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The structure and function of amnesty in the Early Goryeo Period

Hoonpyo Yoon 1

1연세대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

First of all, in this thesis, the content and characteristic of various pardon in the early Goryeo dynasty was looked into. Also, based on such content, the structure and characteristics of sentence system has been studied. After finalizing the task of unifying the Later Three Kingdoms, The Goryeo administration continued to revamp the authorizing system overall. Among the tasks was reorganizing the sentence system. However, under the name of national integration and gathering citizen’s voice in such period, pardoning criminals was implemented. Due to such order, confusion and issues risen from the sentence system. In order to solve this issue, The Goryeo administration needed to set a firm principle for implementing pardon. Pardon has been implemented since King T’aejo. Other monarchs who worshipped him declared such pardon several times after. However, during such incidents, several issues occurred. As the fairness and liability on the pardon plummeted lots of complaints and rage occurred. It was due to the random implementation rather than implementing in the right order and form. In order to solve the issues that occurred due to the pardon, they needed a revamp linked to the sentence system. It is because punishing criminals and pardoning is directly linked together. At last, by the era of King Seongjong who accepted the Confucian politics system, the basic principles of pardon such as the terminology, reason of pardon, scope, reinstatement or social special favor etc has been set up. However, due to the nature of pardon implementation, it was hard to set it up completely. The pardon differed by the political situation as it went along. In such point, pardon was different from sentence system. Nevertheless, the reason and fairness of pardon had to be kept thoroughly. If that has any issues, confusion and rage could occur. However, the debate on reason and fairness went on forever as time went by. During such progress, pardons were implemented more frequently and the content became full. The reason of such frequent pardon lies in the strengthening of centralization system in terms of politics and in terms of social economic terms, the progress of agriculture and the changes in the family dynamics.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.