On the issue of the status of a layman, or several observations on church punishments of the laity in the 11th-13th century Russia

In modern historiography, it is generally accepted that a “layman” is a person who does not have a holy order, while this category includes the widest range of believers of various social groups and strata. At the same time, acquaintance with the ancient Russian canonical legal sources does not allow us to agree with such an assessment. The norms of the “Russian Justice” and the princely Statutes understand by “laity” a completely separate social stratum, the judicial power of the Church over which was significantly limited. At the same time, in pre-Mongol Russia, the “layman” was opposed not to the holder of the holy order, but to Church authority as such. The article attempts to formulate the problem of the dependence of punishments imposed by the Church on the social status of the offender.