Pomeste

(1) In the broadest sense the system of feudal landed property and rights over the feudally dependent peasants living on it; a synonym for “patrimony.” In a narrower, more specialized sense, the term pomest’e refers to a large or medium-sized feudal estate, in which most of the land constituted the demesne, worked by serfs under the corvée system. This type of holding (German Gutsherrschaft; Polish folwark) was particularly widespread in Eastern and Central Europe in the 16th–18th centuries.

(2) A type of feudal landholding in Russia from the late 15th to the early 18th century. The term pomest’e originally referred to the land granted to a member of the gentry in exchange for military service, without the rights of inheritance or sale (see). In the 16th-17th centuries the pomest’e grew more and more similar to the votchina and became a heritable form of property. Members of the dvorianstvo (nobility or gentry) who owned pomest’ia were called pomeshchiki. Under the decree on primogeniture (1714), the pomest’e and the votchina were formally classified as a single type of gentry landholding. In the 19th and 20th centuries the term pomest’e was used as a synonym for “estate.”