Nizhny Novgorod Crown Villages of the 16–17th Century
Authors:   Institute of Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Sokolova Natalia V. 
Published: March 2021

Studying the Nizhny Novgorod crown villages of the 16-17th century allows to get a more complete understanding of one of the main categories of land ownership in the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Age, of crown land ownership and economy, and on the economic situation and social status of the Russian agrarian social stratum usually denoted in historiography as “crown peasants”. A long, painstaking identification of sources, their priority over interpretations existing in the literature, a multilevel, systematic analysis of a complex of various historical documents, supplemented by retrospective mapping, led to a revision of some well-established and seemingly unshakable views on the history of the crown villages in the Nizhny Novgorod Volga region. The introduction of the ancient Nizhny Novgorod scribal books by M.A. Zhedrinsky and scribe Karp Ignatiev (1533) into the scientific circulation revealed some local features of the formation of the so-called crown volosts, which are considered by the author within the framework of the grand prince “service organization” concept. A certain conservation of the mechanisms inherent to the “service organization” in this territory, apparently, was due to its border position. The frontier largely determined the main tendencies and specifics of agrarian settlement on the grand prince / tsar (later — crown) lands of the Nizhny Novgorod Volga region before its transformation into a “hinterland” region. The influence of the frontier should be studied in historical retrospective, since it was during the period under review that the border was significantly moved to the east. If earlier its proximity that was the main factor of agrarian settlement, now the soil-geographical and natural-climatic conditions, which differ in different parts of the Balakhninsky, Kurmyshsky and Nizhny Novgorod districts, came to the fore. A representative description of the Nizhny Novgorod crown villages required a comprehensive consideration of a number of interrelated problems of the crown land tenure and economy. The most significant are issues related to the nature of land ownership, changes in the composition of the fund of grand prince / tsar / crown lands and methods of their use, the structure and functioning of the crown economy, transformations in the management system of crown estates, forms of rent extraction, as well as the peculiarities of the relationship of the crown prikaz with various social groups living in the Nizhny Novgorod crown lands - peasants, bobs, “serving men”, “serving Mordovians”. The analysis of sources shows that the so-called crown economy in the 17th century ensured the satisfaction of the needs of not only (and not so much) the royal family, but the state and the ruling class as a whole, i.e. it was not exclusively domain. A deeper understanding of the social nature of the crown villages, the specifics of economic life and the peculiarities of the social organization of the crown peasants became an important result of the study. A mass peasant colonization of the region, which became relatively safe after the annexation of Kazan and Astrakhan, led to a gradual erasure of differences in status between, on the one hand, the lower stratum of the grand prince “service organization” (unprivileged “servants under the court”, beekeepers, salters and woodworkers), “service Mordovians” and peasants on quitrents, and on the other - peasants-farmers of the old grand-prince villages and the “newcomers” who moved there from the uezds of the Central and Northwestern Russia. Prerequisites were made for their convergence and amalgamation in the seventeenth century into a single category of the crown peasantry. An important consequence of peasant agricultural settlement was the expansion of the territory with a polyethnic population, for the most part composed of the Russians and the Mordovians-Erzya. The study of the various categories of the rural population, their living conditions and the specifics of their economy, made it possible to fill our understanding of the peasant life (and, more broadly, the rural mir) of the Nizhny Novgorod Volga region of the 16-17th century with concrete content, historical everyday life. Contrary to the point of view expressed in historiography, pogosts as social and religious centers of crown volosts existed throughout the period under consideration both in the Trans-Volga region and on the right bank of the Oka and Volga. Sources related to the territories of the Nizhny Novgorod Volga region provide a unique opportunity to trace the processes of the formation of a obschina-volost here. In the 17th century, the rural “world” on the Uzola river is formed, as, probably, in other places of the Nizhny Novgorod frontier, from “service beekeepers” and migrant peasants, for a long time continuing to remain an open social structure, open to non-agricultural elements. Its gradual transformation into a peasant community-volost, homogeneous in its social composition, takes place in the second half of the 16th century. The territorial prevalence of obschina in the Nizhny Novgorod crown estates in the 16-17th century is certain. Peasant self-government, usually hardly perceptible in the sources of this period, is recorded in the Nizhny Novgorod crown villages at the level of both the volost and the rural obschina. In general, the genesis of the peasant obschina-volost in the Nizhny Novgorod Volga region was typologically close to that known from the sources on the Russian North and Siberia. The observations and conclusions of this study obviously outgrow the local level, organically fitting into the all-Russian context, opening up new opportunities for studying the history of an agrarian society which Russia was in the late Middle Ages and the early Modem Age.