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pattern of land ownership; status of peasants 343
rulers of the east. In the west there were perhaps more great landlords
standing between the state and the resources of the land which it wished
to tax. 62
The texts, particularly the surviving wills, also give some indication of
the status of the labourers who worked the estates of both east and west.
Slaves had probably never been very common on the land in the east (by
contrast with their ubiquitous role in domestic service), and they do not
feature in large numbers in the late antique papyri from Egypt. 63 In the west
they appear much more frequently as agricultural labourers. 64 However, in
contrast to the situation in some parts of the early empire, by late and post-
Roman times there seems to be no evidence of great centralized troops of
slaves, housed together in barrack-blocks. Rather, the slaves we meet in the
documents seem to be in small groups on scattered, medium-sized farms,
or even settled individually on single plots of land. Just possibly this was an
improvement in their lot. It is hard to say, and certainly slaves could, as
always, be terribly abused: in sixth-century Francia, one sadistic master
buried alive two household slaves who had contracted a sexual union
against his will, and regularly used boys in his house as living candlesticks,
insisting that they hold the candles between their bare legs until they burnt
themselves out. 65
Coloni also feature frequently in the sources: agricultural workers whom a
series of imperial laws, beginning in 332, tied (or at least tried to tie) to the
land, in order to facilitate the process of raising both the land-tax and the
poll-tax. 66 The evidence of the laws shows that the status of coloni continued
to decline during our period, until in a law of Justinian one category of colonus
is said to be very much on a par with slaves. Coloni were certainly a sizeable
and oppressed group, and their oppression undoubtedly contributed to the
powers of their masters. But exactly how significant they were in late antique
society is open to dispute, since we lack both the information to tell us what
proportion of all agricultural labour were coloni, and the detail of how a
master–colonus relationship worked out on the ground. That modern scholarship
has used quite so much ink on them may be for reasons of its own.
Coloni have attracted two particular groups of scholars: those who wish to
see the late empire as a dinosaur, brought down by the increasing inflexibility
of its own social skeleton; and those who see in the colonus the ancestor of
the tied serf of the Middle Ages, and hence evidence for Marx’s theory of a
direct transition from a ‘slave’ to a ‘feudal’ mode of production.
62 A suggestion made by Jones, LRE 1066–7. 63 Bagnall (1993).
64 MacMullen (1987); Vera (1995) 346–56; Brown, Gentlemen and Officers 202–4 (for sixth-century
Italy); Bonnassie (1991) 71–4 and 93–6 (for Visigothic Spain).
65 Greg. Tur. Hist. v.3 (the human candlesticks are termed pueri, who may not have been slaves). For
a general discussion of brutality to slaves: Bonnassie (1991) 19–21.
66 Useful recent discussions: Whittaker and Garnsey in CAH xiii, ch.9, pp.287,94; Vera (1995)
353–4; Garnsey (1996).
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