My life is like walking on thin ice

Chapter 508: Crimes committed in the present, merits to be passed down through the ages?
Soon, a new trend began to blow in the Hetao region.

Almost overnight, more than 40 counties emerged in the Hetao area, all named after tribes.

Just like the Loufan tribe that surrendered to the Han Dynasty a hundred years ago, and the Loufan County in the Daibei area of ​​the Han Dynasty today.

The people of Hetao found this change very novel.

Especially when the leader of his tribe became the so-called county magistrate, he became even more curious.

The tribe became a county, and the headman became the county magistrate;

What about the pasture?

Where is the water source?
Is it going to become county land and county boundaries?
Also, after becoming a citizen of a county in Shuofang County/Wuyuan County, what should you do if you want to go out and migrate in the future?
Just like in the past year or so, just write a report?

Or should we wait for approval from the county government before setting off?
Even amidst all the doubts, the new system was finally and quietly implemented in the Hetao area.

As the beneficiaries, or "targets" of the system, the first thing that the people of the Hetao tribes felt was that the faint smell of gunpowder that always existed in the air - the air of the grassland, and the hostility that could erupt at any time, had obviously weakened a lot.

Especially after several minor nobles violated the "Three Articles of the Covenant" and were sentenced to death by the Shuofang County Governor's Yamen, everyone seemed to~
It seems~
Maybe~
They are beginning to be afraid of killing people, or in other words, afraid of committing crimes.

In the past, whether in the Hetao region or other areas of the grassland, if the nomadic people had a disagreement, they would draw their swords against each other.

Let alone the nobles versus the herdsmen, the herdsmen versus the slaves, or the large tribe versus the small tribe;

Even between herdsmen and herdsmen, and between nobles and nobles, there were often 1v1 real man battles that decided the outcome, or even life and death.

On the grassland, there is even a set of customary dueling etiquette!

After the "new system" became popular in the Hetao region, almost all the weapons worn by herdsmen were used exclusively for slaughtering livestock.

In the first month after the new system was implemented, there were thousands of private fights resulting in death and dozens of large-scale fights involving more than a hundred people in the Hetao region!

After some investigation, Cheng Buzhi came to know that this number was roughly the daily and normal situation on the grassland.

Therefore, they used thundering means to quickly deal with those people who openly violated the "Three Articles of the Agreement".

Of course, since the purpose was to implement the "Han Law" in the Hetao area, Cheng Buzhi did not forget to give the people in the Hetao area the same treatment as the Han people.

That is: to atone for one's crime with gold or titles.

According to the imperial edict of the Emperor of Chang'an, after the Hetao area was incorporated into the territory of the Han Dynasty, all the people in the Hetao area automatically obtained the first-level title: Gongshi.

Among them, there were minor nobles who obtained titles such as Bugeng and Gongcheng, as well as great nobles such as Chehou and Guanneihou.

In the past year, after the Hetao area was incorporated into the Han territory, Emperor Rong also continued the Han tradition of granting titles to the people frequently and unconditionally since Emperor Wen and Emperor Jing.

In Hetao today, basically everyone has the fourth-level title: no change.

Of course, slaves were still slaves.

As a result, thousands of cases of personal fights resulting in death led to the governor of Shuofang County imposing thousands of death sentences.

There are three rules.

He who kills must die, no doubt about that.

However, among the more than one thousand death row inmates who fought with others and killed others, only about a hundred were actually executed in the end.

The rest were demoted to the lowest level of public officials and paid a considerable amount of fines before they were able to save their lives.

The fine was naturally paid in the form of cattle, sheep, or even horses.

It is not difficult to guess why the hundreds of people who were sentenced to death did not escape with their lives.

——He had no money, or in other words, he had no cattle, sheep, or horses to pay the fine, and he was unable to buy back his life.

As for the dozens of large-scale armed fights, Cheng Buzhi handled them with the same decisiveness, but at the same time he did not forget to be careful and cautious.

In the end, hundreds of people were sentenced to imprisonment, hundreds were sentenced to death, and most of them saved their lives at the cost of demotion or fines.

When it came to the second month of the implementation of the "new system", the crime rate in the Hetao area had dropped sharply from thousands of cases of death caused by private fights and dozens of large-scale armed fights last month to less than 100 cases of death caused by private fights and only four cases of large-scale armed fights.

As a result, nearly a hundred officials in the Hetao region were demoted, and several unlucky people were executed because they could not afford the money to fight for their lives.

When the time came to the third month, the wind of the 'new system' was completely in full swing.

The former tribal leaders who had been appointed as county magistrates were originally the most likely participants or even organizers of large-scale armed fights.

But during this month, almost every county magistrate who was a tribal leader began to use all means to restrain his people, repeatedly ordering them not to allow large-scale armed fights.

As a result, the crime rate in the Hetao area this month, in the category of "group fighting", has dropped to a staggering zero!

The number of cases resulting from private fights remained in the dozens, less than a hundred, of the previous month.

Cheng Buzhi knew: This is probably the limit.

In one county, over a period of one month, there were less than a hundred cases of private fights resulting in death?

Not to mention the grasslands where the people are "fierce" - even places like Qi and Lu, which are known for their Confucian civilization, can be considered to have harmonious and stable societies.

no way.

After all, not everyone can have enough food to eat, warm clothes to wear, and a sound legal system and disciplinary inspection commission in the new era.

In this ancient agricultural society where the pressure of survival is enormous, everyone is likely to starve to death or freeze to death, the labor intensity is extremely high, but the labor rewards are never proportional, it is really a fantasy to want to find a month without even one private fight, injury or murder case within the scope of a county.

In particular, the existence of street vagrants, idlers and lazy people, as well as the oppression of the people by powerful local tyrants and corrupt officials will almost inevitably lead to fierce conflicts at the physical level.

For example, one day, as soon as the sky turned pale, you got up with dark circles under your eyes and full of complaints, ready to go to the fields.

As a result, as soon as I went out, I found that the pretty girl next door was being teased by the famous lazy guy in your village.

When you arrive at the field, after working hard for a long day, you are just about to sit down on the ridge to rest, when you find the village head and the tax collectors from the county office coming to you, telling you that the county magistrate is going to celebrate his 50th birthday, and you must voluntarily give gifts in the name of the county.

Therefore, this year, in addition to the agricultural tax of one-thirty, the county government will retain an additional one-thirty as "filial piety".

You are very depressed, but you can only throw it away.

After a busy day of farm work, I dragged my tired body home, only to find that the porridge was particularly thin.

After asking my wife, I learned that the grain merchants in the county had colluded with the incompetent county magistrate to drive up the price of grain.

Nowadays, the family is in a period of shortage and has no rice to cook.

You had no choice but to hastily eat the porridge, and then ran to your brother's house to borrow rice before it got dark.

When we got there, we found out that the county government had levied labor on your brother, and he had been taken away to dig a canal. Only your sister-in-law and the children were left wiping their tears.

Not only can your eldest brother's family not help with your family's situation, but they even need you to take care of them for a while.

Even your eldest brother's land can only be taken by you, the only male.

You alone cannot cultivate the land of two families. When your eldest brother comes back from labor service, the harvest of his family will surely be very bleak.

For the whole year ahead, my eldest brother’s family will most likely be half-starved and have a hard time making ends meet.

All this makes you physically and mentally exhausted and full of complaints.

But for the sake of your wife, children and the elderly, you can still grit your teeth and persevere.

Until one day, a powerful family came to the county town and said that they wanted to buy your family's and your eldest brother's farmland, one hundred acres each, for a total of two hundred acres, at a "high price" of five stone of rice per acre.

You refused to obey, and were put in a sack and beaten with a club for several days in a row. When you slept at night, you could hear rustling sounds outside the yard, which made it difficult for you and your whole family to sleep well.

The situation is even worse for the eldest brother.

Those beasts, while your eldest brother was away, walked into your eldest brother's yard unscrupulously, spoke frivolously to your brother and his wife, and even touched your young niece.

And in the end, when your eldest brother was not at home, they actually took out the land transfer deed signed and sealed by your eldest brother!
You tell yourself: Be patient, wait for big brother to come back, and then seek revenge on them.

It’s a note that your elder brother didn’t come back.

I can't come back.

An ordinary labor and a simple canal cost your brother his life.

The officials said that he slipped into the canal and drowned, but you can't tell.

Because your eldest brother is seven feet tall, but the canal is only knee-deep.

The only way to drown someone in that knee-deep farm canal was for everyone to work together to push the person down.

When your eldest brother died, your brother and his wife were heartbroken and soon followed him.

The funeral arrangements took up all the money in your eldest brother's family, including the house - you even contributed a little.

As a result, before the bodies of your eldest brother and sister-in-law were cold, the group of people came again and said that your eldest brother and sister-in-law owed them money and you had to pay it back.

If you don't have money, they will say you can use your land to pay off the debt.

It is not until this moment that you finally understand: everything is a conspiracy of these beasts.

So what will you do next?
——If you ask any Han official who has served as an official or judged a case, you will definitely come to the same answer to this question.

kill!
With the strong character and tough morale of the people in the Han Dynasty today, if so many things happened to the same farmer, the result would surely be that the whole county would be massacred!

That dog magistrate will die;

The tyrants who bully others will die;

Even the lazy rangers and greedy tax collectors who the farmers disliked would most likely be killed.

and!

And in the end, this person is likely to be found not guilty!

Because the legal reminders of the Han Dynasty today are not the same as those of the new era in the future: no matter what, as long as you kill someone, it is wrong and you are guilty.

In the current Han Dynasty, whether or not a crime of murder is committed depends not only on objective reality, but also, or even mainly, on the subjective motive of the murderer.

Different motives will result in different severity of punishment, and even determine whether the crime will be proven and whether punishment will be imposed.

If someone kills someone for money, it is naturally driven by illegal purposes. If someone kills someone intentionally, he will inevitably be beheaded;
But if it was a verbal dispute or a murder in the heat of the moment, it would most likely just be a ‘life for a life’.

Pay with your life, pay with your life - if you pay the money, you don't have to pay with your life.

Going a step further: if he seeks revenge, even against the murderer of his father or mother, he will most likely be acquitted and become a famous filial son in the local area.

Furthermore, if one confronts someone in order to protect the weak, the lonely, or even one's relatives, and kills someone during the confrontation, not only will one not be punished, but one will also receive rewards, including but not limited to material and spiritual rewards.

In such an era and legal context, someone who kills someone does not necessarily become a murderer.

Those who kill and rob are thieves;

He who commits manslaughter is a reckless man;

He who seeks revenge is a filial son;
Those who protect the weak are even more heroic.

A farmer who, because his brother and sister-in-law were bullied to death, delivered a fatal blow to a corrupt official and a powerful person, leaving blood splattered five steps away, may not become a hero, but he will never be sentenced as a murderer under the current legal system of the Han Dynasty.

To use a joke that is more familiar to people in later generations, it means: Give me some face and deduct some happy beans...

The Han people themselves are like this - their customs are so tough, let alone the nomadic people who have lived on the grasslands all their lives?
Even the extremely low crime rate, which was comparable to that in the heartland of the Han Dynasty, made Cheng Buzhi suspicious, and he suspected that the officials under him had falsified the data.

After making sure that the data was not falsified or inflated, Cheng Buzhi felt relieved and sent a memorial to Emperor Rong in Chang'an to report the situation and to seek credit for the heads of various departments.

Obviously, in the early days when the Hetao region fell into the hands of the Han Dynasty, the emperor's reward of thousands of gold coins for buying horse bones and enfeoffment of Guiyi Hou had formed an extremely significant role model effect on the Hetao region today.

Nowadays, the leaders of the various tribes in Hetao have almost forgotten everything. All they think about is becoming a marquis and going to Chang'an to enjoy a life of luxury and debauchery.

With the strenuous efforts of these vested interests, the first part of the New Deal: the establishment of a legal system, went extremely smoothly.

what?
You mean just three rules?

I'm sorry, the Han people have quite mature experience in how to extend the "Three Articles of Agreement" into a complete set of "Han Laws".

The acceptance of the Three Articles of Law means that in the foreseeable future, the entire Hetao region will use the "Han Law" as the foundation of social order.

Law-abiding nomadic people are no longer a threat to the agricultural regime.

But the people.

The former Yiqu people have now become the privileged class in the absolute sense of the Han Dynasty: the Knights of the North;

The former Loufan people have become the rarest and most valuable cavalry organization in the Han army today: Loufan Xiaowei and Loufan Duwei.

There are also others such as the Changshui Huqi, which are vivid examples of nomadic peoples perfectly integrating into the Chinese agricultural civilization.

After the legal system was established and tribal leaders lost some of their control over their tribes and transformed themselves into the bureaucratic class, the next question naturally became how to control the range of activities of the nomadic peoples.

Emperor Rong of Chang'an also gave clear instructions on this point.

——Over the past year, the entire Hetao region has compiled and archived the nomadic routes and times of herders, which is a way to test the waters.

Next, we need to tighten the process from the original step of saying a word, writing a report and leaving, to gradually changing it to submitting an application and obtaining approval before it can be triggered.

Then, gradually, the county and prefecture governments formed a coordinated planning practice to plan nomadic routes and tendencies for herders.

Liu Rong was obviously not sure what the effect would be.

But it is definitely better than the current chaotic situation where nomadic people can leave whenever they want and go wherever they want.

(End of this chapter)