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]