DYNAMICS OF THE SOCIAL COMPOSITION OF THE POPULATION OF BLACK EARTH IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE XVII - THE FIRST THIRD OF XVIII (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE ELETSKY UEZD)

Abstract

The study of society, especially the border frontier spaces, is an urgent topic in modern domestic and foreign historiography. The article presents a set of archival documents from the collections of the Russian state archive of ancient acts (RGADA), as well as published documents, such mass sources as scribal and census books of counties in the South of Russia. The main purpose of the study was to try to study the social composition of the population of the Chernozem region within the administrative borders of the Yelets uyezd in the XVII-early XVIII centuries. We used both traditional research methods and modern ones, such as the method of mathematical statistics. The main conclusions of the research are summarized in the following theses. The number of the peasantry throughout the XVII century was significantly less than the share of the landowner population, in addition, the peasants were distributed on the estate lands very unevenly. The growth of the peasantry was connected with the penetration of large land ownership in the Yeletsky uyezd at the beginning of the XVIII century. The evolution of the social composition of the population of Yelets uyezd in the second half XVII- first third XVIII century allowed to establish the specificity of the regional development, when the city Supreme authority supported small serving people to the detriment of the Posad population until the end of the Northern war, which undoubtedly hindered the economic development of the region. In rural areas, as early as the 1650s, the corporations of the boyar children began to collapse, and they were replaced by two groups of the population: large landowners and small proprietors, who were close to the peasantry in their economic situation.

Keywords

• xvii в
• service population
• peasantry
• everyday life
• yelets district
• xvii century