Steward-system not extinct, actor 367 



against loss from the acts of his lessee was evidently an object of the 

 first importance, and this is in harmony with the Roman lawyers' 

 intense respect for rights of property. The general impression left on 

 the reader of their utterances on this subject is that a landlord, after 

 providing a considerable instrumentum, had done all that could 

 reasonably be expected from him. Improvements, the desirability of 

 which was usually discovered through the tenant's experience, were 

 normally regarded as the tenant's business : it was only necessary to 

 prevent the landlord from arbitrarily confiscating what the tenant had 

 done to improve his property. Obviously such ' improvements ' were 

 likely to occasion disputes as to the value of the work done : but it 

 was the custom of the countryside to refer technical questions of this 

 kind to the arbitration of an impartial umpire (vir bonus), no doubt 

 a neighbour familiar with local circumstances. On the whole, it does 

 not appear that the law treated the colonus badly under this head, and 

 the difficulty of securing good tenants may be supposed to have 

 guaranteed him against unfair administration. 



A great many more details illustrating the position of coloni as 

 they appear in the Digest could be added here, but I think the above 

 will be found ample for my purpose. The next topic to be dealt with 

 is that of labour, so far as the references of the lawyers give us any 

 information. First it is to be noted that the two systems 1 of estate- 

 management, that of cultivation for landlord's account by his actor or 

 vilicus, and that of letting to tenant farmers, were existing side by 

 side. The latter plan was to all appearance more commonly followed 

 than it would seem to have been in the time of Columella, but the 

 former was still working. A confident opinion as to the comparative 

 frequency 2 of the two systems is hardly to be formed on Digest evi- 

 dence: for in rustic matters the interest of lawyers was almost solely 

 concerned with the relations of landlord and tenant. What an owner 

 did with his own property on his own account was almost entirely his 

 own business. There are signs that a certain change in the traditional 

 nomenclature represents a real change of function in the case of land- 

 lords' managers. The term actor is superseding 3 vilicus, but the vilicus 

 still remains. He would seem to be now more of a mere farm-bailiff, 

 charged with the cultivation of some part or parts of an estate that 

 are not let to tenants. It may even be that he is left with a free hand 

 and only required to pay a fixed 4 yearly return. If so, this arrange- 

 ment is not easily to be distinguished from the case of a slave colonus 



1 Alternative, xx i 32. 



2 A curious case is the putting in an imaginarius colonus [of course at a high nominal 

 j rent] in order to raise the selling price of a farm, xix i 49 (jurist of 4th cent), earlier in 



Fr Vat 13. 



3 See xxxn 4 i 5 , xxxiv 4 31?'. * xxxm 7 i8 4 , so 1 , XL 7 4 o 5 . 



