THE 13tH AND 14tH CENTURIES 55 
the revenue due from their provinces. The position of the 
Governor was therefore such as to make for fair treatment 
of the revenue-payers, and the evidence of rural prosperity 
during the reign suggests that on the whole the peasants 
had a reasonable chance! Cases are on record where the 
King’s discrimination was at fault, as when a Deputy- 
Governor, who had already been dismissed for misconduct 
in Samana, was appointed to Gujarat, and after some time 
had to be dismissed again, to the great relief of the people?; 
but there are not many such cases in the chronicles, and 
they may, I think, be regarded as exceptional. 
At this period, however, the Assignee must have been 
more important to the peasants than the Governor, for 
Firiiz relied largely on the Assignment system. The salaries 
of his officers were fixed in cash on what appears to be an 
exceedingly liberal scale, and the corresponding amount of 
revenue was assigned to them, while the practice of assigning 
villages to individual troopers was revived. Shams Afif 
doubtless exaggerates, when he says (p. 95) that all the 
villages and parganas were assigned to the army, for the 
King must have had some revenue for himself; but it may 
fairly be inferred that Assignment was now the usual ar- 
rangement throughout the kingdom. 
The precise nature of the Assignments given to troopers 
is obscure. Some passages in the chronicles suggest that, 
according to the usual practice, the troopers assumed charge 
of the villages assigned to them; while another, and very 
difficult, passage can be read in the sense that a trooper 
was not placed in direct contact with his village, but merely 
received a document entitling him to draw his pay from it, 
and that he discounted this document with one of the 
i Barni, 574, says that as the result of the King’s orders, the provinces 
became cultivated and tillage extended widely. Afif, 295, says that not a 
single village in the River Country remained uncultivated, and that in the 
provinces there were ‘‘ four cultivated villages to the kroh’ (14 miles). 
The language of both writers is rhetorical, but we may safely infer from it 
that there was much improvement compared with the preceding reign. 
More satisfactory evidence is contained in a later passage (Afif, 321), 
which records the preservation for sport of a large area in Rohilkhand; 
the extension of cultivation had reduced the supply of game, and, if this 
area had not been preserved, it would, we are told, have come under 
cultivation like the rest of the kingdom. 
2 Afif, 454, 455. A Deputy-Governor was appointed in cases when the 
Governor held also a post at Court.