Since the Ming Dynasty inherited the Yuan Dynasty, the occupational household counting system of dividing household registration by occupation is to divide the national household registration based on occupation. At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the national population was divided into three categories: civilian, military, and craftsman, and the household registration was correspondingly responsible for the corresponding bad service, and it was stipulated that the military households and craftsmen would inherit from generation to generation, and the service would be filled forever.
From the perspective of the acceleration of social mobility and the relaxation of the occupational household system, the two are interactive relationships. In the early Ming Dynasty, the professional household planning system firmly bound the military craftsmen under the control of household registration, but this restriction of hierarchical status could not stop the flow of social classes. In the middle and late Ming Dynasty, with the continuous acceleration of social class mobility, the control of the identity of military smiths was relaxed compared with that of the early Ming Dynasty.
In the early Ming Dynasty, under the shackles of household registration status, it was almost impossible for military smiths from low births to remove military smiths. However, in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, the imperial court's management of household registration was relatively lax, making it possible to change the nationality, taking Ma Shi and Ma Yu's father and son as an example: Ma Shi was an astronomical student during the orthodox and Jingtai years, and in the fourteenth year of orthodoxy, the Qin Tianjian Supervisor Zheng Xu Huan, when opposing Ma Shi's revision of the calendar, believed that Ma Shi was a military smith and did not know the calendar, which showed that Ma Shi was born in a family of military craftsmen.
Ma Shi entered the Qin Tianjian because he was good at painting and astrology, and became an astronomer. Regarding whether Ma Shi's identity was a military smith, Ma Mingda believed that the Ming Dynasty had strict restrictions on the change of military smith's nationality, and Xu Huan's attack on Ma Shi's origin as a military smith showed that Ma Shi's ancestors were likely to be military smiths, and Ma Shi's ability to serve in the Qin Tianjian and the Painting Academy showed that Ma Shi himself had left the military smith's rank.
Ma Shi's son, Ma Yue, was a scholar in the eighth year of Tianshun, and when Ma Yu took the imperial examination, he was an astronomer rather than a military craftsman. This shows that at least in the Ma Shi period, their family had already left the military smith's register.
Since the Ming Dynasty strictly forbade military smiths to change their nationality, why were military smiths still able to change their nationality? At least this shows that the phenomenon of military smiths leaving and changing their nationalities at that time was not as strictly controlled as in the early Ming Dynasty, and to some extent, it also reflected that the imperial court's control over household registration was relaxed.
The entry of military smiths from their original hereditary professions is both a manifestation of their identity transformation and the result of social class and population mobility. Judging from the entry of military smiths, hereditary military households and craftsmen were not prohibited from participating in the imperial examination because of their status restrictions, which to a certain extent showed that it was difficult for the imperial court to implement the regulations of yongchong in the early Ming Dynasty.
Luo Lixin believes that since the craftsmen can enter the army through the examination, it shows that the Ming Dynasty regulations and restrictions on the craftsmen are not so strict. Indeed, the fact that military smiths were able to participate in the imperial examination and enter the career path through the imperial examination reflected the relaxation of the imperial court's restrictions on them, and it can even be said that, to some extent, it was a tacit acquiescence to the entry of military smiths into the imperial examination.
At the same time, the entry of military smiths into their careers also reflects the strengthening of the trend of military smiths gradually breaking away from the shackles of the original household registration and moving from the lower layer of society to the upper level. Regarding the flow of population, He Bingdi believes that rulers need a certain degree of social circulation to maintain political and social stability, so they will be tolerant of this flow.
From the forty-four years after Jiajing to the end of the Ming Dynasty, only Wang Xiang said that only one of them was admitted to the jinshi, and the emergence of this situation was inseparable from the change of the household registration status of the military smith in the middle and late Ming Dynasty and the laxity of the management of the imperial court.
In his analysis of the main reasons for the large decrease in the number of special statuses from the thirty-fifth year of the Wanli Calendar to the sixteenth year of Chongzhen, He believed that those special labor statuses had long lost the original meaning of their identities and were integrated into the civil register.
Chen Changwen believes that this change is a reflection of the military households and craftsmen's breaking the shackles of household registration status. It can be said that it is also very possible for military smiths to integrate into the civil or change into other nationalities, and it is becoming more and more difficult for the imperial court to maintain the hereditary status of identity, and the acceleration of social class mobility has forced the imperial court to relax the restrictions on household registration.
The system of dividing household registration by occupation firmly bound the military craftsmen to the household registration control of the imperial court. Military smiths who were hereditary in status engaged in related official handicraft production activities in the court to meet the needs of the rulers.
However, because the military smiths engaged in related production activities, with a great deal of compulsion, over time, the military smiths who served the court often did not think of making progress in handicraft manufacturing, and the quality of the production products was inferior, which could not meet the needs of the rulers.
During this period, with the continuous development of the commodity economy, the level of private handicraft production gradually improved. At the same time, in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, the phenomenon of military smiths fleeing became more and more intense, and in view of the phenomenon of a large number of military smiths fleeing, the initial imperial court practiced Qinggou, that is, to supplement the fleeing military smiths in their original hometowns, but most of the people who hooked them were not familiar with craftsmanship.
In these cases, the imperial court had to take relevant measures to ensure the quality of products and the improvement of labor efficiency to meet its own needs. Therefore, in the twenty-first year of Chenghua, it was stipulated that shift craftsmen could accept silver substitute service, and in the eighteenth year of Hongzhi, it was allowed to sit in the silver service, but these regulations only applied to local military smiths who served in the Beijing Division, and did not apply to all military smiths in the Beijing Division.
With the continuous change and development of society, the military smith has become a status symbol, and those who have the status of military smith do not necessarily have the corresponding professional skills, in this case, in order to ensure the smooth completion of the craftsman's service, the imperial court allows the military smith to accept silver service. For example, in the thirteenth year of the Wanli Calendar, because the military smiths of the Inner Government Supervision Bureau did not know the skills, the imperial court hired civilian craftsmen to undertake the corresponding errands, and the exempted military smiths were ordered to pay two dollars and five cents of silver every month.
The economic base determines the superstructure, and the implementation of silver service is a measure for the imperial court to cope with the change of the identity of craftsmen, and the reform of the service household system in the middle of the Ming Dynasty is the result of the game between the imperial court and the military households and craftsmen of the Weisuo under the conditions of economic and social development changes.