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the issues and the evidence 317
yet no satisfactory way of telling whether a small house in the countryside
with an array of local and imported pottery was inhabited by a free peasant,
a tied tenant or a slave. Here, in dealing with social relations, documentary
evidence becomes essential. Unfortunately, such evidence is very limited
from our period. The law codes of both the Roman empire and the barbarian
successor states do provide some vital information on the ties that
bound together the rural population. However, as we shall see, it is impossible
to tell how generally and successfully such prescriptions from above
were applied in practice on the ground.
For detailed local information on the organization of estates and on the
status of agricultural labourers, we rely (except in Egypt) on very patchy
and scattered written information which, even when it is roughly contemporary,
tends to derive from very different types of document. What we
lack are sequences of similar data, which would allow us to make reliable
comparisons, either through time or across the Roman world at any one
moment. For instance, from the years around 600, we have an important
will from Gaul, listing the estates and tenants of a single great private landowner
(Bertram of Le Mans, who died in 616); a smattering of letters relating
to papal estates, primarily in Italy and Sicily (preserved in the Register
of Gregory the Great, 590–604); and some passing references to villagers
in a saint’s Life from central Anatolia (in the Life of Theodore of Sykeon). 4 Only
the documents on papyrus excavated in Egypt provide an extensive and
varied corpus of material relating to a single region of the empire; but even
here the survival of documents is necessarily haphazard, and the data do
not compare to the articulated and complementary information that we
might expect, say, from manorial and taxation records in late medieval
western Europe.
Archaeology can provide important information on broad economic
structures affecting the countryside, which will be explored in the next
chapter (in particular, on the import of goods into rural contexts and on
the export of rural products). But the available archaeological and documentary
evidence cannot provide much information on the all-important
local economic structures within which agricultural work was performed.
For instance, we would like to know whether some peasants had a small
specialized sideline in the rearing of, say, chickens, exchanging their surplus
eggs with a neighbour who perhaps had a similar local specialization in the
making and repair of basic agricultural implements. Equally, we would like
to know whether some smallholders supplemented the produce of their
own land by selling their labour to the owners of larger holdings at times
of high demand, such as the harvest and the vintage. Even in Egypt we
4 Bertram will: discussed in Jones, LRE 782–3, and in Wood Merovingian Kingdoms 207–10.Greg.Reg.
ed. D. Norberg, 1982 (�CCSL 140). Life of Theodore of Sykeon, ed. and French trans. Festugière (1970),
partial English trans. in Dawes and Baynes (1948); discussion in Mitchell, Anatolia ii.122–50.
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