46 EARLY CHOSON DYN ASTY
but that their ownership rights were still "immature" and had to undergo a mat-
uration process to create a system of fully fledged "mature" property rights. Of
course, the majority of landowners in all provinces outside of Kyonggi paid the
cho to the district magistrate and were not subject to demands by an interme-
diary group of prebend holders as many of them in the exterior provinces had
been in the Koryo period up to 1389. After 1389 these landowners were liable
to transportation costs for taxes and tribute payments as part of the obligations
they owed the state, but these duties could not be construed as a limitation on
landownership.
The private property rights of the landowning peasants of Kyonggi Province
were limited in other ways, however, because the state imposed restrictions on
both the sale of land and the renting of land. Sharecropping was eventually per-
mitted in 1415, and the ban on land sales was lifted in 1424 even though both
practices must have existed before these dates.^62 One might deduce that the
Choson government must have sought to preserve the relatively small parcels
held by most landowning peasants on the average by preventing the loss of peas-
ant proprietorships through market transactions.
Since private ownership of land without the ability to alienate, sell, or rent is
apparently an oxymoron, one is forced to respect the views ofYi Kyongsik and
others who have concluded that the nature of private property under the kwajon
system represented a less than complete or immature system of ownership even
in the case of peasant owners of min jon in the outer provinces who were not
subjected to any control or supervision by prebend holders as in Kyonggi
Province.^61
Military Defense and Recruitment
Chong Tojon explained what he perceived to constitute the ideal formula for
military defense in the new Choson state, and it was based on his perception
of the militia ideal of the ancient Chou dynasty. Using ordinary peasants for
soldiers had the advantage of eliminating the expense of paying for a profes-
sional force of soldiers during peacetime and the bother of rounding up recruits
whenever war broke out. As in the Chou dynasty, administrative difficulty was
reduced to a minimum because in peacetime the units of civil administration
from the smallest cluster of households up to the largest prefectures were all
placed under the central command of the minister of education (Ssu-t'u), and
the peasant militia was subjected to military training during the agricultural
off-seasons, while in wartime the military equivalents of those peacetime admin-
istrative divisions were simply transferred to the centralized command of the
minister of war (Ssu-ma).
After the Chou dynasty no military system ever attained the perfection of ear-
lier times, but at least the Southern and Northern Armies of the Han dynasty,
and the Iu-ping system of the Tang dynasty, which included rotating duty sol-
diers from the provinces as capital guards, frontier soldiers for peripheral defense,