284 Grey
remind us irresistibly of other instances where wealthy city dwellers evinced
distaste and distrust for peasants, but it is nonetheless tempting to infer that
the rustici of Ostrogothic Italy were not above opportunistic theft or even ban-
ditry, particularly when it involved a resource as valuable as livestock.95
Likewise, we should take with a grain of salt Cassiodorus’ description of
countryfolk raiding a market held during a fair for Saint Cyprian, but not lose
sight of the evidence for rural exchange that the letter provides.96 In the same
letter Cassiodorus waxes lyrical about the nature and extent of this exchange.
This fair, we are told, attracts all the finest produce from the surrounding
regions of Campania, Bruttium, Calabria, and Apulia, such that no person will
go away unsatisfied. He includes also a particularly striking image of young
boys and girls being offered for sale so that by their servitude in the city they
will be freed of rural toil. While it is tempting to associate this with a chapter of
the Edictum Theoderici which seeks to safeguard the free status of children sold
because of their parents’ dire economic straits, and to infer widespread eco-
nomic depression in rural Italy, it seems more likely that they are evidence for
the continuation of long-established practices whereby a child’s labour might
be sold, rented, or leased for a specified period of time.97
Be that as it may, the close and ongoing connection between city and coun-
try that Cassiodorus presents here is striking, although we should not assume
that it was the only possible pattern for urban-rural relations in the period.
As noted above with specific reference to ceramic typologies, for example, we
should imagine that with contraction, or at the very least reconfiguration, of
long-distance networks of exchange, the degree to which cities were integrated
into those networks might have changed.98 Nevertheless, we should assume
that some cities at least continued to function as nodes for both the distribu-
tion and the consumption of the resources of their surrounding countrysides
and beyond.
95 Cassiodorus, Variae 8.32.
96 Cassiodorus, Variae 8.33.
97 Edictum Theoderici 94. For fuller discussion of the phenomenon in the late Roman period,
Vuolanto, “Selling a Freeborn Child”.
98 For broader discussions of these phenomena in the period, Wickham, “Production,
Distribution, and Demand”; Loseby, “Mediterranean Economy”, pp. 618–20.