270 Grey
Land and Its Exploitation
The survey evidence briefly explored in the preceding section encourages
the conclusion that settlement patterns were undergoing a series of gradual
transformations in the period. It is less easy to use that evidence to answer
questions about landownership, but it seems reasonable to propose that small,
medium, and large landholdings continued to coexist in the Italian country-
side, just as they had done in preceding centuries.29 Further, the evidence of
the charters detailing land units attached to the church of Ravenna, together
with certain chapters of the Edictum Theoderici suggest the existence of a mar-
ket in land, although the extent to which that market involved participants at
all socio-economic levels is difficult to determine. Certainly, it is possible to
identify exceptionally wealthy landowners with extensive holdings, and eccle-
siastical estates are also a noteworthy feature of the Ostrogothic landscape.
But it is overly pessimistic to assume that the period witnessed the widespread
dispossession of small landowners and the transformation of these erstwhile
free individuals into dependent tenants. In what follows, I explore practices
of exploitation and patterns of landholding as they can be reconstructed from
the rather limited textual evidence, leaving discussion of tenancy and other
types of labour relations for the following section.
Scholars now recognize that Theoderic and his Ostrogoths did not encoun-
ter agriculture for the first time when they arrived in Italy, although manifest
challenges attend any attempt to establish with absolute certainty the nature
of their agricultural regimes and the relationship between grains and animals
in their diet.30 It is likewise difficult to untangle the impact of immigrating
populations on agricultural technologies such as ploughing, although these
difficulties have not discouraged scholars from engaging enthusiastically in
this debate.31 In broad terms, we should expect that the agricultural regimes
that the Ostrogoths did encounter in the late 5th century encompassed culti-
vation of cereals and other plants as well as animal husbandry. If the roughly
contemporaneous Opus Agriculturae of the Gallo-Roman agronomist Palladius
is anything to go by, a diversity of crops were known in the period and those
crops were typically planted in combinations in three distinct plantings: wheat
29 See, for a broad survey account and fuller references, Grey, “Concerning Rural Matters”.
30 See the attempts of Forni, “Dall’agricoltura dei Goti”, especially p. 680; Kokowski,
“Agriculture of the Goths”. Also, the synthesis and comments of Del Lungo, “Paesaggio,
cultura et vocazioni”, pp. 213–14.
31 Forni, “Dall’agricoltura dei Goti”, pp. 700–1 dismisses a Germanic origin for the new,
heavier ploughs of the period.