Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

466 16. state, lordship and community in the west
landed estate divided into two parts (hence ‘bi-partite’). One was worked
by the tenants of the estate to provide for their own sustenance. The other
part – the demesne – provided for the needs of the lord and was worked
by the tenants, who, in addition to various renders of produce, owed substantial
labour services to the estate. 90 Did late and post-Roman developments
mark an important stage in the formation of this characteristic rural
production unit of the medieval period?
There is some reason to think that at least its first foundations may have
been laid in the late Roman period and after. Detailed information on estate
organization in western Europe in the period 400–600 is rare to the point of
non-existence. No estate surveys survive, and very few charters, and there is
little to compare to the rich evidence provided by papyri from contemporary
Byzantine Egypt. However, an isolated piece of evidence reveals that in the
territory of Padua in c. a.d. 550, tenants (coloni) of the church of Ravenna
were obliged to undertake heavy labour services on their lord’s demesnes,
amounting to between one and three days per week (in addition to various
renders). As always, it is difficult to know what to make of an isolated
example. There is no other Italian evidence for characteristically manorial
organization for another two centuries, and the tenants of the papacy’s
Sicilian estates in c. 600 seem to have owed only renders and no labour
service. 91 On the other hand, it is wildly unlikely that chance has preserved
evidence from the only manorially organized estate of sixth-century Italy.
More generally, although this is again a much disputed question, it has
been argued that some (not necessarily all) villas in the late Roman period
were tending to become centres of rural population rather than remaining
the dwelling-places of individual landowners. Agache’s aerial surveys in the
Somme basin in northern France showed that many villages of the region,
deserted later in the medieval period, had a Roman villa underneath.
Arguments have also been advanced from place-name and other evidence
for seeing Roman villas as the generators of medieval villages across much
of the rest of the Frankish kingdom. If so, this would suggest that in the
late and post-Roman periods, the Roman villa in Gaul at least underwent a
transformation highly comparable to the process of nucleation observable
later in other areas of Europe, when dispersed rural populations gathered
in concentrated settlements. 92 As we have seen, the diminution in status of
tenant cultivators – the adscripticii, at least – was also creating, at broadly the
same time, a labour force highly subservient to the landowning class. It is
at least worth suggesting that a nucleation of settlement around some villas
in our period was accompanied by an extension of landlord control over
the relevant parts of the rural population.
90 A good historiographical introduction is Rösener (1989) 9–28. 91 Wickham (1981) 99–100.
92 Agache (1970); cf., more generally, Percival (1976) esp. chs. 8–9. Some bibliographical orientation
on nucleation and manorialization: Cheyette (1977); Blair (1991) ch. 1; Hildebrandt (1988).
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