Problem of the origin of clerks and assistant clerks in 14th - 17th centuries in modern historiography

In the modern historical science the traditional approaches to the problem of the social origin of clerks and assistant clerks, set before 1917 and developed in the works of the Soviet period researchers are still used. I. Gralya devoted a monograph to the activity of a clerk, Ivan Mikhailovich Viskovaty. The author came to a conclusion that most part of clerks come from the nobility. Representatives of gentry and mean nobility became assistant clerks. Ju.G. Alekseyev tracked the initial stages of evolution of the social origin of the grand-ducal clerks in the second half of the 14th century: from non-free servants to paper workers who have already found freedom, but yet not a part of children of the boyars. Approximately from the first half of the 15th century the researcher traces the beginning of gradual transformation of clerks from servants into feudal lords. In 2001 in Volgograd State University N.V. Rybalko defended a PhD thesis ''Russian Mandate Bureaucracy in the Time of Troubles of the Beginning of the 17th Century''. The study of the social origin of clerks and assistant clerks was one of the tasks in the work. N.V. Rybalko came to a conclusion that in the Time of Troubles the share of noble family representatives among clerks was from 28% (clerks of the cities in the time of Vasily Shuisky) to 38% (in the First Home Guard), and among assistant clerks -from 2% ( in the time of Tsar Vasily) to 3% (in the time of Tsar Boris). D.V. Liseytsev's monograph is among the most recent works on the problem of our interest. In this rather thorough work a part of Chapter 7 is devoted to the question of the social origin of clerks. D.V. Liseytsev's general conclusion about the sources of formation of clerks of the period of the Time of Troubles is that about 90% of the clerks of the first two decades of the 17th century were noble by origin. The other 10% was made up by the representatives of merchants. It corresponds to S.K. Bogoyavlensky's calculations by which in the first third of the 17th century the number of nobles among clerks fluctuated between 79 and 87%. Summing up the analysis of the historiography of the problem it is necessary to notice that, despite a number of thorough researches, the question on a social the of clerks in the 14th - 17th centuries has not yet been solved.

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