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peers and lords: local communities 459
were tackling the problem from another angle, establishing satellite religious
centres in the countryside. By Gregory’s death, there were over forty
such establishments in the Touraine, and there is no reason to think Tours
unique. A proto-parish system was already emerging in the countryside of
sixth-century Europe, allowing Christianity to spread under the bishop’s
co-ordinating eye. 69
The civitas thus continued to shape senses of local political, legal and
religious community in large parts of Gaul, Spain and Italy in the immediate
post-Roman period. There were, of course, also discontinuities. The
disappearance of secular public buildings marked the end of a long tradition,
the displacement of a whole way of life. Peer landowning groups in
local society no longer gathered as a curial body in city council chambers
but expressed solidarity and pursued rivalries when gathered to fight
together in city levies or as assessors in the courts of the local count. There
was, moreover, wide regional variation. In some areas, the old Roman cities
failed to survive even the first shock of the end of empire. In Britain and
north-eastern Gaul, violence and social revolution combined to remake the
political landscape. Neither the boundaries of the host of small Anglo-
Saxon kingdoms which had emerged by c. 600 nor, perhaps more surprisingly,
those of their British counterparts bore much relation to the civitas
geography of the Roman period. Bishops did survive among the British,
though not among the pagan Anglo-Saxons, but their sees were also not
based on the old civitates. 70
North-eastern Gaul did not witness political fragmentation on the same
scale, but, here too, new patterns were generated. The area throws up not
comites civitatis but grafios in charge of pagi, and even where larger solidarities
emerged, they did so on new bases. Several former Roman units combined,
for example, in the Champagne, creating, amongst other things, a military
group who tended to act together like the city-based levies to the south and
west. While the settlement of outsiders in Spain, southern Gaul and Italy
was dictated by, or at least does not seem to have disrupted, the existing
civitas structure, further north there was much greater discontinuity. 71
Moreover, even where civitas units did survive the invasion period, there
were other forces at work which, in some places at least, eventually dismantled
them. The Roman civitas had many roles. Of central importance was
its position as the local administrative centre for the state: the unit of taxation,
the court of first resort, and so on. As we have seen, the post-Roman
69 Preaching: Klingshirn (1994); cf. Hillgarth (1980). Proto-parish systems: the essays of Stancliffe
and Fouracre in Baker (1979) with the studies collected in Cristianizzazione (1982). Much recent work
on the establishment of parish and proto-parish systems has been done in England, where these processes
did not take place within civitas structures: see generally Blair and Sharpe (1992).
70 Political structures: as p. 439 above, n. 8. Ecclesiastical structures: Davies (1982) ch. 6.
71 See generally James (1982) 58–62; Halsall (1995) esp. ch. 8–9 provides a detailed case study.
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