I cannot lose this opportunity of referring to a very interesting little book by M. Augé-Laribé, L’évolution de la France agricole [Paris 1912]. Much of it bears directly on the labour-question, and sets forth the difficulties hindering its solution. It is peculiarly valuable to a student of the question in the ancient world, because it lays great stress on the effect of causes arising from modern conditions. Causes operating in both ancient and modern times are thereby made more readily and clearly perceptible. Such modern influences in particular as the vast development of transport, the concentration of machine-industries in towns, and the constant attraction of better and more continuous wage-earning, by which the rustic is drawn to urban centres, are highly significant. The difference from ancient conditions is so great in degree that it practically almost amounts to a difference in kind. So too in the material resources of agriculture: the development of farm-machinery has superseded much hand-labour, while Science has increased the possible returns from a given portion of soil.
Most significant of all from my point of view is the author’s insistence on the irregularity of wage-earning in rustic life as an active cause of the flitting of wage-earners to the towns. This brings it home to a student that a system of rustic slavery implies a set of conditions incompatible with such an economic migration; and also that the employment of slaves by urban craftsmen would not leave many eligible openings for immigrant rustics. It is fully consistent with my view that the wage-earning rustic was a rare figure in the Greco-Roman world.
It is perhaps in the remedies proposed by the author for present evils (and for the resulting depopulation of the countryside) that the contrast of ancient and modern is most clearly marked. Bureaucratic the French administrative system may be: but it is not the expression of a despotism that enslaves its citizens in the frantic effort to maintain itself against pressure from without. For individuals and organizations are free to think speak and act, and so to promote what seems likely to do good. Initiative and invention are not deadened by the fear that betterment will only serve as a pretext for increase of burdens. Stationary by instinct the French peasant proprietor may be: but he is free to move if he will, and no one dare propose to tie him to the soil by law.
Nor can I omit a reference to a paper of the late Prof Pelham on The Imperial domains and the Colonate (1890, in volume of Essays, Oxford 1911).
The simplicity of the solution there offered is most attractive, and the general value of the treatise great. But I do not think it a final solution of the problem. Not only are there variations of detail in the domains known to us from the African inscriptions (some of them found since 1890). That some of the regulations may have been taken over from those of former private owners is a point not considered. And there is no mention of the notable requisition of the services of coloni as mere retainers, to which Caesar refers without comment (above pp 183, 254). Therefore, while I welcome the proposition that the system of the Imperial domains had much to do with the creation of the later Colonate, I still think that earlier and more deep-seated causes cannot safely be ignored. Perhaps this is partly because I am looking at the matter from a labour point of view.
FROM DIOCLETIAN
LI. GENERAL INTRODUCTION.
If we desire to treat History as the study of causation in the affairs of mankind—and this is its most fruitful task—we shall find no more striking illustration of its difficulties than the agricultural system of the later Roman Empire. In the new model of Diocletian and Constantine we see the imperial administration reorganized in new forms[1551] deliberately adopted: policy expresses itself, after a century of disturbance, in a clear breach with the past. But, when Constantine in 332 legislates[1552] to prevent coloni from migrating, he refers to a class of men who are not their own masters but subject to control (iuris alieni), though he distinguishes them from slaves. Evidently he is not creating a new class: his intention is to prevent an existing class from evading its present responsibilities. They are by the fact of their birth attached as cultivators to their native soil. With this tie of origo[1553] goes liability to a certain proportion of imperial tax (capitatio). This is mentioned as a matter of course. Now we know that such serf-coloni formed at least a large part of the rustic population under the later Empire. We cannot but see that the loss of the power of free migration is the vital difference that marks off these tied farmers from the tenant farmers of an earlier period, the class whom Columella advised landlords to retain if possible. For these men cannot move on if they would. How came they to be in this strange condition, in fact neither slave nor free, so that Constantine had merely to crystallize relations already existing[1554] and the institution of serf-tenancy became a regular part of the system? If we are to form any notion of the conditions of farm labour in this period, we must form some notion of the causes that produced the later or dependent colonate. And this is no simple matter: on few subjects has the divergence of opinions been more marked than on this. I have stated my own conclusions above, and further considerations are adduced in this chapter.
Our chief source of evidence is the collection of legal acts of the Christian emperors issued by authority in the year 438, and known as the codex Theodosianus. It covers a period of more than a hundred years, and innumerable references to the land-questions attest the continual anxiety of the imperial government to secure adequate cultivation of every possible acre of land. Contemporary history may suggest motives for this nervousness. The increased expenses of the court and the administrative system made it necessary to raise more taxes than ever for the civil services. The armies, now mainly composed of Germans and other barbarians, were necessary for imperial defence, but very costly to equip pay and feed. Whether they were mercenaries drawing wages, or aliens settled as Roman subjects within the empire on lands held by tenure of military service, they were either a burden on the treasury or a doubtful element of the population that must at all costs be kept in good humour. On a few occasions Roman victories furnished numbers of barbarian prisoners to the slave-market. These would be dispersed over various districts, generally at some distance from the troubled frontiers, and the rustic slaves of whom we hear were doubtless in great part procured in this way. But that the rustic population consisted largely of actual slaves we have no reason to believe. Of estates worked on a vast scale by slave labour we hear nothing. Naturally; for the social and economic conditions favourable to that system had long passed away. Slaves were no longer plentiful, markets were no longer free. Under the Empire, the pride of great landlords needed a strong mixture of caution; under a greedy or spendthrift emperor the display of material wealth was apt to be dangerous. In the century of confusion before Diocletian agriculture had been much interrupted in many parts of the empire, and much land had gone out of cultivation. So serious was the situation in the later part of that period, that Aurelian[1555] imposed upon municipal senates the burden of providing for the cultivation of derelict farms.