Книги писцовые.

Scribe books. From the 15th-17th centuries, scribal books in the proper sense and related scribal (written) books of a wide variety of names have come down to us, such as: census, survey, measurement, inventory, feeding, sentinel, seasoning, construction, payment, etc. 5 (N.N. Ogloblin has especially many of these book titles in his “Review of Columns and Books of the Siberian Order of 1592-1768”, Moscow 1895). Scribe books in the proper sense are called serf documents on the ownership of land, land and other real estate, compiled by order of the government, in order to obtain information and grounds for taxation. One cannot but agree with the assumption of some scientists that these books began to be compiled from the beginning of the Russian state, from the time when scribes appeared in Rus'. Although scribal books from such an early period have not reached us, their existence is assumed in the form of lists of princely possessions at the beginning of the formation of the Russian state and especially during the division of Rus' into appanages. In the 13th century, the description and surveying of lands was an official institution in each principality and the census carried out by the Tatars to collect tribute was done at the direction of the Russian princes; the Tatars only strengthened the custom of our princes to draw up inventories of their lands and income from them (Nevolin). Until the 16th century scribe books differed from place to place because different places had different measures of space; Thus, the Moscow “plows” did not fit the Novgorod “crush” and other earthen measures in other regions. Uniformity in books was introduced by Moscow scribes in the 16th century, when the government clearly and clearly realized the benefit of a systematic description of lands and began to compile books periodically to collect (on the basis of this description) people for service and various kinds of government fees. The first large “general” census in the Moscow state was carried out in 1538–1547; then new conquests and annexations of lands to the Moscow state caused new descriptions, new compilation of scribe books; this was the case in 1550–1580, 1620–1630, 1646–1648 (house census), 1676–1678, 1710, 1717. etc. Thus, the scribe books that have come down to us embrace three eras of the state: 1) the second half of the 16th century. - the reign of Ivan the Terrible, 2) the last years of the first and first second half of the 17th century. - the reign of Mikhail Feodorovich and Alexei Mikhailovich, when the scribe books that were lost in the enemy invasion and in the great Moscow fire on May 3, 1626 were resumed, and 3) from 1680 until the end of the century, when they began to simultaneously describe all the lands of the state. Scribe books for the indicated years are stored in the Moscow archives of the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where the former Patrimonial Archives moved. They may be found in monastery archives and in the archives of abolished government places in different cities. Copies of them are available in St. Petersburg. Imperial Public Library. Many of them were printed by the Imperial Archaeographic Commission, Imperat. Russian Geographical Society, Society of Russian History and Antiquities, Vilna Archaeographical Commission, etc. When the time came for compiling the scribal books, the scribes from the Local Prikaz received an “instruction” 6 and a copy from the previous scribal book “addition”. Scribes were sent for the most part in groups of several people, headed by some noble okolnik, steward, governor, etc. (there were “big scribes” and just “scribes”). They convened residents and took evidence of ownership, demanding confirmation either from previous scribe books, or from acts indicating the right of ownership of land and property. The scribe books contain detailed inventories of cities and counties, i.e. a) everything that made up the city - its serf, military, government and private buildings, monasteries and churches with their utensils, squares, rows, shops, industrial establishments and income from them, city lands, waters, forests, the urban population of all classes and ranks, and b) everything that made up the county - settlements, villages, hamlets, repairs and in each of them landowners, peasants and peasants courtyards with their inhabitants, churches, monasteries, as well as lands, forests, meadows, hayfields, wastelands and wastelands, indicating their owners and explaining the quantity and quality of land - arable, good, average and poor. The scribe's boundary books describe the boundary characteristics of the properties, indicate exactly the names and nicknames of the owners, as well as the deeds of ownership and the amount of taxes and duties. In a word, they give a complete and extremely interesting picture of cities, suburbs, villages, etc., that is, of the entire land ownership in ancient Russia from the 15th century to Peter the Great inclusive. Honor and praise to our ancestors, who left us rich material for historical, legal and economic research. Already from what has been said, the significance of scribe books for the present time is clear. They give a picture of the social state of our fatherland in the 15th-18th centuries, and therefore are extremely important both for various scientific studies about ancient Russia, and for practical information about land holdings. As state acts, they serve as proof of ownership of certain real estate or of peasants living on a certain piece of land, proof of the noble origin of the owners and their heirs; in disputed land cases they are of decisive importance. They are primary sources for Russian history, because they contain materials of paramount importance for the history of the tax classes of Russian society, for the history of dioceses, churches, and monasteries. They contain historical-statistical, historical-ethnographic and colonization information, the number of population, its trades, occupations, wealth, poverty, the amount of land in a particular department, the transfer of ownership from one to another, the expansion and contraction of land plots. They resurrect the past system and way of life of our ancestors. History, geography, statistics, topography, metrology, agriculture, administration, financial law, legal and church-historical sciences - all receive materials for themselves from scribal books. Quite rightly, these books occupy the first exceptional place in the Moscow archives, due to their significant quantity, the variety of data they contain, covering most of today’s Russia, and their enormous importance for researchers in various fields. The collection of books, however, is not complete - there are gaps and, unfortunately, never filled; however, more than 200 cities with their districts have their own descriptions in the scribe books that have come down to us from the end of the 15th to the beginning of the 18th centuries. The disadvantages of scribal books include the fact that not all descriptions in them are accurate. Books need critical study; in order to obtain accurate material from them, you need to take several historical moments and compare them according to scribal books in all particulars. This should always be remembered. In addition, they contain many conventions that can be debated. It is necessary to take into account the mistakes of scribes and even their abuses - sloppiness, arbitrariness, corruption, etc. For all these books, it seems, one name may be suitable - “order books”. The “scribal orders” of 1631 and 1686 are known.