The beginning of the process can be traced apparently at work during the later empire.
The Imperial military and fiscal officers.
The German and Gallic provinces had for long been considered as in an especial sense Imperial provinces, and their 'ager publicus' and tithe-lands had become regarded to a great extent as the personal domain of the emperors. They were under the personal control of his imperial procuratores, or agents.[443]
In fact there had grown up strictly imperial classes of military and fiscal officers with local jurisdiction over larger or smaller areas. There were the 'duces,' or 'magistri militum,' and 'comites,' and 'vicarii,' [444] whilst in the lowest rank of 'procuratores,' possibly controlling smaller fiscal districts or [p301] subdistricts, were the 'ducenarii,' and 'centenarii.' [445] They seem to have combined military, and judicial, and fiscal duties with functions belonging to a local police.
Whatever at first the exact position and authority of these military and fiscal officers of the Emperor may have been, there is evidence that they easily assumed a kind of manorial lordship over the portion of the public domains under their charge in two distinct ways.
Were apt to assume a sort of lordship in their district.
In the first place, the 'villa' in which a military or fiscal officer lived was the fiscal centre of his district. He was the 'villicus' by whom the 'annonæ,' tribute, and 'sordida munera' were exacted. In some instances the services seem to have been rendered in the form of work on his 'villa,' or on the villas of 'conductores,' by whom the special products of some districts were sometimes farmed.[446] And there are passages in the Codes which complain of the tendency in these Imperial officers of higher and lower rank to oppress those under their jurisdiction, even sometimes using their services on their own estates, and thus arrogating to themselves almost the position of manorial lords, whilst reducing their fiscal dependants to the position of semi-servile tenants.[447] [p302]
Take persons and villages under their patrocinium.
In the second place, the practice also was complained of by which the fiscal officers, using their influence unduly, induced tenants on the public lands of their district, and sometimes even whole villages, to place themselves under their 'patrocinium,' thereby practically converting themselves into semi-servile tenants of a mesne lord who stood between them and the emperor.[448]
The question would be well worth a more careful consideration than can be given here how far these tendencies towards the gradual establishment under [p303] the later empire of a manorial relation between the 'coloni' and 'læti' on the crown lands, and the fiscal officer of the district in which they lived, were the beginnings of a process which ended in the division of the crown lands practically into 'villæ,' or districts appendant to the villa of the fiscal officer, which in their turn may have been the prototypes of the villas or manors on the 'terra regis' of Frankish and Saxon kings.[449]