Landowning and Labour in the Rural Economy 279
to many of the entries in the Codex Theodosianus when those entries were
incorporated within the early 6th-century Breviarium of the Visigothic King
Alaric II. Those Interpretationes are aimed primarily at making a diffuse and
heterogeneous set of enactments workable and intelligible in a rather different
political and legal landscape.72 Finally, it has been suggested that the ‘colonate’
(as modern scholars might recognize it) was realized as a coherent concept
only with the dissemination of the Codex Justinianus, the great codification of
law carried out under Justinian and published in a second edition in 534, for it
was in the vision of Justinian and his codifiers that the many disparate strands
of registered tenancy were first linked together.73
These propositions have significant implications for our view of the posi-
tion of registered tenants in the Ostrogothic kingdom. If it is the project of
legal codification that imposes coherence upon this particular fiscal phenom-
enon, then we may legitimately ask two questions. First, what was the purpose
of the Edictum Theoderici as a codification of law? And second, what relation
did the legal and fiscal relations that it sketched out bear to socio-economic
realities in Italy at the time? I take each question in turn. Scholars have long
noted the preponderance of regulations concerning rural economic activity
in this collection. But it is also difficult to discern a clear and coherent orga-
nizational structure, such as we observe in the codifications of Theodosius II
and Justinian. For this and other reasons, it seems reasonable to suggest that
the Edictum Theoderici was a rather different kind of legal project.74 With spe-
cific reference to rural labour relations, Justinian’s codification appears to have
sought to maintain and preserve the role of the state in brokering the relation-
ship between dominus and registered colonus. Justinian was also seeking to
make new law and to shape fiscal and socio-economic relations using that law.
By contrast, the provisions of the Edictum Theoderici—like the Interpretationes
contained in the Breviarium of Alaric—sought largely to gloss and adapt
already existent legal pronouncements, so as to render them explicable in a
new and rather different fiscal and socio-economic context.75 As a result, these
pronouncements are descriptive and reactive rather than prescriptive and
72 Koptev, “Colonate in the Theodosian Code”, p. 263. Also Matthews, “Interpreting the
Interpretationes”, pp. 17–18.
73 Sirks, “Colonate in Justinian’s Reign”, especially pp. 121–2.
74 See now the full and detailed exploration of the Edictum Theoderici in Lafferty, Law and
Society, passim, especially pp. 16–53.
75 Lafferty, Law and Society, pp. 60–99 offers an essential and masterly discussion of both
the sources for the Edictum Theoderici and the ways in which it adapts those sources.
More succinctly: Vera, “Proprietà terriera”, 144–5.