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or that landowner or through measures enabling apeasant' black' canton to prevent a drpp in its taxpayingcapacity owing to peasants leaving the canton withoutfinding substitutes. The cadastral surveys and 'inquiryregisters' are extended in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies and those inscribed in them become knownasi old-dwellers,' though the conception of 'old' isvariable and uncertain. They were probably a relativelyprosperous section of the peasantry and their attachmentwas all the more valuable. Gradually between1550 and 1650 this becomes the rule and the status of' old settler' hereditary. By then ' the writer,' who drawsup the innumerable reports, inquests, and registers thatare demanded by the government, has become a terriblefigure in the eyes of the common folk: to be ' writtendown' means trouble, obligations, some form of attachment.Much of that same hundred years was a time of' dissension,' of' sedition.' The wars and violent strugglesof the last twenty years (1565-84) of Ivan the Terrible'sreign and of the first two decades of the seventeenthcentury reduced much of the centre of Muscovy todesolation. Villages were abandoned and land revertedto waste. The pressure of taxation was increasing.The peasants made off to the south or 'commended'themselves, seeking protection and economic supportfrom the more powerful and bigger landowners. Thehunt for hands became more and more intensive, andmore and more limitations on free movement wereimposed in the interest of the small and middling landedclass, the men with the service fiefs, the backbone ofthe army. They had taken a large share in the expulsionof the Poles and the founding of the Romanov dynasty(1613), and in the next dozen years they reaped theirreward in new land grants (cf. p. 83).The free peasants, for the most part, had had thecustomary right of departure from landowners each yearat the Russian equivalent of Michaelmas, provided theirdues had been met. That right had been recognizedby the codes of 1407 and 1550, but thereafter it becamechallenged, especially by the lesser landowners, who could