SUDEBNIK 1589: FEATURES OF THE LEGAL REGULATION OF PEASANT LAND OWNERSHIP AND LAND USE IN NORTH-WESTERN RUSSIA

Abstract

The article is devoted to the legal review of the monument of law of the last quarter of the XVI century – the Sudebnik of 1589, namely, its norms on peasant land ownership and land use. The article analyzes the legislative regulation of land relations in the north-western lands of Russia with the help of historical-legal and comparative-legal methods. To summarize the results of the study, the authors also considered the norms of the Judicial Code of 1550, which regulate the above-mentioned circle of public relations, but are applied in the central regions of Russia, where serfdom existed and actively developed. The comparative characteristics of the legal regulation of land relations among the peasantry in these legal monuments allow us to assert the interdependence of the rights of the Russian landowner on the territorial factor. The authors come to the conclusion that the peculiarity of the legal regulation of land relations in the Judicial Code of 1589 was interconnected and mutually conditioned by the specifics of the social and social structure of Pomerania, on the territory of which its norms were distributed, and where, unlike the central regions of the Moscow Kingdom, the peasant population lived free from serfdom.