英文摘要 |
The Cultivated Judgments is a collection of late Ming civil and penal judgments written by Chang K'en-t'ang, during his term as magistrate of Chün County, Ta-ming Prefecture in northern Chihli (1629-1634). As reflected in the Cultivated Judgments, civilian and military factions in Chün County were prone to come into dispute, due in part to their shared residency of the area, in conjunction with the many local garrison lands owned by the Guards and Battalions (wei-so). The distribution of wei-so garrison lands in the adjoining regions of Hopei, Honan, and Shansi are all strikingly similar, thus the legal cases presented in the Cultivated Judgments may be taken as representative of like cases in those areas. Study of the cases in the Cultivated Judgments that are related to the wei-so has revealed that in the late Ming the military services of the wei-so in the above areas were seldom performed hereditarily by the male descendents of the original military households. Instead, the services were generally passed to the female-households who inherited the military status of their heirless fathers, tenants, mercenaries, or military households of other wei-so that had extra males. By and large, those servicemen, the actual landowners, leased out their lands while attending to their military duties. On average, the servicemen would only return home once every few years, and since the mortgage or sale of garrison lands was forbidden by law, they would normally agree to lease out the property for several years at a time but required advance payment of the rent in full. Occasionally, the lease was renewed on an annual basis; the nature of the latter agreement greatly resembles that of tenancy. Litigations between military servicemen and civilians were in principle jointly adjudicated by local civil officials and wei-so military officers. The rulings recorded in the Cultural Judgments, show that Chang K'en-t'ang and his military counterparts joined together in judiciary practice, and also reveal Chang's keen insight into the boundaries of the powers of military and civilian authorities in military-civilian disputes. In addition to the authority bestowed upon Chang by the system itself, his administrative capabilities as an individual and the bold nature of his character explain his active engagement in auditing garrison lands and substantiating the wei-so roster. |