Frankish 'Terra Regis' divided into Villæ, or Manors.
As we have said, the use of the word 'villa' in the Salic laws and early capitularies, for the smallest general territorial unit as well as for the 'villa' of a private lord, would thus perhaps be most easily accounted for. And possibly the continuity which such a result would indicate between Roman and Frankish institutions might, after all, be confirmed by the seeming continuity, in name at least, between the fiscal officers of the later empire and those of the Salic and Ripuarian, and other early barbarian codes. The appearance of the dux and the comes and the centenarius in these codes, and in the early capitularies, as the military, fiscal and judicial officers of the Frankish kings, is at least suggestive of continuity in fiscal and judicial arrangements, though of course it does not follow that many German elements may not have been directly imported into institutions which, even under the later Roman rule in the Romano-German provinces, already indirectly and to some extent were [p304] no doubt the compound product of both Roman and German ingredients.[450]
The settlement of these difficult points perhaps belongs to constitutional rather than to economic history.
The process of commendation commenced under Roman rule.
Having noticed the evident tendencies of the fiscal district of the later empire to approach the manorial type, and to become a crown villa or manor with dependent holdings upon it, we must pass on to a further important effect of the oppression of the imperial officers. We have noticed the edicts intended to prevent the tenants on the imperial domain from putting themselves under their direct 'patrocinium.' These edicts did not prevent the over-burdened and oppressed tenant from putting himself under the 'patrocinium' of the lord of a neighbouring villa, thereby becoming his semi-servile tenant, in order to escape from the cruel exactions of the tax-gatherer.
This process was called 'commendation,' and it was carried out on a remarkable scale. It consisted in the surrender by the smaller tenants on the public lands of themselves and their property to some richer landowner; so parting with their inheritance and their freedom whilst receiving back a mere occupation of their holding by way of usufruct only as a 'præcarium,' or for life, as a servile tenement, paying [p305] to their lord the fixed census or 'gafol' of the servile tenant.
And so hastened on manorial tendencies.
By this process they rapidly swelled the number of servile tenants on villas of the manorial type, and hastened the growing prevalence of the manorial system.[451]
Commendation very ancient.
This process of commendation was nothing new. It was an old tribal practice at work long before Roman times in Gaul, and destined not only to outlast the Roman rule, but also to receive a fresh impulse afterwards from the German invasions. And as its progress can be traced step by step from Roman times, through the period of conquest into the times of settled Frankish rule, and its history is closely mixed up with the history of the growth of the Roman villa into the mediæval manor, and with the change of the 'sordida munera' from public burdens into manorial services, it presents useful stepping-stones over a gulf not otherwise to be easily crossed with security.