305 the ownership of serfs and ordered searches to be made for serfs who had escaped from their landlords. In addition, this prikaz was also charged with the task of registering the cases of insolvent debtors handed over to their creditors in order to work off their debts.•'* The personnel of the prikazy—sud'ia, d'iak, pod'iachii—was subordinate to the Chelobitnyi prikaz, or petitions prikaz, which also served as a court of appeals. Anyone who was dissatisfied with a judgement reached by one of the prikazy could appeal to the Chelobitnyi prikaz, but this chancellery was absorbed by the Vladimirskii sudnyi prikaz in 1677.*^ There was no clearly regulated hierarchy of courts with clearly defined areas of jurisdiction, and the Code of 1649 stipulated that cases in which no settlement could be reached in the prikazy should be presented to the tsar and the Duma.' There were no uniform rules for the administration of justice by the prikazy, and thus the court system was characterized by arbitrariness and unpredictability. The extensive legislation promulgated after the issuance of the Code of 1649 was not summarized or gathered together in any codex; instead, it was spread about in the collections of ukazes, the so-called ukaznye knigi, kept by the various prikazy. Nor was there any common registration of legislative acts as they were promulgated; each prikaz kept a record of those ukazes which affected its own activities, but had no knowledge of the legislative acts which were implemented in other prikazy.^ This diffuse, and thus uncertain, system of judicial administration was a serious obstacle to the establishment of an absolutist regime which strove to centralize the various functions of government as much as possible. Effective control over the administration of justice was one important aspect of such an absolutist regime, and therefore one notes changes in the prikaz system toward the end of the seventeenth century that were meant to effect a more uniform administration of justice. In 1699, for example, the Vladimirskii sudnyi prikaz and the Zemskii prikaz were joined together with the Moskovskii sudnyi prikaz, thus providing a greater concentration of the judicial administration.^ In this connection, too, the founding of the Preobrazhenskii prikaz at the end of the seventeenth century should also be mentioned, since it, too, constitute a homogeneous group. Their legal position varied significantly from case to case; see Sobornoe Ulozhenie 1649 g., 412—414. ® UsTiuGOV (1955), 372. ® Ibid., loc.cit.; Amburger, 82. ’ Sobornoe Ulozhenie 1649 g., X:2, p. 96. ^ M. M. BoGOSLOvsKii, Petr I. Materialy dlia biografii (5 v., Leningrad, 1940—1948), IV, 193. ® Ibid., 266; Amburger, 169. 20 - I'eteraou
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