The plan allowed
several of the males of the family to seek work at a distance,
leaving some at home to perform the "_corvee_" (forced labour)
three days a week; but the families quarrelled among themselves,
and the effect of the emancipation has been to split them up into
different households. A considerable portion of the serfs were
not really serfs at all. They were coachmen, grooms, gardeners,
gamekeepers, etc., while their wives and daughters were nurses,
ladies'-maids, and domestic servants. Their number was out of all
proportion to their work, which was always carelessly done, but
there was often great attachment to the family they served. The
serfs proper lived in villages, had houses and plots of land of
their own, and were nominally never sold except with the estate.
The land, however, was under the dominion of the "_Mir_"; they could
neither use it nor cultivate it except according to the communal
obligations.
The outward aspect of a Russian village is not attractive, and
there is little choice in the surrounding country between a wide
grey plain with a distance of scrubby pine forest, or the scrubby
pine forest with distant grey plains.
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