Within his own commune, too, whether rural or urban, he enjoyed a certain administrative autonomy which has taxed the sagacity of quite recent historians, and the nature of which I shall have to indicate more precisely when I reach a more detailed study of the organization of the country.
Finally, as I have just reminded my readers, these peasants were not all husbandmen. The documents of the period frequently divide them into two classes: labourers (pakhatnyié) and villagers (dereviénskiié). What are these villagers who do not dig? In this category we find men registered as millers, tailors, shoemakers. Here again is manifested, once again, that lack of the corporative spirit, that confusion of social atoms, which, save in the Church—and even there we shall soon have to go back to the subject—keeps the national organization in the outline stage. If many country peasants do not till the soil, the towns hold many who are husbandmen. In country places the peasants of this first-named category often, though the fact is disputed (see Monsieur Diakhonov's 'View of the History of the Rural Populations in Russia,' 1889, p. 209, and Serguiéiévitch's 'Judicial Antiquities,' 1903, iii., 133, etc.), belonged to the mysterious class of the bobyli, landless peasants, occasionally tillers, but not on their own account, and in that case agricultural labourers, but trade labourers often, and, oftenest of all, vagabonds pure and simple, lost in the mass of outlaws of every kind—Cossacks, wandering jugglers, beggars, and thieves. Those who would differentiate them from the tiaglyié—qualified peasants—are mistaken. Except in the case of lands enjoying a temporary or perpetual, but always an exceptional, freedom by virtue of special charters, the tiaglo (from tianout, to draw, to drag a load) is the universal rule of the period. Everybody pays in some fashion, everywhere, and on everything, and the bobyli, who pay taxes or imposts on the houses they inhabit or the trades they follow, are no exception. They owe nothing for the soil they till, because they till for others, and in this lies the sole difference between them and the ordinary husbandman.
Whether imposed on them by some misfortune or voluntarily accepted, nothing binds them to this comparatively humiliating condition in life. They can always leave it as soon as they find means to do so, and share the common rights once more. In the sixteenth century the proportion of bobyli in the country parts was from 4·2 to 41·6 per cent., the lowest percentage occurring on the lands held by monastic establishments. In the following century, and under the influence of the tumult into which the disputes over the inheritance of the Terrible cast the country, these figures will be quite upset.
In a more and more floating population the monasteries
