The Landed Aristocracy and the Beginning of Serfdom

Adapted from G. Bloch, in Lavisse: Histoire de France

IN the fourth century most of the land in the Roman Empire was in the possession of the senatorial nobility. This nobility had its rise from the practice of conferring the office of senator without requiring the recipients of the honor to take their seats in the senate, or even to reside at Rome. Many of them lived in the provinces, and there were not a few who had never been away from home. They were senators, nevertheless, in the full enjoyment of the titles and privileges of their high station, and with the right of transmitting them to their children. Appointment to certain governmental posts or the mere will of the emperor would also confer it. Hence this nobility was more than a mere hereditary caste; it was an order to which all ambitious men might aspire.

The strength of this aristocracy, which, because of its advantages, swallowed up the lesser nobility, lay in its possession of the land. Landed property was in this era the chief source of public wealth and the most honorable sort of riches. It was, therefore, the source of all consideration and power. We shall examine the methods by which this nobility got possession of the soil and drew wealth from it, and in so doing we shall discover the causes of its power and gain an insight into the condition of the rural population.

The peculiarity of the Roman organization of landed property was its conception of the fundus or domain. This word had several synonyms: ager, meaning field, villa, the home of a master, and cortis, the court or yard of a farm. Fundus was, however, the strict legal term. The Romans carried the idea of the fundus with them into its provinces. The distinctive attribute of the fundus was its indestructible unity. It almost always bore the name, from generation to generation, of the man who had owned it in the far-off time when it had first been placed upon the tax-register. It might be broken up by sale or inheritance, but in the eyes of the law it remained undivided, and the coöwners merely possessed parts of it. If one man acquired several contiguous fundi, each retained its individuality and its name. The explanation of this peculiarity is undoubtedly the simplification of the work of taxation which resulted.

We must avoid confusing the fundus with a modern village. The Romans had no village in our sense of the word. The nearest approach to it was their vicus, a group of dwellings. Most European villages have a council or government of some sort of their own; the vicus had nothing of the kind. The smallest area which had, under the Romans, a right to make municipal regulations of its own was the civitas, which was composed of a town portion and a country portion dependent upon the former. The vicus, then, was not a division of the soil. All the soil was divided as follows: first the civitas, then the pagus, which was a subdivision of the civitas, and, finally, the fundus, which was a subdivision of the pagus. These were the only divisions known to the tax-officials. It should be clear that a fundus could not be part of a vicus, though there might be several vici on one fundus.

These vici were inhabited by tenants more or less unfree. There was another sort of vicus, dwelt in by freemen, but it was unusual, and toward the end of the empire it sank into insignificance before the onward march of the large estate. The growing importance of the large estate did not, of course, affect the permanence of the fundi. The joining of one fundus to another did not disturb its individuality, and, furthermore, the large estate was not necessarily composed of contiguous fundi. In Gaul the large estate of many a rich proprietor was scattered over a wide area, although there was a constant tendency to increase the size of the adjacent portions.

The struggle between the proprietors of large and of small domains has always been an unequal one. It was still more unequal in the period we are discussing. A large domain was more than so many acres of meadow, vineyard, forest, and cultivated land. It was a little world sufficient to itself and provided with agricultural toilers and artisans of every sort. How could a small proprietor compete with such an accumulation of resources? His expenses were relatively greater and his profits smaller. If his small capital gave out he could not borrow, for there was little money in circulation, and the rate of interest was exceedingly high. If political catastrophes prevented the cultivation of the soil and caused famine, he was ruined. That is what happened in the second half of the third century. And the vices of the system of taxation heaped to the full his cup of woe. We shall see below how the land-taxes fell with all their crushing weight on those least able to bear them. The small proprietor was compelled to abandon the struggle.

The enslavement of the rural population took place in a variety of ways.

One of the most usual was that of patronage. This was not a novelty. The Romans had always been familiar with it, and the Gauls had practised it before the Roman conquest. It did not involve any inconvenient personal subjection so long as the government of the State remained strong. But it became dangerous under the weak sway of the later Roman Empire. The empire at this time had little hold upon the senatorial aristocracy, which was powerful through its riches, its local attachments, and its independence, which the State itself had fostered. Its members were subject to the jurisdiction of the provincial governor in civil matters, but in criminal matters they had been exempted from responsibility to any one save the emperor or his immediate representative, the pretorian prefect, and these were too distant to be any real check. This practical immunity from external control explains adequately the lawlessness of the nobility. Their commonest breach of justice and the laws was perhaps the seizure of land, by fraud or force. The emperors in vain directed their functionaries to oppose such lawlessness, for they had, as we have just seen, rendered them powerless in advance. Is it surprising, then, if the weak landholders more and more fell into the habit of seeking from the strong that support which they could not get from the law? Such an one would apply to a powerful man, would commend himself to him, to escape the land-tax, gain a lawsuit, secure protection against an injustice, or obtain the means of perpetrating one. Patronage, or commendation, accordingly, spread like a huge net over the whole social body. The State, moreover, saw the peril. It declared all such agreements void, and threatened with severe punishments those who made them. It was useless. Then the State thought that it could compete with these private agreements by offering similar public ones. It offered to become a patron, against itself, in the person of the defensor of the city. It failed again. The mere idea of such a system was virtual abdication.

This commendation was generally completed by the precarium, which was also a very ancient usage. This was the name given to a grant of land which was made to an individual, free of cost, in response to his request, or prayer. Hence the name precarium. The precarium did not involve any abandonment of ownership by the giver. It was revocable "at will," whenever he wished, in accordance with the legal doctrine that no one could be bound by his own generosity. Moreover, the grant was of necessity a gratuitous one, for any obligation imposed upon the receiver would have violated the essential nature of the precarium and made of it a species of legal contract. That was the theory. In practice, it is fairly certain that the receiver of a precarium was not satisfied to be a tenant at will, and that the landowner obtained some compensation. There had to be something to make the precarium advantageous to both parties, and, as a matter of fact, the proprietor did impose a rent upon his precarious tenant. The threat of eviction would, without any legal sanction, insure the payment of it. As long as the tenant paid his rent, he could be morally certain of keeping the use of the land and transmitting it to his children. The precarium, then, was nothing but a disguised method of renting land, in which the proprietor was not legally bound and the tenant-farmer had to rely upon usage for his possession and possessory rights.

The transformation of the small proprietor into a tenant of this sort might result from a loan. The lender would prefer a more profitable kind of security than the ordinary mortgage. The borrower accordingly sold him his land for the amount of the loan, it being understood that he could buy it back by repaying the loan with interest. Until repayment he enjoyed the use of the land under a precarious title. If he never made repayment, which was generally the case, he remained a precarious tenant all his life long, and at his death his children could, with the consent of the creditor, take his place. Another method of constituting a precarium, apparently the most usual of all, was the extension of the commendation from the man to his land. After all, the protection of the man, unless his property were protected, would not suffice. But this protection, too, must be paid for. The small proprietor accordingly gave his land to the large one by a fictitious sale, which the law in vain condemned, and became the precarious tenant of his protector. After all, it was better to have a well-defended precarium than an estate liable to be pillaged by the first robber.

Commendation combined with the precarium was one of the most potent means of developing the large estate. But it...