10 - The village and agriculture during the Edo period

Summary

THE SENGOKU VILLAGE LEGACY

Near the end of the Tokugawa period, officials from the shogunate's Finance Office undertook a survey of villages in Musashi and Sagami provinces. During the course of their investigations, the bakufu officials consulted documents preserved by prominent village families that traced their lineages back in time to samurai society of the sixteenth century. Some of the documents from the villages of Sagami had been issued by the Hōjō house of Odawara, and many of the Musashi documents carried the seal of the Uesugi daimyo. Among them were directives requiring the recipient to provide horses for military service, whereas others bestowed fiefs in reward for distinguished service in battle, an indication that some of the villagers' ancestors had served, nearly three centuries earlier, as warriors under the Sengoku daimyo. Other evidence corroborates this notion. In many cadastral survey registers from the early seventeenth century, it is not uncommon to find two persons listed as cultivators (sakunin). Usually the name of a samurai or priest appears first, below which is entered the name of the man who was presumably the actual cultivator, separated by the term bun. From this it is clear that many former samurai who had lived in the villages while serving the Sengoku daimyo as warriors remained on the land in the seventeenth century, thus establishing the lineages revealed in the survey at the end of the Edo period.