著者

平井 上総

出版者

公益財団法人史学会

雑誌

史學雜誌 (ISSN:00182478)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.115, no.1, pp.五四-七九, 2006-01-20

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The cadastral surveys conducted between 1587 and 1598 by the Chosokabe Family of Tosa Province are contained in ledgers recording results from the whole province and entitled Chosokabe Chikencho長宗我部地検帳(hereafter, Chikencho); however, what they say about those who directly conducted the surveys has yet to be examined. The present article is an attempt to fill that gap by clarifying how these surveyors were organized in terms of power and authority. An investigation of the signatures affixed to the Chikencho by the surveyors reveals 1) The inclusion of the signer's official capacity above each signature. 2) Some included handwritten seals (kao花押) and some did not. 3) There were between scribes, accountants and police agents tended to appear somewhere between the first and third signatures, while those who did the actually measuring (tsueuchi杖打) mostly appeared toward the end of the signature order. 4) Each surveyor worked in a specific capacity, despite differences in group, region and time. 5) Surveyors tended to have little interest or relationship to the regions they were measuring. The research to date has been of the opinion that those who signed the ledgers were groups of supervisors; however, the activity of each signer was base on a specific duty, and there is nothing to indicate those duties were supervisory in nature. Concerning the order in which the signatures appear, members of the Chosokabe Family and their retainers tend to appear either at the very beginning or the very end. This seems to indicate that the Chosokabe regime was dispatching its high ranking personnel to survey areas under the control of former local proprietors of similar daimyo大名status, in order to minimize any disgruntlement on the part of the latter. When comparing the ledgers according to the three eras in which were created-Tensho天正, Bunroku文禄and Keicho慶長-from the Bunroku era (1592) on, the number of functionaries (bugyo奉行) in the Chosokabe government dispatched on surveys doubled. Those who did the actually measuring (tsueuchi) tended to be members of the Chosokabe family, other feudal lords, their retainers and members of influential religious institutions, which indicates that tsueuchi was a duty connected to vassalage. From the above investigation, the author concludes that towards the last decade of the sixteenth century, although the Chosokabe Family was making compromises to appease other feudal lords within Tosa Province, it seems to also have been tightening control over extended (branch) family members and their retainers in a move towards centralization.