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peers and lords: local communities 467
The argument cannot be pressed. It is entirely possible to have a marked
increase in vertical bonds of lordship within a society, without, in the first
instance at least, generating a world of nucleated great estates. In the Metz
region of north-eastern Francia, an established nobility, passing on inherited
status, seems to have emerged in the eighth century, but bi-partite
manors only in the ninth. 93 Nucleation of settlement can also occur
without generating any increase in the powers of landlords. Villages existed
across much of the Mediterranean region in the Roman period without
manors coming into existence, and, acting as human collectivities, they
could even frustrate the designs of landowners. 94
Indeed, across much of northern Europe, it was only long after the fall
of Rome that processes of nucleation and manorialization worked themselves
out. The subject has been explored to greatest depth for Anglo-
Saxon England, where these processes can be dated, in the arable lands of
central and southern England, between the seventh and the ninth century;
further north it was still under way in the twelfth. In the Frankish kingdom,
the Carolingian polyptychs demonstrate the existence of bi-partite estates
on monastic holdings in its north-central heartlands by the ninth century,
but the system was clearly not new at that point. The seventh and eighth
centuries have been suggested as the moment of their evolution.
Elsewhere, the position is far from clear, but the eighth and ninth centuries
would seem to have been an important period of bi-partite estate formation
in Lombard Italy. Outside Roman Europe, the demonstrable date for
nucleation is generally even later. Nucleated rural settlements in Saxony, for
example, seem to have resulted from the imposition of Carolingian lordship
there in the ninth century and beyond. 95 Nevertheless, a local society
dominated by an élite of free peasants survived in parts of Brittany well
into the ninth century, and such societies had probably prevailed across
much of western Europe up to the Carolingian period. 96
Conclusions can only be tentative, but some broad outlines of development
seem clear. In the long term, the rural landscape was remade into a
series of estate units, under the domination of a powerful landlord class.
These formed the primary local communities for medieval peasants. Some
of the necessary transformations underlying this process were already
under way in the late imperial period, and some late Roman landlords may
have already essentially turned their estates into manors. Where the migration
period saw substantial settlements of outsiders, such as around Metz,
these processes were probably halted or even reversed as lands were
93 Halsall (1995) 262ff.
94 The experience of Libanius in Antioch: Liebeschuetz (1972) 67–71 with refs. On all these issues,
see further ch. 12 (Ward-Perkins), pp. 327,33 above.
95 Anglo-Saxon England: Unwin (1988). Carolingian polyptychs: e.g. Duby (1974). Italy: Wickham
(1981) 100ff. Saxony: Nitz (1988). 96 Brittany: see above, n. 85; cf. Wickham (1992).
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