THE SEVENTH-CENTURY KINGDOM 141drifting and out of control as some modern commentators believe.
On the contrary, it was subjected to a degree of supervision unparal-
leled since the fall of Rome. Lay and clerical lawmakers were con-
cerned to regulate minutiae, and the development of centralised
government of the Church was matched by that of the state. The
mass of legislation is a symptom of vigilance, not of neglect. There is
something here of the unsleeping supervision of the monks that
Fructuosus of Braga enjoined upon the officers of his monastery.
This is all the more remarkable as being on the part of a govern-
ment that lacked the massed bureaucracy of its Roman predecessor.
Much had to be done through bishops, who might supervise the Jews,
oversee the local officials of the fisc, undertake judicial responsibil-
ities and quite possibly act as a source of local information and intel-
ligence. Much of the ill-founded criticism of the late Visigothic state
has been based upon a mistaken belief that a sophisticated adminis-
trative machinery existed, which in the late seventh century was in the
process of breaking down. As an instrument of central government
any such machinery had disappeared in the fifth century, whilst most
of those features of local administration that survived that period of
cataclysm continued in being up to the Arab conquest, and in some
cases, under new titles, even beyond.^94 However, this is only to talk of
a small handful of officials, with local responsibilities towards justice
or the revenues of the fisc or military supervision. The Visigoths did
not inherit a complex administration.
The issue of fugitive slaves well illustrates both the aspirations
and the limitations of late seventh-century royal government in the
peninsula. The existence of several laws in the codes relating to the
problems of the apprehension and return of fugitive slaves has been
interpreted as a symptom of the breakdown of internal order in the
kingdom.95 The very existence of fugitive slaves is not in itself surpris-
ing. Slaves had existed in the peninsula at kast since the beginnings
of Roman domination and were a fundamental feature of the rural
economy, especially of the large estates. This is equally true of the
other Germanic kingdoms and of the Byzantine Empire.
There are no grounds for supposing that slaves in the fifth or sixth
centuries were happier than their successors in the seventh, or that
the latter were more prone to flight. Of the laws relating to the flight
of slaves and the harbouring of fugitives and related offences treated
in the ninth book of the Code, only five out of twenty come from the
seventh century, the rest date back to the times of Leovigild or Euric.