Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

336 12. land, labour and settlement
ditch-and-bank; reoccupied and refortified Iron Age hill-forts; villas with
towers and surrounding wall (see Fig. 6,p.326 above); and settlements built
around strongly fortified refuge-towers. 37 However, the prevalence of
fortified sites in the late and post-Roman rural landscape should not be
exaggerated: in some regions particularly exposed to raiding, like southern
Tripolitania, it does seem as though rural fortresses were ubiquitous, but in
most of the empire, even in the confused fifth- and sixth-century west, the
vast majority of sites seem to have been only very lightly defended or not
defended at all. 38
The pattern of rural defence in our period is perhaps best understood
in terms of the emergence of selected strongholds, leaving most settlements
undefended, rather than as a widespread attempt to fortify every
rural dwelling or to move people into enclosed defensible sites. 39 The fifthand
sixth-century countryside did contain fortifications that had certainly
not existed before, but it did not yet resemble the landscape of, say, late
medieval central Italy, dominated by fortified hill-villages. Even in the
unstable world of seventh-century northern Britain, the kings of Bernicia
did not site their villa at Yeavering within the security of the nearby late
Iron Age oppidum, but seem to have preferred to retreat, in times of
danger, to the impregnable fastness of their coastal fortress at Bamburgh,
leaving Yeavering and their other rural estate-centres to be burnt to the
ground. 40
v. the pattern of land ownership; the status of
peasants
When looking at how the land was shared out, and at the legal and social
ties that bound many at the lower levels of society to that land, we are
dependent mainly on written sources for our information. Patterns of
landholding and the status of rural dwellers can sometimes be revealed in
the archaeological record: for instance, it is probably reasonable to infer
that an excavated house which proves to have been expensively decorated
was inhabited by an owner rather than a tenant. But often we are left guessing
whether or not a small farmstead or a whole village, known only from
archaeology, was part of a larger estate, and whether its inhabitants were
free or tied to the land.
37 For some examples of these types of fortification, and other variants: Van Ossel (1992) 163–4;
Alcock (1972) 174–94; Démians d’Archimbaud (1994); Alföldy (1974) 214–20; Brogiolo (1994) 151–8;
Anselmino et al.(1989); Mattingly and Hayes (1992); Mattingly (1995) 147–8 and 194–209.
38 Tripolitania: Mattingly (1995) 147–8 and 194–209.
39 The long list of (largely unknown) fortresses (phrouria) built or restored by Justinian in the Balkans,
according to Procopius (Buildings iv.4), may be evidence of a different policy – of helping to provide
or enhance defences for large numbers of villages and other settlements.
40 Hope-Taylor (1977); Bede, HE iii.16 and 17.
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