조선후기 매매문서를 통해 본 漢城府 南部 豆毛浦 소재 토지거래 양상

Abstract

In this article, the issues related to the transactions of cultivated lands inside the Hanseong-bu capital city are examined, using land documents from the past regarding the Nam-bu district's Dumo-po area. Inside the capital, cultivation was generally banned, yet cotton and dropwort were rare exceptions. The Dumo-po area was where these two items were grown, namely cotton and vegetable, so we can say that the area was exempted from the above-mentioned ban. The reason for transacting lands in this area were mostly indicated in transaction documents pretty much vaguely, like 'for some reasons(or 'to be used for something')'. The second most frequent reason was because one was poor and had to sell it, or one had to make money to hold a funeral for a family member. And some people even chose to sell their land, only to buy a new one some place else. The entities who were engaged in such transactions were from various social classes, from high-class Yangban figures to people below the Jungin class. Most of them profited from the discrepancy between the selling and buying prices, but they also had their eyes upon the items that were to be harvested from lands which were on the table of transaction. Land transactions continued to take place in the area, and there were no noticeable or particular incidents that could have affected such transactions to change either in nature or in frequency. In most cases people only owned a small amount of land, and were mostly engaged in cultivating special items other then general ones such as rice. Land owners in this region showed the tendency of trying to acquire lands positioned in adjacent locations to the lands they already had, undoubtedly in order to take advantage of a certain connectedness between land units, to ultimately boot efficiency and the level of convenience in their agricultural production. And some people tried to get their hands upon larger units of land compared to other people. In this article, the land situation in terms of ownership and transaction inside the Hanseong capital city is examined through an isolated example, which does not give us enough information regarding the whole picture, the entire situation regarding land transactions in the area. So, not only the inside of the capital but also other areas outside the capital, which can be examined through all the documents and materials that were in custody of the capital city authorities, should be surveyed and analyzed in the near future. Hopefully this article would contribute to the task of bringing new materials that could be helpful in assessing the Hanseong-bu capital situation in terms of land transactions to the surface, and to the task of expanding the boundaries of relevant researches in this area of studies using land-related documents, in the future.