조선시대 分財文記의 작성과정과 그 특징 - 草文書‧原文書‧複文書의 제작과 수취를 중심으로 -

Abstract

This study set out to investigate the sociological meanings of preparing and acquiring Bunjaegi, which refer to property inheritance documents during Joseon. Preparation of Bunjaegi is based on a process of the inheritee dictating the specifications of the Bunjae and the heir or someone else writing them down. Hidden in the process are, however, a couple of steps in which the primary documents(草文書) is made up and refined into the completed documents(原文書). There are two types of the primary documents; one is the draft -type documents, which becomes the completed documents through refinement; and the other is a sort of list of property completely different from it, serving as the script to prepare the completed documents. Every family has their own processes of preparing Bunjaegi according to the ways they managed property, in which process different types of the primary documents were created. That is, the way Bunjaegi was prepared contained the content about how the subjects of inheritance operated the concerned property. Under the assumption that Bunjaegi was issued along with property inheritance, the receiving Bunjaegi was regarded as a right to an equal heir. Unlike such a common idea, however, there were often cases in which the number of heirs and the number of Bunjaegi did not match. It is thus estimated that the receiving qualification of Bunjaegi was dependent upon the invisible hierarchy among the heirs and that it was highly likely that the sons and the legitimate sons would have a preferential right to Bunjaegi to the sons-in-laws and the bastard sons, respectively. As a matter of fact, when the plural documents(複文書) discovered in the house of the eldest son and that of the son-in-law contained the records about the individual share instead of the overall distribution, the son-in-law would be given only the document containing the records about the daughter(son-in-law)'s share and the eldest the records about the shares of the second eldest son as well as the eldest one himself. It is probably because such a heterogeneous Bunjaegi was required to allow the eldest son to inherit and manage the property of the head family unlike the son-in-law who inherited property only once. Just like the changes to property inheritance demonstrated by the content of Bunjaegi have sociological meanings, the differences among the families and the hierarchy among the heirs demonstrated in the process of preparing, issuing, and receivng Bunjaegi also claim important significance. It is required to read the intentions of those who prepared the Bunjaegi through the ideological system revealed in the process of preparing and receving Bunjaegi rather than the cases of property inheritance in Bunjaegi.