Conscription is a citizen’s obligation to perform socially useful work, enshrined in law. Previously, service was performed by peasants serving the feudal lord. It consisted either in the payment of money or products, or in the performance of work on the lands of the feudal lord (landowner). Despite the fact that such economic relations have long sunk into oblivion, the term retains its meaning and is used today. How has its meaning changed?
Peasant duties
Previously, all lands, both in Russia and Europe, were divided between strong landowners - feudal lords. There were practically no private lands on which one family worked, and at the same time ordinary people could live only at the expense of the harvest received by their labor. Therefore, the peasants had to take the land in a kind of lease and pay for it. Money used to be of little importance, and ordinary people simply could not have other material values, such as expensive jewelry or elegant dishes. The question arose: what to pay for the land? So there was a conscription.
This concept was very broad. As a payment for land, the feudal lord could ask for any work on his land or a fee for any products grown in his territories. In Russia, there were two types of duties - a quitrent and corvee. Payments were called payments by food or money, corvée - working off with their own labor. It was difficult for the peasants to bear both the one and the other duty. This eventually led to the limitation of the feudal lord’s rights to establish the terms of corvee and form of quitrent, and then completely led to the abolition of the practice of conscription.
Development
But before conscription was canceled, she changed her form. Natural dues (that is, paid by manufactured products) were not profitable for both the peasant and the landowner. The peasant hardly received a crop sufficient to feed himself and his family - after all, there were no fertilizers, no machinery, no high-quality seeds and seedlings. Allocating a part to the landowner almost always meant condemning himself and his relatives to hunger. What if crop failure or drought? Barshchina (that is, work on the land of the landowner) did not become a way out of this situation. The peasant, forced part of his time to work not on his plot, but on the landowner, did not really try to look after the fields of the feudal lord. While he worked out the service on the land of the feudal lord, his own plot could decline, which again threatened hunger for the whole family. And the feudal lord was often not satisfied with the quality of the products received in the form of conscription or the work performed by the peasant.
I had to admit that such a duty is an outdated relic of the past and something needs to be changed. A solution was found quite simple and convenient for everyone - to pay for land with money. This was beneficial to the feudal lord, since he could purchase any goods he needed with the proceeds. And for the peasant, over time, this approach became more convenient - commodity-money relations became more developed, trade and markets appeared.
Nowadays
Today, conscription is first of all the duties of citizens to the state. Feudal relations long ceased to exist, and the term acquired a new meaning. Most often, speaking of this in our days, we have in mind military conscription. This is a practice that exists in many countries of the world. Upon reaching a certain age, men (and sometimes women) become liable for military service. This means that they are obliged to perform military or alternative civilian service for a specified period in peacetime and to defend their homeland in case of war.