386 Migration forbidden 



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 1 deliber- 

 ately adopted : policy expresses itself, after a century of disturbance, 

 in a clear breach with the past. But, when Constantine in 332 legislates 2 

 to prevent coloni from migrating, he refers to a class of men who are 

 not their own masters but subject to control (juris 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* goes liability 

 to a certain proportion of imperial tax (capitatid). 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 4 

 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 ad- 

 duced 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 



1 There were in the latter half of the third century some signs of the coming recon- 

 struction. But they came to no effect. 



2 Cod Th V 17 (9) i apud quemcumque colonus iuris alieni fuerit inventus, is nonsolum 

 eundem origini suae restituat verum super eodem capitationem temporis agnoscat... etc. 

 Runaway coloni are to be chained like slaves, iuris alieni the control of someone other than 

 the person harbouring him. The colonus is legally dependent, though nominally free. 



3 See Weber, Agrargeschichte pp 256 foil. 4 See Seeck n 320 foil, 330 foil. 



