463 



concerns me is the position of farmers under the Byzantine empire in the eighth 

 century as compared with that of the fourth or fifth century coloni, and the 

 different lines of development followed by country life in East and West. 

 Therefore it is only necessary to consider some of the main features of the 

 picture revealed to us by various details of the Farmer's Law. 



The first point that strikes a reader is that the serf 1 colonus has apparently 

 disappeared. Land is held by free owners, who either themselves provide for 

 its cultivation or let it to tenants who take over that duty. The normal organi- 

 zation is in districts (x w P t/a ) each of which contains a number of landowners, 

 who either farm their own land or, if short of means (aTropot), let it to other 

 better-equipped farmers of the same district. Thus the transactions are locally 

 limited, and the chief object of the law is to prevent misdeeds that might pre- 

 judically affect the prosperity of the local farmers. These are in a sense partners 

 or commoners (KOIVCDVOI), the 'commonalty' (KOIVOTIJS) of the district, which is 

 a taxation-unit with its members jointly liable. The district seems to be regarded 

 as originally common and then divided into members' lots, with a part reserved 

 perhaps as common pasture. Redivision is contemplated, and the lots seem 

 to belong rather to the family than to the individual. To judge from the tone 

 of the rules, it seems certain that the farmers and their families are a class 

 working with their own hands. But there are also wage-earning labourers, and 

 slaves owned or hired for farm work. Tenancy on shares, like the partiary 

 system in Roman Law, appears as an established practice, and in one passage 

 (clause 1 6) Mr Ashburner detects a farmer employed at a salary, in short a 

 mercennarius. 



Thus we find existing what are a kind of village communities, the land- 

 owning farmers in which are free to let land to each other and also to exchange 

 farms if they see fit to do so. How far they are free to flit from one commune 

 to another remains doubtful. And there is no indication that they are at 

 liberty to dispose of their own land-rights to outsiders. There appears however 

 side by side with these communal units another system of tenancies in which 

 individual farmers hire land from great landlords. Naturally the position of 

 such tenants is different from that of tenants under communal owners: the 

 matter is treated at some length by Mr Ashburner. What proportion the corn 

 crop generally bore to other produce in the agriculture of the Byzantine empire 

 contemplated by these regulations, the document does not enable us to judge. 

 Vineyards and figyards were clearly an important department, and also gardens 

 for vegetables and fruit. Live stock, and damage done to them and by them, 

 are the subject of many clauses, nor is woodland forgotten. But the olive does 

 not appear. So far as one may guess, the farming was probably of a mixed 

 character. The penalties assigned for offences are often barbarous, including 

 not only death by hanging or burning but blinding and other mutilations of 

 oriental use. At the same time the ecclesiastical spirit of the Eastern empire 

 finds expression in the bestowal of a curse on one guilty of cheating, referring 

 I suppose primarily to undiscovered fraud. 



1 The truth seems to be that serfage had never become so widespread in the East as in 

 the West, as Mr Bouchier, Syria as a Roman Province p 181, points out. 



