DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

310 CHANGES IN FEUDAL STRUCTURE [9.3
building during his sojourn. During the excessive rains of the three months he would
not travel thus. Constantly in his travelling-palace he would provide choice meats for
men of all sorts of religions. The Buddhist priests would be perhaps a thousand, the
brahmins five hundred.” (Bed 1.215).
The combined survivals of the Arth, Asokan, and Ms.
economies are noteworthy. When feudalism became stronger (as in
landlord-dominated China), the character of rulers and people changed
too. With later feudalism from below, the smaller merchant was squeezed
by innumerable restrictions and imposts. The statement that the
cultivator rested a while after his seasonal labour implies a free
peasantry, without serfdom or landlords oppression. The ominous spread
of closed village economy is proved by the reference to barter trade
without coinage. No coins of Harsa are in fact known (except two
low-grade issues of doubtful ascription), which contrast with the
substantial Mauryan and Kisatrapa hoards of silver coins, and the
prolific Gupta gold coinage including gold coins of Narendragupta-
Sasanka who held the rich trade ports of Bengal. Hansa’s was the
last, great, personally administered, centralized empire. Thereafter,
kingdoms were smaller, and the class of feudal landowners — in fact, if
not in theory — grew in number, power and importance to be the
intermediary stratum between king aixi subjects, to be the real basic
class of the state. [After this period, the later feudal peasant was under
increasing constraint, whether because of higher land-rent, taxes and
less paying land, or the corvee and force used by the barons.
Indeed, these two were symptoms of a common root cause. Inevitably,
later, rigorous feudal judges started to flog and torture the people
they were to examine, while control of the land was more and more in
the hands of those whose main function was to squeeze out the
maximum taxes but pass on a minimum to the higher authority.] Hsiuen
Chuang does not tell us what proportion of land was held directly by the
crown, nor what forms of land-ownership and ground-rent prevailed on
the rest of the land. Harsa’s mobile palace and the swarming entourage
have been attested by his court-poet Bana (Har. 58-70; 207-213).
The Chinese pilgrim does not mention Harsa’s feats of dramaturgy
(though his successor I-tsing did so), and special patronage of