고려시대 성씨 확산의 동인과 성씨의 기능

Abstract

The surname ‘Wang(王),’ which was the last name of the Goryeo royal family, was not only a surname of the founder king Taejo Wang Geon’s direct descendants (the sons), but also the surname of figures who were the descendants of Wang Geon’s ‘daughters.’ Such situation was enabled by the fact that Wang Geon’s male and female descendants continued to marry each other for generations. As a result, this surname itself came to reflect a rather ‘complete’ lineage and a consciousness of such lineage, than a one-sided, patrilineal consciousness.BR Documents regarding governmental officials living in the Capital included their ‘Surnames’ by law, but in general the way surnames spreaded throughout the society and were embraced by the people did not feature any particular, for example patrilineal, consciousness in motion. There were no fixed factions established through or represented by a ‘single’ surname in the local Hyang’ri class. Only a handful of local Hyang’ri figures who were bestowed a military rank from the king branded surnames, yet such practice only became a widely popular one later during the Military regime period. These surnames, which had only been cultural and administrative requirements with no particular attachments to either patrilineal or matrilineal relatives, later did become a thing that was inherited to posterior generations through the patrilineal line, only because the political privileges of a society’s senior class (using surnames) were delivered usually from male ancestors to male descendants.BR The lineage consciousness of class members using surnames had been generally bilateral in nature, to the extent of the state sometimes ordering an individual to change its original surname to the surname of its mother. The reason that patrilineal relatives enjoyed relatively higher merits in Eumseo(蔭敍) institution was only because ‘father and son’ was the most basic pair in terms of succeeding or inheriting political assets. The Eumseo practice in cases of the meritorious leaders’ descendants was essentially a male-oriented institution by design, but only because such meritorious figures were usually males, and not because it was an institution of a society with a lineage sensibility which differentiated patrilineal and non-patrilineal relatives or viewed the former as more important than the latter. The surnames of the Goryeo period reflected a bilateral, comprehensive lineage consciousness.