Landowning and Labour in the Rural Economy 275
a straightforward proxy for its pervasiveness in society. Certainly, we observe
in the chapters of the Edictum Theoderici a keen interest in the maintenance
of property boundaries, and in clearly establishing the ownership of specific
fields. Thus, for example, we witness entries forbidding individuals from rais-
ing either their own titles of ownership on property belonging to another or
the name of another on their own property.53 If boundary markers are tam-
pered with, punishments are prescribed, which vary according to whether the
domini of the fields in question are found to be complicit or solely the cultiva-
tors (coloni or servi) who are responsible for working those fields.54 Forcible
seizure of another’s property—even it would seem in the case of debt—is sin-
gled out for particular opprobrium, and assigned a capital penalty, as a case of
violentia.55 Moreover, sales and donations of property are to be publicly trans-
acted and acknowledged, and the resulting changes in ownership entered into
the municipal registers (gesta municipales).56
These concerns are entirely in step with the legislation of the 4th and 5th
centuries, where the motivation for prescribing the public transaction of
transfers of property and forbidding forcible expulsion of one’s neighbours
was to maintain the integrity of the tax system, which had come to rest even
more heavily and explicitly on establishing clear and transparent connections
between particular parcels of land and the individuals who could be held
responsible for the fiscal burdens assessed on that land. However, the atten-
dant system of recording proved to be unwieldy, and difficult to reconcile with
the rather more flexible land management strategies employed by large and
small landowners alike, for these rested upon a fluid and dynamic market in
land both for rent and for purchase.57
The expectation that responsibility for the tax burden assessed on a par-
cel of land would be publicly acknowledged added a fiscal dimension to these
strategies that rendered them legally problematic, even in situations where
the intentions of the landholders in question were not to defraud the state.
Moreover, this tension between fiscal ideals and economic realities also served
to colour the interpretation of a range of other peasant survival strategies in
53 Edictum Theoderici 45.
54 Edictum Theoderici 104–105. See also, for conflicts over land occasioned by changes in the
courses of rivers, Cassiodorus, Variae 3.52; Ennodius, Life of Epiphanius 21–25, and, more
generally, Squatriti, “Riverains et rivaux”, pp. 138–9.
55 Edictum Theoderici 75.
56 Edictum Theoderici 52; 53. See, for similar interest in public documentation, Cassiodorus
Variae 5.14.7.
57 Full discussion in Grey, “Concerning Rural Matters”, pp. 633–4.