Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/553

 APPENDIX 531 (2) Opposed to these groups of small farms and the peasant proprietors who cultivated them, were the large estates {lSi6araTa) of rich OAvners and the depen- dent coloni who tilled them. Many of these estates belonged to churches and abV)e3's ; others were crown estates (part of the res privata, or iYie patrirtionhim, or the divina doraus) ; others were owned b}- private persons. The peasants who worked on these estates were of two kinds : — (a) Free tenants (fjnaduroi, liheri coloni), who cultivated their holdings at their own expense, paying a rent (whether in gold or kind) to the proprietor. At the end of thirtj' years of such tenure, the tenant (and his posterity) became bound to the land in perpetuitj' ; he could not give up his farm, and on the other hand the proprietor could not eject him. But excej)t for this restriction he had no disabilities, and could enter into ordinary legal relations with the proprietor, who had no claims upon his private property. [h] The labourers {ivairoypacpoi, adscriptitii) were freemen like the tenants, and (like the tenants of over thirty years) were " fixed to the clod". But their indigence distinguished them from the tenants ; they were taken in by a pro- prietor to labour on his estate, and became his serfs, receiving from him a dwell- ing and board for their services. Their freedom gave these labourers one or two not verj- valuable privileges which seemed to raise them above the rural slaves ; but we sjrmpathize with Justinian when he found it hard to see the difference between servi &xiA adscriptitii." For good or bad, thej- were in their master'.s power, and the only hold they had on him was the right of not being turned off from his estate. The difference between the rural slave and the serf, which seemed to Justinian microscopic, was gradually obliterated by the elevation of the former class to the dignity of the latter. As to the origin of the adscriptitii, it seems to have been due to the financial policy of the Constantinian period, which aimed at allowing no man to abandon the state of life to which he or his father before him had been called. Such were the agricultural classes in the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries — peasant proprietors on one hand, and on the other the cultivators of great estates, whether tenants bound to the soil or serf-labourers. And these classes continued to exist till the latest age of the Empire. If the Iconoclastic reformers had had their way, perhaps the history of the agricultural classes would have been widely different. The abolition of the principle which the first Christian Emperor had adopted, of nailing men to the clod, was part of the programme which was carried out by the Iconoclast Emperors and reversed by their succes- sors. The storms of the 7th century, the invasions of Slavs and Saracens, had made considerable changes in the condition of the provincial lands. The Illyric peninsula had been in many parts occupied by Slavonic settlers ; in many cases the dispossessed provincials had fled to other parts of the Empire ; and Emperors had transferred whole populations from one place to another, to replenish deserted districts. These changes rendered a revision of the land laws imperative ; and, when an able sovereign at length came to the throne, he set himself the task of regu- lating the conditions of agriculture. The Agricultural Code (I'd/xos yewpyiKSs) was issued either by Leo III. or by his son, who worked in the same spirit as the father ; it consists chiefly of police provisions in regard to rural crimes and mis- demeanours, but it presumes a state of things completely different from that which existed in the 6th century and existed again in the 10th. In this Code no man is nailed to the clod, and we hear nothing of serf-labourers (adscriptitii) or of services owed by freemen to landlords. "We cannot ascribe this radical change, the abolition of what we may call serfdom, to any other sovereign than the reformer Leo III. The Agricultural Code shows us peasant proprietors in their village communi- ties as before ; but it shows us, too, — and here we get a glimpse of the new settle- ■-Cod. Just. II, 48, 21.