Legal Regulation of Peasant Family Divisions in the Russian North in the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries

The article analyzes the issues of legal regulation of the institution of family divisions among the peasants of the Arkhangelsk province in the second half of the XIX -early XX centuries: namely, the role of legal custom and legislative regulation in the field of marital and family relations in the peasant community of the Russian North is studied.The authors focused not only on the materials of pre-revolutionary historiography on this issue, but also on archival documents found in the State Archive of the Arkhangelsk region, which contain reliable information about the activities of volost courts during this period.From the point of view of the formal legal method, this article analyzes the normative legal acts concerning family divisions among peasants.Due to the already published and for the first time introduced archival documents into scientific circulation, the problem of the relationship between law and legal custom in regulating family divisions and their consequences expressed not only in the disintegration of a large peasant family but also in the division of property based on the principles of consentient labour and family ownership, is understood.In addition, the authors identify the subjective and objective causes of the processes taking place, its specifics in the Russian North, where there was no private feudal dependence of the majority of peasants.The research materials demonstrate reliable results concerning the period under study in the field of regulating family divisions among peasants, who mainly relied on local custom in solving this issue, at the same time experiencing a governmental reaction in the form of the adoption of normative legal acts restraining the process of disintegration of the peasant community and contradicting peasant customary law.