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peers and lords: local communities 465
for landlords, therefore, may well have had something to do with the necessity
– as military obligations became generalized in post-Roman society –
of building a body of armed retainers with the requisite military traditions
and expertise.
(c) Slaves, serfs and estates
Such upward social movement on the part of some slaves was paralleled by
a decline in the status of some formerly free peasants. We have already
encountered the long-term decline of poorer freemen in the Lombard,
Visigothic and Frankish kingdoms. Not dissimilar processes were already
working themselves out in late Roman society, which witnessed a major
decline in the status of formerly free tenant farmers (coloni), who did not
own the lands they worked. This particular group of coloni – in technical
terms, the adscripticii – were tied to their lands by the Roman state in an
attempt to turn the countryside into stable units of agricultural production,
and hence facilitate the collection of taxes. For the same reason, the imperial
authorities also forbade agricultural slaves to be sold separately from
the land they worked. And as differences between the rights of some formerly
free tenants and some slaves started to disappear, the power of landlords
over the adscripticii increased. From 365, adscripticii were denied the
right to alienate any property without the landowner’s permission. In 371,
landlords were made personally responsible for collecting their taxes,
removing any contact adscripticii may have had with imperial officials. In
396, they were debarred from suing their landlords (except for extracting
more than the customary rent), and, from the early fifth century, they
required their landowner’s consent to be ordained or to enter a monastery.
Hence, in the sixth-century east, Justinian could reasonably claim to see no
difference between adscripticii and slaves. 89
There is no way of knowing what percentage of the rural population was
composed of adscripticii, and hence whether this evolution marks a general
strengthening of the social, legal and economic dominance of the landlord
classes. In fact, this transformation was only one among several, some very
long-term, which, as we have seen, were all leading, if slowly, towards a
greater predominance of vertical ties of lordship in the local communities
of the post-Roman west. The break-up of the civitas unit, the decline in
status of lesser freemen, the appearance of liberti and a general shift in patterns
of slavery – all were probably just as important as the fate of the late
Roman coloni in generating the rise of a class of dominant landlords.
Lurking not very far in the background here is the thorny problem of
manorialization: the spread of what is often considered the characteristic
form of medieval estate organization. The classic medieval manor was a
89 Jones, LRE 795–803 remains the essential starting-point for any discussion of the late colonate.
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