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344 12. land, labour and settlement
In the west coloni may have been common: they certainly appear frequently
in the surviving wills. It is also possible that their numbers were on
the increase: Salvian states that many free persons were driven to become
coloni during the troubles of the fifth century – though he also states that
other peasants were able to escape oppression, by fleeing to the greater
freedom of bagaudic or barbarian rule. 67 But the apparent prevalence of
coloni in the west may partly be because western sources are focused so
heavily on large estates. In Egypt, coloni also appear on the great estates, but
balanced by considerable evidence of a free peasantry elsewhere. Is this
fuller Egyptian evidence representative of the whole of Egypt, representative
of the east in general, or even perhaps representative of the entire
empire?
As with the possible connection between different patterns of landholding
and different economic fortunes, it is tempting to link the apparently
greater freedom of the east with the undoubted greater prevalence there of
villages. Were villagers perhaps better placed for collective action, in order
to fend off the claims of the aristocracy on their lands and their liberties?
But again, when looked at in any detail, this possible connection is not
readily sustainable. Libanius, in later-fourth-century Antioch, provides
good evidence that there was no necessary correlation between types of settlement
on the one hand, and the size of estates and the level of dependence
of the peasantry on the other. He writes of villages with many owners (each
with a small holding), but also of other villages under the control of a single
proprietor. 68 Indeed, while it is easy to see that the community of the village
could provide the focus for collective resistance to outside forces, it is also
perfectly possible to suggest that, in different circumstances, it might
provide the ideal context for centralized repression. 69
In both patterns of land ownership, and in the social bonds that tied
many people to the land and to their landlords, there may have been
important differences between east and west; but it is much more difficult
to detect changes and developments through time in either geographical
region. It is possible that, in its social organization, country life really did
alter very little, even in the west, which saw the collapse of Roman power
and the advent of new barbarian masters and landlords. It is certainly
remarkable to discover farmers in late-fifth-century Africa holding their
land under a centuries-old, and very Roman, local form of land-tenure,
and to find the Gallic wills of c. a.d. 600 populated by servi and coloni. As
far as we can tell, these people (and the documents that describe them)
would fit happily into the world of some three centuries earlier. Such
67 Salv. De Gub. Dei v.43–5 and 21–6. 68 Lib. Or. xlvii.11.
69 As in parts of the medieval west, like Latium, where the appearance of nucleated villages, replacing
dispersed settlement, is currently explained as a manifestation of the rising power of territorial lordship
from the tenth century onwards: Toubert (1973).
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