戦国時代の菅浦 : 供御人と惣続論

Abstract

The township of Suganoura now forms a part of Nishiasai-mura, a village in the Rural District of Ika-gun, Shiga Prefecture. It has been well-known for its massive medieval archives ready for the historians and its wellestablished communal organization which is traceable in these materials. My essay, Kugonin and So in the History of Suganoura" which was submitted to the Miscella-nea Kiotiensia in cellebration of the semicentennial of the Faculty of Letters of our University was an attempt to describe the scope, the population and the industrial activities of this little community together with the incessant disputes with the neighbouring township of Ohura over the tenant right of the borderland Hisashimorokawa, so the niche of land was called, lies between the two villages and was the only place where the peasants of Suganoura could have carried on rice-cropping. Though the issues were always at stake, there is some evidence for believing that the land had formerly belonged to Ohura, not to Suganoura in the not too distant Past. Furthermore there is evidence of engrossing of the land by Suganoura in 1295 and the villagers of Ohura violated the landmarks and appealed to the Government. Suganoura, on the other hand, attempted every possible couter-attack and meanwhile made the land in dispute common to all the villagers, dividing it equally among them. This led to the growth of a solid community on the part of Suganoura and to the making of the powerful jury (SO) in the fourteenth century. The jurymen looked upon the tenures of the land as inviolable and prohibited the sellers of the tenements to attend the jury in 1346. Moreover the villagers plotted against the neighbouring township with the aid of the feudal retinues who were banded together near the village. Thus they succeeded to perpetuate the right, but in doing so they became more and more dependent on the elders of the village, especially in managing to repudiate the challenges of Ohura. Here the Elder Seikuro will be worth while to be remembered as a distinguished figure who could find a sound solution for the disputes from 1445 onward and again of 1461. By his efforts the issues which at first seemed fatal to the village turned to be a windfall. In the midst of turmoils he died. It was in 1467, when he bequeathed his property to the village jury, not to the temple, for the salv ation of his soul. The present paper for this volume of the Transactions of the Faculty is, first and foremost, a continuation of my foregoing essay and an attempt to enlarge it by illustrating every aspect of the activities of the inhabitants. First of all, I want to point out the growth of popular movements toward the turn of the fifteenth century as are shown in the peasant revolts during the civil wars of Ohnin and Bunmei. They revolted against the financial burdens and asked the benevolent Government (tokusei) above them. Especially the bad harvest and the wide-spread pestilence since 1460 devastated the whole country. This devastation is a well-known fact, but the immediate effects of the plague still await to be estimated in the light of evidences which I hobe to provide from the materials of this village. The verdict based on this study is emphatically catastrophic : the decrease of the population and the change of tenure. The peasants who were unable to plough their tenements owing to the family mortality surren dered them to the lords. The balance of power which existed between lord and peasants was thus abruptly changed. The picture shown here is an Eastern countpart of the Black Death. Secondly, the impression gained from the study is the subsiding of the communal activities from the dawn of the sixteenth century. It is noticeable that the village jury was running into debt unable to pay the rent. Characteristic of the fifteenth century was the energetic aspiration of the jury resulted from the communal solidarity. It was based on the appropriaton of the land of Hisashimorokawa and al