Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

ural settlement (villages, farmsteads and villas) 333
apparent in some areas where written accounts survive. Gregory, bishop of
Tours, writing at the end of the sixth century, mainly about the Auvergne
and the Touraine, happens to mention in his works of history and hagiography
seventy different villages (vici): they were clearly a standard feature of
the countryside. From Gregory we also learn that at least thirty-six of these
vici had their own church, some of them dedicated by Gregory himself. 32
As in the east, where the evidence lies in the survival and excavation of so
many village churches, villages in the west were also clearly emerging as one
important element in the organization of Christian life – an element which
from the ninth century onwards was to develop into the fully-fledged
parish system.
The countryside of the western provinces in Roman times had always
also contained the houses of landowners, which, if they reveal some decorative
features in the Roman style, modern scholars have tended to call
‘villas’. The fate of the villas in the disturbed circumstances of the fifthand
sixth-century west remains somewhat mysterious, despite considerable
archaeological attention. The most complete archaeological evidence is
from the far north, Britain and northern Gaul, where it seems that villas in
the Roman style disappeared early in the fifth century, though there is
sometimes continued use of the same sites with buildings of much
humbler materials. 33
Further south, some impressive late villas have now been excavated and
published (see Fig. 10), but we still rely heavily on literary references for
evidence of the widespread survival in the fifth and sixth century of an
aristocratic lifestyle centred on comfortable and marbled villas in the
antique manner. For example, the poems and narrative sources from
Vandal Africa clearly demonstrate that the new Vandal landlords readily
adapted to this way of life; and, from southern Gaul as late as the second
half of the sixth century, the poems of Venantius Fortunatus testify to
building-works on three separate villas by a rich Gallo-Roman bishop of
Bordeaux. 34
Probably in the fifth and sixth century there emerged a cultural
difference between the northern and southern regions of the west, with the
division running roughly along the line of the Loire: to the north, archaeology
demonstrates that Roman-style villa buildings had already disappeared;
to the south, the literary evidence, even allowing for some
rosy-tinted exaggeration in the poetic descriptions, makes it quite clear that
32 Touraine and Auvergne: Longnon (1878) 16–19; Pietri (1983) 793–6 (for the rural churches).
Similar evidence for villages in Maine, and in south-west Gaul in general: Latouche (1967) 64–72;
Rouche (1979) 221. I and others are here making the assumption that vicus�‘village’, which may prove
over-optimistic. 33 Lewit (1991) 37–46; Van Ossel (1992) 79–84.
34 Africa: Rossiter (1990). Gaul: Venantius Fortunatus, Carm. i.18–20; and the discussion of the late
Gallic villa in Percival (1992).
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