* On this subject see Tchitcherin, “Opyty po istorii Russkago prava,” Moscow, 1858, p. 162 et seq.; and Lokhvitski, “O plennykh po drevnemu Russkomu pravu,” Moscow, 1855.

Under these circumstances it was only natural that those who possessed this valuable commodity should do all in their power to keep it.  Many, if not all, of the free Communes adopted the simple measure of refusing to allow a member to depart until he had found some one to take his place.  The proprietors never, so far as we know, laid down formally such a principle, but in practice they did all in their power to retain the peasants actually settled on their estates.  For this purpose some simply employed force, whilst others acted under cover of legal formalities.  The peasant who accepted land from a proprietor rarely brought with him the necessary implements, cattle, and capital to begin at once his occupations, and to feed himself and his family till the ensuing harvest.  He was obliged, therefore, to borrow from his landlord, and the debt thus contracted was easily converted into a means of preventing his departure if he wished to change his domicile.  We need not enter into further details.  The proprietors were the capitalists of the time.  Frequent bad harvests, plagues, fires, military raids, and similar misfortunes often reduced even prosperous peasants to beggary.  The muzhik was probably then, as now, only too ready to accept a loan without taking the necessary precautions for repaying it.  The laws relating to debt were terribly severe, and there was no powerful judicial organisation to protect the weak.  If we remember all this, we shall not be surprised to learn that a considerable part of the peasantry were practically serfs before serfage was recognised by law.

So long as the country was broken up into independent principalities, and each land-owner was almost an independent Prince on his estate, the peasants easily found a remedy for these abuses in flight.  They fled to a neighbouring proprietor who could protect them from their former landlord and his claims, or they took refuge in a neighbouring principality, where they were, of course, still safer.  All this was changed when the independent principalities were transformed into the Tsardom of Muscovy.  The Tsars had new reasons for opposing the migration of the peasants and new means for preventing it.  The old Princes had simply given grants of land to those who served them, and left the grantee to do with his land what seemed good to him; the Tsars, on the contrary, gave to those who served them merely the usufruct of a certain quantity of land, and carefully proportioned the quantity to the rank and the obligations of the receiver.  In this change there was plainly a new reason for fixing the peasants to the soil.  The real value of a grant depended not so much on the amount of land as on the number of peasants settled on it, and hence any migration of the population was tantamount to