ABSTRACT

The social system developed by the Tokugawa Shoguns in the first half of the seventeenth century was designed to last. Each individual had his proper place as a member of a family – usually, since most younger sons managed to get adopted, of a long-established family. Each family had its proper place in a graded hierarchy knit together by a network of feudal obligations. At the top, the Shogunal family of Tokugawa overlords claimed the allegiance of the fief-owning lords who ranked at the Tokugawa palace according to the size of their fief revenues and the length and nature of their families’ services. Each feudal lord in turn had his own samurai retainers, again precisely ranked – sometimes in more than thirty separate categories – according to service and the size of their families’ hereditary rice stipends. Each cultivating peasant owned a traditional right to till a portion of his fief-lord’s land, and owed a traditional duty to pay heavy rice dues for the privilege. The old Imperial court at Kyoto and the religious foundations had their own smaller, partly independent but similar systems. Only the small world of the merchant and the urban artisan preserved any great fluidity.