The English Village Community / Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry; An Essay in Economic History (Reprinted from the Fourth Edition)

by Frederic Seebohm

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.