明清時代「歇家」考--訴訟との關わりを中心に

Abstract

This article is a preliminary examination of the of xiejia 歇家, a term that refers both to inns and their proprietors and that often appear in written sources of the Ming and Qing periods, chiefly in regard to lawsuits involving them. The results of this examination can be summarized in the following fashion. First, plaintiffs and defendants in the lawsuits frequently found pettifoggers (legal fixers) 訟師 via the inns. Inns were often run by such pettifoggers, county clerks 胥吏, and county runners 衙役, and thus they functioned as if they were "introduction service centers for the pettifoggers." Although it has not been possible to examine how they came across the inns due to the limitations of the sources, it can be surmised that an appropriate inn was chosen based on consideration of personal finances and without any particular direction from government officials. Second, it is thought that among the inns that sheltered those involved in the lawsuits, there were inns of various ranks, from the luxurious to those of ordinary quality. Ultimately, whatever establishment was chosen to safeguard the lodger's person, the choice was made in large measure on the basis of the lodger's financial capacity. In the worst cases, when the poor could not muster sufficient funds, they were on occasion detained by rural agents and jailed. Third, with the dramatic increase in the number of lawsuits, large numbers of those involved in the cases headed into the cities, and just how the state authorities should deal with them became an important issue. The authorities attempted to manage the problem by binding visitors to the inns using the local neighbor organizations. However, the character of this policy was that of temporary or emergency measure. Fourth, during the Ming and Qing periods, court officials recognized the harm that was caused by the illegal actions of county clerks and runners that accompanied the detention of those involved in the lawsuits and they resorted to makeshift methods to hold them somewhere. This, however, made no progress toward ameliorating the fundamental flaw that was the insufficient compensation for their service, which was in reality the basic problem. Furthermore, the situations should be viewed in the larger context of the population explosion from the mid-Qing onward. There was, however, no increase in the number of government offices at the lowest-level, which also functioned as courts, in the localities, and thus there was no attempt to respond to the increase in lawsuits that accompanied the population explosion. In short, the increasing numbers of people involved in lawsuits had already surpassed the capacity of the local authorities, and it appears that the reality was that they had to rely on the inns even though they were aware of the various negative effects of doing so.