Hay officer

The title derives from the Slavic word for hay, seno, combined with the suffix -ar, commonly used for people engaged in a particular trade or occupation. Its literal sense is therefore a person responsible for hay. Bulgarian evidence is sparse: the office is explicitly recorded only in the Rila and Vitosha charters from the reign of Ivan Shishman, where it appears in the plural form “сѣнаре.” The surviving material does not establish when the institution originated or whether it continued after the end of the fourteenth century.

Hay was essential both to animal husbandry and to the maintenance of horses used by the army and the ruler’s household. The hay officers may therefore have belonged both to the fiscal administration and to the system responsible for provisioning the cavalry. These activities need not have been institutionally separate: an official charged with securing fodder could also collect the relevant levy or supervise the population’s labour obligations.

Bulgarian chrysobulls—solemn rulers’ charters authenticated with a gold seal—mention hayfields as a category of landed property. The Virgin charter also records the obligation “сѣно косити,” meaning the mowing of hay as corvée, or compulsory unpaid labour for a ruler or lord. The document is a forgery and is textually related to a charter of the Serbian king Stefan Uroš II Milutin, so its evidence requires caution. Nevertheless, haymaking was a routine agricultural activity and the corresponding obligation is well documented in Serbian records, making its existence in medieval Bulgaria entirely plausible.

Useful comparisons come from Wallachia and Moldavia, whose Slavonic-writing chanceries preserved elements of the administrative tradition of the medieval Balkans. There, the official who collected a tithe on hay was called “сѣнарь” in Slavonic, while Romanian used finar, a word related to the Latin foenarius. In Moldavia, officials associated with the cavalry administration also helped provide fodder for the ruler’s horses. The great comis managed resources connected with their maintenance, while his subordinate, the comişel, supervised the mowing and transport of hay. Comparable arrangements are also recorded in Wallachia.

These parallels support identifying the Bulgarian hay officer primarily as a fiscal official who collected a levy on hay, probably in kind. He may also have directed the corvée involved in mowing and gathering it. A connection with cavalry offices, the imperial stables, and officials such as the komis or the comestabularius cannot be ruled out, but no Bulgarian document directly demonstrates such subordination.

The position of the hay officers in lists of officials indicates their low rank. They appear fifteenth in the Rila charter and occupy the final place in the Vitosha charter. This suggests that they were not members of the central court elite but subordinate provincial agents entrusted with limited fiscal and economic duties.