B. THE FARMER’S LAW.
The so-called ‘Farmer’s Law,’ νόμος γεωργικός, is now assigned by the critics to the time of the Iconoclast emperors, say about 740 AD. It is an official document of limited scope, not a general regulative code governing agricultural conditions in all parts of the eastern empire. Its text origin arrangement and the bearing of its evidence have been much discussed, and it will suffice here to refer to the articles of Mr Ashburner[1826] on the subject. What concerns me is the position of farmers under the Byzantine empire in the eighth century as compared with that of the fourth or fifth century coloni, and the different lines of development followed by country life in East and West. Therefore it is only necessary to consider some of the main features of the picture revealed to us by various details of the Farmer’s Law.
The first point that strikes a reader is that the serf[1827] colonus has apparently disappeared. Land is held by free owners, who either themselves provide for its cultivation or let it to tenants who take over that duty. The normal organization is in districts (χωρία) each of which contains a number of landowners, who either farm their own land or, if short of means (ἄποροι), let it to other better-equipped farmers of the same district. Thus the transactions are locally limited, and the chief object of the law is to prevent misdeeds that might prejudicially affect the prosperity of the local farmers. These are in a sense partners or commoners (κοινωνοί), the ‘commonalty’ (κοινότης) of the district, which is a taxation-unit with its members jointly liable. The district seems to be regarded as originally common and then divided into members’ lots, with a part reserved perhaps as common pasture. Redivision is contemplated, and the lots seem to belong rather to the family than to the individual. To judge from the tone of the rules, it seems certain that the farmers and their families are a class working with their own hands. But there are also wage-earning labourers, and slaves owned or hired for farm work. Tenancy on shares, like the partiary system in Roman Law, appears as an established practice, and in one passage (clause 16) Mr Ashburner detects a farmer employed at a salary, in short a mercennarius.
Thus we find existing what are a kind of village communities, the landowning farmers in which are free to let land to each other and also to exchange farms if they see fit to do so. How far they are free to flit from one commune to another remains doubtful. And there is no indication that they are at liberty to dispose of their own land-rights to outsiders. There appears however side by side with these communal units another system of tenancies in which individual farmers hire land from great landlords. Naturally the position of such tenants is different from that of tenants under communal owners: the matter is treated at some length by Mr Ashburner. What proportion the corn crop generally bore to other produce in the agriculture of the Byzantine empire contemplated by these regulations, the document does not enable us to judge. Vineyards and figyards were clearly an important department, and also gardens for vegetables and fruit. Live stock, and damage done to them and by them, are the subject of many clauses, nor is woodland forgotten. But the olive does not appear. So far as one may guess, the farming was probably of a mixed character. The penalties assigned for offences are often barbarous, including not only death by hanging or burning but blinding and other mutilations of oriental use. At the same time the ecclesiastical spirit of the Eastern empire finds expression in the bestowal of a curse on one guilty of cheating, referring I suppose primarily to undiscovered fraud.
The state of things inferred from the provisions of the ‘Farmer’s Law’ is so remarkable in itself, and so different from the course of rustic development in the West, that we are driven to seek an explanation of some kind. Many influences may have contributed to produce so striking a differentiation. But one can hardly help suspecting that there was some one great influence at work in the eastern empire, to which the surprising change noted above was mainly due. In his History of the later Roman Empire[1828] Professor Bury has offered a conjectural solution of the problem. It is to be sought in the changes brought about in the national character and the external history of the Empire. Since the middle of the sixth century north-west Asia Minor and the Balkan country had been filled with Slavonic settlers, and other parts with other new colonists. Now the new settlers, particularly the Slavs, were not used to the colonate system or the rigid bond of hereditary occupations, and emperors busied in imperial defence on the North and East knew better than to force upon them an unwelcome system. Invasions had reduced the populations of frontier provinces and shattered the old state of serfdom. Resettlement on a large scale had to be carried out within the empire, and under new conditions to suit the changed character of the population. Among the new elements that produced this change the most important was the coming of the Slavs.
For the Slavs had themselves no institution corresponding to the German laeti. Slaves indeed they had, but not free cultivators attached to the soil. Therefore they could not, like the Germans in the West, adapt themselves to the Roman colonate; accordingly their intrusion led to its abolition. In support of this view the well-known Slavonic peasant communities are cited as evidence. Nor can it be denied that this consideration has some weight. But, while we may provisionally accept the conclusion that Slavonic influences had something, perhaps much, to do with the new turn given to the conditions of rustic life in the East, we must not press it so far as to infer that the colonate-system was extinct there. In no case could the ‘Farmer’s Law’ fairly be used to prove the negative: and moreover it is apparently the case according to Mr Ashburner that the document is not a complete agricultural code for all agricultural classes within the empire. If it is ‘concerned exclusively with a village community, composed of farmers who cultivate their own lands,’ it cannot prove the non-existence of other rustic conditions different in kind. Colonate seems to have disappeared, while slavery has not. But that is the utmost we can say. The slave at least is still there. As to the important question, whether the farmers contemplated in the Law enjoy a real freedom of movement, as has been thought, it is best to refer a reader to the cautious reserve of Mr Ashburner.
The one general inference that I venture to draw from these two authorities is that, however much or little the conditions of agriculture may have changed in the surviving Eastern part of the Roman empire, the employment of slave labour still remained.