49 hard to bear. Moreover, it is likely that even five peasant households were too few to support a noble cavalryman sufficiently. The service nobility’s chances of reclaiming peasants who fled their estates were very limited. First of all, the magnates could easily hide the fugitives on their far-flung estates, and, secondly, the service nobility did not have the physical resources to oppose the great estate owners, who sometimes even kidnapped peasants from the service estates. The holder of a pomest'e who lost his peasants in this manner received very little help from the slow and ineffective central administration at Moscow. The prospects for finding and returning peasants to their lawful masters were limited by a nine-year statute of limitation, for when that expired the rights of the pomest'e holder to the fugitive peasants expired, too.^^ At the Zemskii sohor in 1642, the dvoriane and deti boiarskie complained of their situation and begged that the “sovereign favor them and order that the statute of limitation {urochnye leta) for their fugitive peasants be set aside.”The service nobility thus sought the right to take back their peasants whenever they found them, regardless of how much time had elapsed since they had run away. The magnates who dominated the government were not, however, willing to meet the demands of the service nobility when it came to this matter, since setting aside the statute of limitation would mean that the peasants were bound in a relationship of serfdom to the estates where they were registered. The magnates wished instead to retain a mobile peasant population, since that social order gave them the opportunity to populate their large estates with the necessary number of laborers. The owners of the large estates, moreover, had greater resources with which to keep peasants on their estates. They could, for example, set up effective systems of control which significantly reduced the peasantry’s opportunities for running away, and they could also impose a number of economic and physical reprisals against peasants and their families if anyone tried to escape. For these reasons, then, the government responded to the petition of the service nobility only by extending the statute of limitations to ten years for peasants who had run away on their own initiative and to fifteen years for those who had been taken away by force. Behind the demands of the service nobility lay not only an economic motive, but, as Richard Hellie has pointed out, a socio-psychological one, as well The nine-year statute of limitations was established in 1636, prior to which time the period was five years; see Hellie, 111—112, 131, Sobornoe Ulozhenie 1649 g., edited by M. N. Tikhomirov &: P. P. Epifanov (Moscow, 1961), 410. Hellie, 239. 4 - Peterson
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