16-17세기 兩班家 노비 가족의 존재 형태- 固城李氏 臨淸閣 分財記 분석을 통하여 -

Abstract

This study set out to analyze the information about the servants and their families found in the Bunjaegi(documents of property inheritance) of noble families in the 16th and 17th century and to illuminate the family structure of servants. More specifically, it examined how servants were owned and inherited by their master families and how servants and their families were maintained in the process. The successors of the Goseong Lee family in Andong multiplied their inherited servants 2.5~3.5 times for 30 years throughout their youth and adulthood from 1540 to 1713. The means of multiplication include inheritance, trade, and natural increase. And it's estimated that there must have been many other means of servant influx not directly depicted in the documents. The servants of the Lee family were confined to the family type focusing on a small number of members. One-member families accounted for 17% or so, and about 30% failed to form a family of the parents and children when including transitional families(or disrupted families) that couldn't form a generation. Even if they formed a family, most of the families existed in the category of monogamous marriage consisting of the parents and single children. The continuance rate of a servant family in the Bunjaegi of the Lee family, whose average documenting interval was 28.8 years, was only 38.2%, which implies that 60% or more of the servant families discontinued in their existence not surviving more than a generation. A couple of reasons can be explored why there were the repetitions of new servant families being registered in the Bunjaegi of a noble family, which lasted for generations, and then disappearing from the documents after only one generation. The study focused on the nature of servant status, which involved constant changes to a master and residence in the process of the master family's inheritance, management, multiplication, and division. Other reasons may include servants' poor concept of family or family ethics and the inflow of independent servants due to the poor management of small farms. In future studies, they need to elaborate on them.