Obrok is one of the types of taxes that serfs gave to their master. It was called natural if it was paid in products, monetary if it was money. This tax was collected from what the serfs created, that is, from the “surplus production”. Natural quitrent is various agricultural products (vegetables, grains, wines), artisans' goods. By the 15th century, corvee gradually fades into the background. The quitrent becomes the main requisition.
Roy alty as a tax
I must say that quitrent in Russia appeared in the ninth century and was originally natural. Fixing its size is planned by the 14th century. Subsequently, commodity-money relations play an increasingly important role, and the quitrent gradually begins to be paid in money. Best of all, this practice took root in the lands of Novgorod. When corvee appeared in the 16th century, a kind of stratification took place in the peasant environment: the landlord peasants paid the corvée, and the state and monastic ones paid the quitrent. Since the middle of the 18th century, it has been flourishing more and more luxuriantly due to the growth of market relations. More than half of all peasants paid it in all provinces in the European part of Russia (55% in the non-chernozem part and 26% in the zonechernozem). Thus, this rent is a tax, the amount of which was fixed and paid completely regardless of the opinion and desire of the peasants.
History of quitrent
By the way, it was the cash quitrent that was much more beneficial to the peasants, because it provided them with relative independence and self-sufficiency in managing. Actually, therefore, all attempts by especially cunning landowners to transfer serfs to corvee caused fierce resistance from the population. At the beginning of the 19th century, otkhodnichestvo became more and more popular, serving as the main way of earning money to pay dues, the size of which was about doubling (while peasant plots were shrinking). Gradually, a whole system of mixed payments took shape, which included both quitrent and corvée. In 1861, during the liberation of the peasants, the latter was canceled, replaced by money, and from the beginning of 1863, the peasants began to pay a mandatory ransom. Payments of dues to landowners are a thing of the past. All installment payments thus became redemption.
Another kind of dues
The word "rent" has another definition: renting vacant plots of land, meadows and forests to those who wish. This is what they called - "return in quitrent." Places for catching ermines, squirrels, beekeeping lands, areas for catching fish, wild fields and even cultivated lands, suddenly left without plowmen, were also rented out in such a lease. If the peasants took such empty lands, they received benefits from the state for several years(exemption from all duties, except, in fact, rent, the amount of which was contractual and voluntary). In cities, even places for shops and shopping arcades were rented out in such a lease. Such quitrent is a purely hired payment for the right to use lands and places, moreover, for an exclusively private deal with the state. Thus, the same term denoted two completely different payments. One is a forced filing from management, the other is a voluntary payment for land lease.
