Yu's COMMUNITY COMPACT REGULATIONS 743
severity of the deed. Minor transgressions were to be punished by dropping the
individual down in the seating order in compact association meetings to a place
lower in prestige than their normal position (see later). A perpetrator might regain
his original place only after the group granted permission. More serious errors
were punished by removal of the perpetrator's name from the compact register,
and prohibition against participation in public meetings or village atlairs. Any
violator who claimed he had rehabilitated himself would be readmitted to the
association only after a probationary period of several years and a final face-to-
face admonition session that required him to stand in the open courtyard and
make a public apology. He would then be allowed to take his seat only if the
association members approved.
Yu's list of punishments was not as detailed as Yulgok's five degrees of pun-
ishment with a limit of forty strokes, and he reduced the degrees of punishment
and the number of strokes to ten, twenty, or thirty, and eliminated some of the
light penalties for men of high status. Echoing his desire for the abolition of
slavery, one of his regulations declared that "There will be no consideration of
nobility or baseness [kwich on] of status [in the determination ofl penalties" -
a striking reversal ofYulgok's regulations.
Yu did not. however, believe in total equality in the treatment of perpetrators,
because punishment had to vary according to the relative ages of the perpetra-
tor and victim. If two brothers happened to fight with one another, the younger
brother would be punished more severely than the older. If a transgressor hap-
pened to be old or sick and could not endure the full number of strokes pre-
scribed by regulations, he would be required only to remove his hat and lay
prostrate on the ground, but his son would take the whipping in his place. TO
Even though Yu's more general provisions reflected his rcvulsion against slav-
ery and inherited status. he was hardly more liberal than Yulgok in his com-
mitment to group pressure and physical punishment as the ultimate means for
forcing conformity to social norms. Like most other architects of community
compacts. he wanted to constrain individuals in the village to vague definitions
of requisite interpersonal behavior and make them subject to corporal punish-
ment without requiring that all potentially illegal acts be codified in written form
in state laws. [ [
ARe versus Inherited Status
In the late sixteenth century, Yulgok had introduced a significant modification
into the rules of local self-government organizations hy inserting considerations
of social status into regulations for punishment in his Pledges for the Village
Granary Kye. Even though the village granary kye was not the same as the com-
munity compact, the distinction between the two institutions was not that clear
in Yulgok's mind because he carried over many of the moral standards and norms
of behavior from the community compact tradition into the granary regulations.
Although his list of punishments provided lighter punishments for "scholars"