I. General

Peasant liberation is a collective term for a variety of measures taken between 1777 and 1817 to break up the traditional lifelong bonds of seigniory and serfdom; they gave the peasants personal freedom, eliminating socage and domestic service, abolishing the hereditary subserviency that tied the peasant to the land and transforming a portion of the estate cultivated under feudal tenancy into the private property of the peasants. At the same ¶ time, th…