The land rent established by the feudal lords in relation to serfs, the gratuitous forced labor of a peasant dependent on the master, and with his own tools, is what corvée is. It existed in Western Europe from the 8th-9th centuries, after three hundred years it was gradually replaced by a quitrent, by the 14th-15th centuries it had almost completely disappeared. In Russia, corvee appeared during the reign of capital Kiev.
Background: what is corvée
The most widely spread corvore in the 16th and 17th centuries. The abolition of serfdom in 1861 did not fully release the peasants, the temporarily liable laborers worked as sharecroppers. Legally, corvee was abolished in 1882, but actually existed until 1917 in the form of mining. However, the end of corvée cannot probably be considered irrevocable. It is believed that Russia never lived without serfdom, and that it was corvé in Russia that ensured the country's prosperity.
Comparison of corvee and quitrent
Relief of serfdom was facilitated by a quitrent: payments made once and for all, but since there was no system of measures and weights everywhere, the bar was as busy as possible: for example, a quitrent rooster had to be so well-fed and strong that it could jump on a perch without a run, cheese should to be so strong that it doesn’t break from a blow against the wall ... More often than not, even the bar, having fun at the balls of Moscow and St. Petersburg, was courageous, but the clerks, whose arbitrariness was insufferable and by which most of the proceeds were simply appropriated.
So what is corvée? The work of both serfs and temporarily liable peasants for the landowner. What did the peasants receive for this extremely hard and exhausting work? For leasing part of the land of this landowner, most likely - inconvenience, bumps and swamps. The landlords were obliged to give the peasants a piece of land for temporary use, but this land remained the property of the landowner and never, in any future, belonged to the peasants. On the contrary, before the "redemption transaction" the peasant had to carry out duties. The terms for the repurchase were not established, therefore precisely such dependent relationships gradually lost their “temporality” and became long-term. Forms and sizes of duties were established by the local "Regulations", which indicated two types of duties - quitrent and corvee.
Forms and types
Barshchina in Russia in every possible way changed its forms and types. The size of the service was calculated from the size of the allotment of the peasant. In payment for the use of the land, both men, women, and even children served their own household tools: they had to plow, sow, harvest, harvest hay, berries, mushrooms, and in general fully provide all the landowner's needs.
Recall that serfs did not have the right to manage their own lives, they were sold and bought, executed and merciful, and also forced to work like ordinary cattle. The peasant's yard at any moment could be relocated to a new place, and already cultivated lands, watered for many years afterwards by a peasant family, were selected under the arable land.
conclusions
Nevertheless, the peasants loved their land very much. Already in the first half of the 16th century, at the source of serfdom, it was clear that only coercion or calamity could tear off the peasants from their allotments. Or peasant revolt, for example, "meaningless and merciless", when the patience of the Russian people was overflowing. That's what corvée is.