It assigned a numerical rank to each person depending on their status, and served to determine their precedence in society, and especially among the nobility.
[1] The Three Seals Law, for example, specifies a sakdina of 100,000 for the Maha Uparat, 10,000 for the Chao Phraya Chakri, 600 for learned Buddhist monks, 20 for commoners and 5 for slaves.
[2] The term is also used to refer to the feudal-like social system of the period, where common freemen or phrai (ไพร่) were subject to conscription or corvée labour in service of the kingdom for half of the months of the year, under the control of an overseer or munnai (มูลนาย).
Jit Phumisak viewed sakdina as a persistent remnant of exploitative class relations in his analysis of what is typically translated as "feudalism."
[3] Kukrit Pramoj claimed that sakdina was a fundamentally Thai form of social organization.