III. THE ROMAN 'VILLA,' ITS EASY TRANSITION INTO THE LATER MANOR, AND ITS TENDENCY TO BECOME THE PREDOMINANT TYPE OF ESTATE.

The Roman villa like a manor.

The Roman villa was, in fact, exceedingly like a manor, and, moreover, becoming more and more so in the Gallic and German provinces, at least under the later empire as time went on.

An estate.

The villa, as described by Varro and Columella, before and shortly after the Christian era, was a farm—a jundus. It was not a mere residence, but, like the villa of the present day in Italy, a territory or estate in land.

The curtis.

The lord's homestead on the villa was surrounded by two enclosed 'cohortes,' or courts, from which was derived the word 'curtis,' so often applied to the later manor-house.[364]

The villicus and slaves.

At the entrance of the outer court was the abode of the 'villicus'—a strictly manorial officer, as we have seen—generally a slave chosen for his good qualities.[365] Near this was the common kitchen, where not only the food was cooked, but also the slaves performed their indoor work. Here also were cellars and granaries for the storing of produce, the cells in which were the night quarters of the slaves, and the underground 'ergastulum,' with its narrow windows, high and out of reach, where those slaves who were kept in chains lived, worked, and were tormented; for [p264] in the ergastulum was revealed the cruel side of the system of slave labour under Roman law. Columella says that the cleverest slaves must oftenest be kept in chains.[366] Cato, according to Plutarch, advised that slaves should be incited to quarrel amongst themselves, lest they should conspire against their master, and considered it to be cheaper to work them to death than to let them grow old and useless.[367]

In the inner 'cohort' were the stalls and stables for the oxen, horses, and other live stock; and all around was the land to be tilled.

Thus the Roman villa, if not at first a complete manor, was already an estate of a lord (dominus) worked by slaves under a villicus.

Sometimes the whole work of the estate was done by slaves; and though the estimates of historians have varied very much, there is no reason to doubt that in the first and second centuries the proportion of slaves to the whole population of the empire was enormous.

The decuriæ, slaves.

But even the management of slaves required organisation. The anciently approved Roman method of managing the slaves on a villa was to form them into groups of tens, called decuriæ, each under an overseer or decurio.[368]

The villicus, or general steward of the manor, was sometimes a freedman. And there was a strong reason why a freedman was often put in a position of trust, viz. that if he should be dishonest, or show [p265] ingratitude to his patron, he was liable to be degraded again into slavery. There is an interesting fragment of Roman law which suggests that the decurio of a gang of slaves was sometimes a freedman, and that it was a common practice to assign to the freedman a portion of land and a decuria of slaves, and no doubt oxen also to work it, thus putting him very much in the position of a colonus with slaves under him. The result of his betrayal of trust, in the case mentioned in the fragment, was his degradation, and the resumption by his patron of the decuria of slaves.[369] Thus we learn that the lord of a villa might, in addition to his home farm worked by the slaves in his own homestead, have portions of the land of his estate let out, as it were, to farm to freedmen, each with his decuria of slaves, and paying rent in produce.

Groups of tens.

There was nothing very peculiarly Roman in this system of classification in tens. The fact that men everywhere have ten fingers makes such a classification all but universal. But the Romans certainly did use it for a variety of purposes—for taxation and military organisation as well as in the management of the slaves of a villa. And M. Guerard, probably with reason, connects these decuriæ of the Roman villa with the decaniæ, or groups of originally ten servile holdings, under a villicus or decanus, which are described on the estates of the Abbey of St. Germain in the Survey of the Abbot Irminon about A.D. 850.[370] So possibly a survival of a similar system may be traced also in the much earlier instances mentioned by Bede under date A.D. 655, in one of which [p266] King Oswy grants to the monastery at Hartlepool twelve possessiunculæ, each of 'ten families;' and in the other of which the abbess Hilda, having obtained a 'possession of ten families,' proceeds to build Whitby Abbey.[371] In all these cases of the Roman freedman and his decuria, the Gallic decanus and his decania, and the Saxon possessiuncula of ten families, there is the bundle of ten slaves or semi-servile tenants with their holdings, treated as the smallest usual territorial division.[372]

But to return to the Roman villa. The organisation of decuriæ of slaves was not the only resource of the lord in the management of his estate.

The coloni, on a villa.

Varro speaks of its being an open point, to be decided according to the circumstances of each farm, whether it were better to till the land by slaves or by freemen, or by both.[373] And Columella, speaking of the families or 'hands' upon a farm, says 'they are either slaves or coloni;' [374] and he goes on to say, 'It is pleasanter to deal with coloni, and easier to get out of them work than payments. . . . They will sooner ask to be let off the one than the other. The best coloni,' he says, 'are those which are indigeni, born on the estate and bound by hereditary ties to it.' Especially distant corn farms, he considers, are cultivated with less trouble by free coloni than by slaves under a villicus, because slaves are dishonest and lazy, neglect the cattle, and waste the produce; [p267] whilst coloni, sharing in the produce, have a joint interest with their lord.

Adscripti glebæ.

That the coloni sometimes were indigeni upon the estate, and were sometimes called originarii, shows the beginning at least of a tendency to treat them as adscripti glebæ, like the mediæval 'nativi.' Indeed, we find it laid down in the later laws of the empire that coloni leaving their lord's estate could be reclaimed at any time within thirty years.[375] And nothing could more clearly indicate the growth of the semi-servile condition of the colonus, as time went on, than the declaration (A.D. 531) that the son of a colonus who had done no service to the 'dominus terræ' during his father's lifetime, and had been absent more than thirty or forty years, could be recalled upon his father's death and obliged to continue the services due from the holding.[376]

We know from Tacitus that the typical colonus had his own homestead and land allotted to his use, and paid tribute to his lord in corn or cattle, or other produce. And there is a clause in the Justinian Code prohibiting the arbitrary increase of these tributes, another point in which the coloni resembled the later villani.[377]

Likeness to a manor.

Village round a villa.

A villa under a villicus, with servi under him living within the 'curtis' of the villa, and with a little group of coloni in their vicus also upon the estate, but outside the court, would thus be very much like a later manor indeed. And Frontinus,[378] describing [p268] the great extent of the latifundia, especially of provincial landowners, expressly says that on some of these private estates there was quite a population of rustics, and that often there were villages surrounding the villa like fortifications. It would seem then that the villas in the provinces were still more like manors than those in Italy.

The villa becoming the prevalent type of estate.

It is now generally admitted that indirectly, at least, the Roman conquest of German territory—the extension of the Roman province beyond the Rhine and along the Danube—added greatly to the number of semi-servile tenants upon the Roman provincial estates, and so tended more and more to increase during the later empire the manorial character of the 'villa;' whilst at the same time the pressure of Roman taxation within the old province of Gaul, and beyond it, was so great as steadily to force more and more of the free tenants on the Ager Publicus to surrender their freedom and swell the numbers of the semi-servile class on the greater estates; so that not only was the villa becoming more and more manorial itself, but also it was becoming more and more the prevalent type of estate.

As regards the first point, during the later empire there was direct encouragement given to landowners to introduce barbarians taken from recently conquered districts, and to settle them on their estates as coloni, and not as slaves. These foreign coloni became very numerous under the name of tributarii and perhaps 'læti;' so that the proportion of coloni to [p269] slaves was probably, during the later period of Roman rule, always increasing, and the Roman villa under its villicus was becoming more and more like a later manor, with a semi-servile village community of coloni or tributarii upon it in addition to the slaves.[379]

As regards the second point, the evidence will be given at a later stage of the inquiry.

Confining our attention at present to the Roman villa, and the slaves and semi-servile tenants upon it, we have finally to add to the fact of close resemblance to the later manor and manorial tenants proof of actual historical connexion and continuity in districts where the evidence is most complete.

A clear and continuous connexion can be traced in many cases, at all events in Gaul, between the Roman villa and the later manor.

German lords of villas.

In the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris the Visigothic and Burgundian invaders are described as adapting themselves roughly and coarsely to Roman habits in many respects. He speaks of their being put into the 'villas' as 'hospites.' Indeed, it is well known that these Teutonic invaders settled as invited guests, being called hospites or gasti;[380] that they shared the villas and lands of the Romans on the same system as that which was adopted when Roman legions—often of German soldiers—were quartered on a district, according to a well-known [p270] passage of the 'Codex Theodosianus.' [381] They took their sortes, or fixed proportions of houses and lands and slaves, and, sharing the lordship of these with their Roman 'consortes,' they must have sanctioned and adapted themselves to the manorial character of the villas whose occupation they shared, ultimately becoming themselves lords of villas probably as manorial as any Roman villas could be.[382]

Dr. P. Roth has shown that in Frankish districts many of the wealthy provincials remained, under Frankish rule, in unbroken possession of their former estates—their numerous 'villæ.' Amongst these the bishops and abbots were conspicuous examples. He shows that thousands of 'villæ' thus remained unchanged upon the widely extended ecclesiastical estates.[383]

Gregory of Tours speaks of the restitution by King Hildebert of the 'villas' unjustly seized under the lawless regime of Hilperic.[384] He also relates how bishops and monasteries were endowed by the transfer to them of villas with the slaves and coloni upon them.

Villas given to the Church.

Under the year 582, he mentions the death of a certain Chrodinus, also the subject of a poem by Fortunatus, a great benefactor of the clergy, and describes him as 'founding villas, setting vineyards, building houses [domos], making fields [culturas],' and then, having invited bishops of slender means to [p271] his table, after dinner 'kindly distributing these houses, with the cultivators and the fields, with the furniture, and male and female servants and household slaves [ministris et famulis], saying, "These are given to the Church, and whilst with these the poor will be fed, they will secure to me favour with God."' [385]

Here, then, after the Frankish conquest, we have the word villa still used for the typical estate; and the estate consists of the domus, with the vineyards and the fields, and their cultivators.

Turning to the earliest monastic records we have seen that the 'villas' or 'heims' of the abbeys of Wizenburg and Lorsch were in fact manors.

Villas become villages,

The donations to the Abbot of St. Germain-des-Prés,[386] in the neighbourhood of Paris, commenced in the year 558, and in the survey of the estates of the Abbey made in the year 820, there are described villas still cultivated by coloni, leti, &c.—villas which grew into villages which now bear the names of the villas out of which they sprang:—

and 'hems' which are manor.

The chartulary of the Abbey of St. Bertin also [p272] contains instructive examples. By the earliest charter of A.D. 648 the founder of the abbey granted to the monks his villa called 'Sitdiu,' and it included within it twelve sub-estates, one of them, the Tattinga Villa, which later is called in the cartulary Tattingaheim.[387]

The chief villa with these sub-estates was granted to the abbey 'cum domibus, ædificiis, terris cultis et incultis, mansiones cum silvis pratis pascuis, aquis aquarumve decursibus, seu farinariis, mancipiis, accolabus, greges cum pastoribus,' &c. &c., and therefore was a manor with both slaves (mancipia) and coloni, or other semi-servile tenants (accolæ) upon it, as indeed were the generality of villas handed over to the monasteries.

There seems, therefore, to be conclusive evidence not only of a remarkable resemblance, but also in many cases of a real historical continuity between the Roman 'villa' and the later Frankish manor.