李朝土地制度史 硏究

조선시대 토지제도의 변천과 토지의 공·사유 체계를 연구한다.

This paper is to study the changing process of the land system of the Yi dynasty. The Yi dynasty nationalized the land as the previous Koryo dynasty had owned all the land for herself, but this system could not be well maintained during the Yi Dynasty. The feudal Yi dynasty classified the land in the nation into public and private estates for ecnomic and financial purposes. The former is owned by the government, both central and local, military posts, public schools and other public agences, and thus these organizations collected the crops as rent and tax from the tenants according to a fixed rate, and the tenants, being serfdom, were subject to the arbitary decision of the Yangban class.

The private estates were the Land assigned to Yangban aristcrats, the royal palace, the private schools and the Buddhist temples etc. During the ealier period of the dynasty, these private landlords, for their livings and for the management of the schools and temples, collected the rent in the manner that government had imposed taxed upon the tenants, and them for their own tax they paid a fifteenth of the collected rent to the government.

The privately owned estates kept expanding in spite of the efforts on the part of the government to break off the expansion in the early period of the dynasty, and thus in 1465 King Sejo decreed an ordiance to the effect that officials in the government might hold land, and later, under King Song Jong, even the officials were not granteted to collect any rent from their land for themselves, and thus the rent was exclusively collected by the government, and thus the owners of the land were paid later through the government.

After the Imjin war, new patterns of landholding and taxes were gradually emerging out of the dynasty, and government offices and military posts expanded their private lands, and on the other hand the Yangban ariscrats, new merchant class and royal families expanded rapidly their private estates which was called Nongjang. The owners of Nongjang exploited their sub-tenants a half of the harvest from the land as rent. Thus the principle of the state-owned system was almost collapsed at later period of the dynasty.