They abolished the feudal tenure of land,.e., they got rid of all its obligations to the State, indemnified the State by taxes on the peasantry and the rest of the mass of the people, vindicated for themselves the rights of modem private property in estates to which they had only a feudal title, and, finally, passed those laws of settlement, which, mulatis mulandis, had the same effect on the English agricultural labourer, as the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunof on the Russian peasantry.