions, by the town in which their family had resided for generations.^42 He held
that everyone in the village knew when the first resident of a lineage moved into
the village, except in cases when that event occurred far back in the mid-to-early
Koryo or before. As in the case of capital yangban, those in the villages main-
tained and reinforced their status by marrying with other yangban, passing the
civil service exams, receiving a government post, earning a reputation for schol-
arship, virtuous behavior, or the conduct of rites. The family maintained the con-
tinuity of the family's yangban status through war and natural disaster. They
also held exclusive membership in local government associations like the early
Yuhyangso and were listed in the later local yangban association membership
roster (hyang'an).43
In short, although the state created much broader opportunities for advance-
ment than existed before 1392 or after the sixteenth century by allowing most
categories of yang'in (commoners or men of "good" status) to take the exami-
nations and be appointed to office, the yangban class was by no means a group
of upwardly mobile commoner newcomers unaffected by the status of their ances-