Landowning and Labour in the Rural Economy 277
for confusion over boundaries is here exploited by small landowners as they
employed a strategy aimed at protecting themselves against loss or predation
by taking advantage of the reputation of a powerful figure—just as in the cases
noted by Augustine.62 Of course this is not to say that these smallholders were
immune to the depredations of larger landowners in the period, nor to suggest
that this strategy was viable, or even effective. Indeed their impulse to take this
action together with the legal measures against forcible dispossession offers
compelling evidence that such dispossession was taking place. But we should
not interpret the rhetorical force of the legal pronouncement as evidence for
the prominence or extent of the practice as a socio-economic problem. After
all, legal evidence documents only legal facts, and it is the legal fact of fiscal
responsibility that seems most important here.
Tenancy, The Labour Market, and Economic Strategies
The labour regimes available to large landowners in exploiting their estates
during the Ostrogothic period appear, as in preceding centuries, to have
involved combinations of slaves, tenants, and wage labourers, sometimes over-
seen by a chief tenant or farm manager.63 A chapter contained in the Edictum
Theoderici concerning loans of money to various individuals on an estate iden-
tifies procuratores, conductores, coloni and servi.64 We witness also originarii,
individuals who appear to have been legally registered on a specific plot of
land, or origo. As we shall see, the legal relationship that these individuals
enjoyed both with that land and with its owner, or dominus, seems to have
been considered analogous to that of liberti and servi with their owner or for-
mer owners.65 Finally, in chapters aimed at preventing a dominus from taking
on another’s colonus or seeking to exercise control over another’s rusticus, we
catch glimpses of an active market in casual or seasonal labour.66 In what fol-
lows, I elaborate on these propositions, and explore rural labour relations of
the period as they can be reconstructed from our rather recondite and patchy
sources. I will suggest that the labour market of the period continued to be
62 See, analogously, provisions against the transfer of notices of debt to a more powerful
individual so as to collect the debt more easily: Edictum Theoderici 122.
63 For vilici, Cassiodorus, Variae 5.39, with Vera, “Proprietà terriera”, p. 160.
64 Edictum Theoderici 121, which reflects and responds to CTh 2.31.1 and 2.31.2: Lafferty, Law
and Society, p. 221.
65 Edictum Theoderici 48.
66 Edictum Theoderici 89; 150.