The Early Medieval Transition. On the Origins of the Manor and Feudal Government. Some
Problems of Interpretation.
George Grantham
McGill University
September 2003

In the dull disquisitions that follow we may be cheered by the thought that great questions are at stake.’ F. W. Maitland,
Domesday Book and Beyond . (p. 361)
‘Il est d’une mauvaise méthode en histoire de se décider sur quelques phrases isolées. Il faut tout lire, et établir une proportion exacte entre les affirmations contradictoires.’
Fustel de Coulanges, L’Alleu et le domaine rurale (p. 24)
Introduction
Ever since Renaissance humanists identified a media aeva in the ‘degraded’ Latin of sub-
Roman writings scholars have interrogated its texts to apprehend how the world of classical antiquity vanished. The age of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages is considered one of a small handful of great historical transitions in western history. Culturally it marked the end of the classical world of Greece and Rome and the beginning of the medieval Christian world; politically it marked the substitution of feudalized principalities for a unitary state; economically it marked the collapse of an integrated market economy and a return to conditions of subsistence farming. At the same time, the period has come to be viewed as a new beginning, a time of rebirth of values, political structures and economic institutions that were to be the foundation of
Europe’s subsequent political and economic dominance. The titles of books on the period published in the last twenty or thirty years are indicative of that vision: George Duby’s Guerriers et paysans, le premier essor de l’économie Européeene (1973), 1 Robert Lopez’s Birth of Europe
(1967), David Levine’s Dawn of Modernity (2001) are but a few examples. The common theme of these works is the emergence of a new order out of chaos.
Economic historians do not commonly devote much attention to the historiography of their objects of research. The usual procedure is to take the general context as given, and to restrict the review of the literature to work bearing on the specific topic under investigation. This pragmatic course of action permits engaging a research problem without having to solve all the ancillary issues related to it. At the same time, neglecting the larger conceptual framework induces path-dependence in research problems and their interpretation. Conceptual schemes that originated in now discredited notions and concepts live on in the interpretation and synthesis of new work, which is generally taken as adding to or slightly modifying the received wisdom rather than overturning it. This tendency to preserve received ideas about the past appears to be especially (though not uniquely) true of the historiography of late antiquity and the early middle ages, where the extreme paucity of texts leaves a large void to be filled with constructions founded on hypothesis and conjecture, and where their ambiguity leaves a large space for alternative interpretations, making it difficult for an alteration on one point to be introduced without challenging all the other hypotheses that support the general construction. This paper is concerned with one such point – the interpretation of the early medieval estate documents as evidence of a bi-partite manorial structure that emerged from the wreckage of the Roman world to become the typical form of agricultural organization in the early and central Middle Ages.
The conventional vision of the early middle ages as a period profound social and economic dislocation is rooted in centuries of contemplation of the historical significance of the end of the Roman Empire as a unified political entity and its replacement by successor kingdoms
1 The English subtitle ‘The early growth of the European economy’ does not do justice to the French
‘premier essor’ which has the connotation of soaring, flight, and take-off.

in the West ruled by princes of German origin. The decline was originally thought to be political and cultural. Only later did the vision of decline come to include the economy, about which little was known beyond a few outbursts on the iniquities of later Roman taxation by Christian apologists like Salvian, refuting the pagan charge that Christians were the cause of Rome’s current troubles.
2 The image of post-Roman disorder is largely nourished by the History of the
Franks by Gregory of Tours, whose depiction of the Franks as concupiscient beasts incapable of rational thought and action reflected an upper-class Gallo-Roman disdain for the long-haired kings, and a materialistic interest in protecting the fiscal immunities of his bishopric.
3 Gregory was above all a Christian, and the composition and tropes of his History suggests he fashioned it as a biblical epic in which Gaul assumed the place of the holy land, Germans the scourge of God visited on a sinful people, Clovis (the Frankish conqueror of Gaul, who accepted Catholicism and drove out the heretical Goths) a David who restored them in God’s eyes, and the civil wars of his profligate and polygamous grandchildren a sign that the people had once again strayed from the truth and were being punished for their sins.
4 A similar bias infuses the Gildas’ diatribical account ( De excidio Britanniae --The ruin of Britain ), which is the textual source for the little that is known about the advent of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain. Like Gregory, Gildas seems to have viewed himself as a kind of Jeremiah railing against the British kings and clerics who brought that disaster on themselves by their lust, rapaciousness, and their flirtations with heresy.
5 It is only recently that scholars using the techniques of literary criticism and rhetorical analysis have begun to decipher the ideological substructure of these much used and much-abused accounts of the descent to savagery.
That picture is very much a construct of later writers preoccupied with later matters.
When the last western Emperor was deposed in 476 and sent to live out his days in luxury on an estate outside Naples, no one noticed that the Empire had in fact ended. The Senate merely decided that one emperor – the one that ruled from Constantinople – was sufficient; 6 local administration had a new head, but day-to-day operations of government continued as before.
That subcontracting the primacy of regional governments to German military leaders (to whom the Empire had already subcontracted the primacy of military organization) produced widespread destruction and disorder throughout the Italian peninsula was introduced in the fifteenth and sixteenth century by Italian humanists, who saw in the Italian wars of their own time an image of that earlier abandonment of centralized authority, and the source of their present troubles. French
2 ‘They who suffer the incessant and even continuous destruction of public tax levies...desert their homes...
The poor and wretched, despoiled of their few possessions and evicted from their little plots of land, must, even when they have lost their property, bear the taxes for the things they have lost... When either they lose their homes and fields to the invaders or flee as fugitives from the tax collectors, because they cannot hold their land, they seek out the estates of the rich and become their coloni . De gubernatione dei . Cited by
Lewitt (1991), p. 66. Gibbon paraphases the passage thusly: ‘The Roman government appeared every day…more odious and oppressive to its subjects. The taxes were multiplied with the public distress; economy was neglected in proportion as it became necessary; and the injustice of the rich shifted the unequal burden from themselves to the people.
3 Gregory came from a prominent senatorial family from Auvergne. Fiscal immunities transferred part (but not necessarily all) of taxes on specified property to the church, which was then as the pagan temples earlier been, an administrative arm of the state. They were revocable and did not automatically apply to property coming into the hands by way of donation. See Durliat (1990). Pp.
4 Wynn (2000). For an extensive review of the whole sub-Roman historical literature on the barbarians see
Goffart (1988).
5 Jones (1996), Pp. 43-53; James (2001) Pp. 94-95.
6 The emporer Zeno, who recognized the Odoacre’s kingship in Italy, was himself the son of a Vandal general who had come to power through a military coup before getting himself named Emperor by the
Senate in Constaninople..

writers in the Enlightenment gave a similar representation of the age. Montesquieu, whose account of the Franks had a determining influence on the historiography of the Merovingian and
Carolingian period, characterized them as simple warriors in an endless pursuit of booty. In the twentieth century that vision was transmuted of Marcel Mauss into an anthropological model of political society held together by the redistribution of tribute from a chief to his followers.
Economic historians know this model chiefly through the works of Karl Polanyi. The medievalist
Wickham lays out its conceptual core.
‘[O]ne essential tenet of comparative sociology; the less hierarchy, and the less stable and inherited authority, there is in a society, the more people one has to win with generosity, food or charisma in order to gain support, and the longer one has to go on doing it. This has,, one must add, an implication for material culture, too; a society with this degree of devolution of resources lacks anyone with the buying power to make the development of a wide range of artisanal traditions worthwhile.’ 7
Montesquieu, however, was not engaged in comparative sociology when he asserted the Frank’s constitutional incapacity for settled government.
8 The barbarization thesis was the core of his rebuttal to the thesis of learned and better-informed Abbé du Bos that the government of Gaul was legally ceded by the Roman Emperor to the Frankish king, who maintained the old Roman taxes, a third of which went directly to the support of the Frankish army.
9 The practical import of this academic dispute concerned the contemporary question the monarchy had the authority to eliminate the tax exemption on noble property. If as Montesquieu claimed the Franks had never collected tax because they were too undisciplined to manage a stable tax system, that authority would have had no foundation in law.
10
Although Du Bos’ assessment of the evidence was more accurate, Montesquieu’s reading dominated later scholarship. In the particular matter that concerns this paper, his opinion that the
Roman tax system collapsed with the coming of the Franks affected the reading of the
Carolingian document known as the
Polyptique de l’abbé Irminon by its first editor Benjamin
Guérard (1844) as a manorial extent rather than a fiscal register, thereby setting in motion the classic model of the medieval manor as a self-sufficient bi-partite estate in which the land was divided between a seigniorial demesne and servile tenements owing labour services on it. As the estate in question was the royal Abbey of St-Germain-des-Près, it was natural to suppose that the partition represented the organizational response to economic autarchy resulting from centuries of barbarization.
The notion of an early middle ages dominated by invasion and barbarization kept its currency through the first great age of professional scholarship. Augustin Thierry conceived the
7 Wickham (1991) p. 241.
8 ‘Des peuples simples, pauvres, libres, guerriers, pasteurs, qui vivaient sans industrie et ne tenaient à leurs terres que par des cases de jonc, suivaient des chefs pour faire du butin, et non pour payer ou lever des tributs...Le tribut passager d'une cruche de vin par arpent, qui fut une vexation de Chilpéric et de
Frédégonde, ne concerne que les Romains...Il est aisé que la maltôte romaine tombât d'elle-même dans la monarchie des Francs: c'était un art très compliqué,et qui n'entrait ni dans les idées ni dans le plan de ces peuples simples. Si les Tartares inondaient aujourd'hui l'Europe, il faudrait bien des affaires pour leur faire entendre ce que c'est qu'un financier entre nous.’ Esprit des lois, chapter 30.
9 Jean-Louis du Bos,
Histoire critique de l’établissement de la Monarchie françoise dans les Gaules
(1732). The significance of this point for royalists like Du Bos was the source of the monarchical legitimacy. The principle of right acquired by conquest could also justify revolution.
10 Hulliung (1976)

history of France as along struggle between native Gallo-Romans and their barbarian German conquerors, whose principal occupation when not at war was devising ways to dispossess the
Gauls.
11 A representative of the Romantic movement, he wanted to show how different the
Middle Ages were from later times, and sought to ‘defamiliarize’ them by altering the accepted spelling of the Frankish kings – Hil-perik for Chilperic, Dago-berht, for Dagobert – to emphasize their exotic origins. Despite a century and a half of criticism by German historians, the characterization, nourished by anthropological models of customary societies and economic models of self-organizing social structures has survived. Those models require a narrative that puts the early middle ages in a kind of elemental soup that mysteriously organized itself into a new form of life.
From this all too cursory review of the original themes of early medieval historiography we may extract the following generalizations in the conventional wisdom. The end of centralized
Roman government in the West triggered the collapse of stable administration and a descent into
Hobbesian anarchy. In Marc Bloch’s account that descent was delayed to the in the ninth and early tenth centuries, but the model of social and political disintegration of a society under attack by barbarians is essentially the same. Culture and literacy contracted into the highly protected sphere of the church. Continual internecine warfare destroyed cities and the trade they engendered. The land emptied out as population declined, leaving space for the invaders to claim and settle but depriving them of farmers to cultivate it, and the commercial economy reverted to a state of virtual autarchy. Agricultural productivity, which had never been high, declined to the point where peasant farmers barely produced enough food to subsist.
12 The royal household supported itself on the produce of its estates, which it consumed on the spot by migrating from one villa to another. Soldiers were paid by the cession of royal land and seigniorial rights over the peasants. Regional government was held together by oral communication., and the structure of that government changed from a legally constituted bureaucracy to a loose hierarchy created by bilateral personal dependence. The space of effective government contracted into the space of a seigneury.
The history of the early middle ages is thus the story of the formation of a new social and economic ‘structure’. Its significance lies in the proposition that the new structure was more
‘free’ and thus more open to the self-organizing activity of markets than the Roman one it succeeded. The expansion of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries thus represents the expression of a new culture, the ‘dawn’ as one writer has recently put it, ‘of modernity’. The early medieval period in this traditional historiography is thus one of the great transitions.
New evidence and new interpretations
11 [I]l n’y avait, chez les principaux chefs barbares, aucun parti pris contre la civilization; tout ce qu’ils
étaient capable d’en recevoir, ils le laissaient volontiers venir à eux; mais ce vernis de politesse rencontrait un tel fond d’habitudes sauvages, des moeurs si violentes, et des caractères si indisciplinables, qu’il ne pouvait pénétrer bien avant. D’ailleurs, après ces hauts personages, les seuls à qui la vanité ou l’instinct aristocratique fit chercher la compagnie et copier les manières des anciens nobles du pays, venait la foule des guerriers franks, pour lesquels tout homme sachant lire, à moins qu’il n’eût fait ses prevues devant eux,
était suspect de lâcheté. Sur le moindre prétexte de guerre, ils recommençaient à piller la Gaule comme au temps de la première invasion; … En temps de paix, leur principale occupation était de machiner des ruses pour exproprier leurs voisins de race gauloise, et d’aller sur les grands chemins attaquer, à coups de lance ou d’épée, ceux don’t ils voulaient se venger.’ Jullian (1979) p. 80 [Extract from Récits mérovingiens ].
12 Duby (1962, 1973)

Since the early 1980 the ‘primitivist’ account has come under attack on several different fronts McKitterick (1989, 1990) and others have demonstrated that contrary to the conventional vision of early medieval society as an ‘oral culture’, the political elite were mostly literate, many highly so, despite the disappearance of publicly funded schooling for prospective bureaucrats in the Roman administration. That literacy was not just a matter of gaining access to religious and literary texts, but an essential element in the functioning of contemporary civil society and the state. Written records were reqjuired to authenticate legal ownership of real property, to establish its geographical location and tax liability, and to effect its legal transfer by inheritance and sale.
To be workable those records had to be in archives maintained by trained professionals.
13 We know that at least down to the seventh century land transfers were duly registered in the old
Roman gesta municipalia to ensure that the tax on land wase levied on its rightful owner. The
Carolingian capitularies clearly state that Dukes and Counts have to make copies of the imperial decrees available for inspection their subalterns and subjects, and that they must to submit written accounts of their actions to their superiors at the imperial court. The capitulary De Villis (of which more below) requires the intendants ( judex ) charged with administering the Crown’s fiscal estates make an annual inventory of their output, manpower and assets. A number of these inventories have survived. All this points to pervasive written communication and extensive literacy. Perhaps the most striking evidence of that literacy are the laws and literary works from
England and Ireland which were written in the vernacular.
14 Had priests alone been literate there would have been little demand for works in Gaelic or Anglo-Saxon.
Analysis of the military and diplomatic history of the Frankish realm casts doubt on the hypothesis of savagery in a sphere where violence and its resulting strong emotions most encouraged it.
15 Bachrach demonstrates that far from being an undisciplined mob that assembled each spring to launch an annual raid in pursuit of booty and tribute, the exercitus francorum was an instrument of Frankish ‘foreign’ policy that was deployed to gain limited strategic goals when diplomatic measures failed to get the desired results. Campaigns were planned well in advance, supplies and vehicles were requisitioned and positioned at strategic points, and troops were summoned by written order. Except when it was thought necessary to make an example of persons and peoples who violated their pledges, defeated enemies were protected from looting and wanton destruction. The purpose of war was to acquire or defend territory; it made no sense to ruin the tax base. Nothing in the surviving record of military actions pursued by the post-
Roman rulers suggests that they were determined by impulsiveness or a warrior ethos. The politics of the sub-Roman era, like that of Rome itself, was rough politics, but not one devoid of ordinary rationality.
16
The vision of a society disintegrating under the shock of a massive and undisciplined invasion has also been called into question. While scholars have long conceded that the Germans did not constitute a horde that overwhelmed Roman defenses by sheer numbers, recent estimates
13 Posner (1972). The Roman practice of effecting transactions in real property by written instruments was adopted by the Germans in the sub-Roman period. Long after the fall of the Roman empire, transactions in land had to be registered in the municipal records ( gesta municipalia ) to guarantee authenticity. For a full discussion of the essential role of writing in property transactions see Fustel de Coulanges (1889).
14 The use of Latin in adminstrative documents from the German-speaking part of the regnum Francorum testifies to the survival of Latin as the common language of West Francia and bilingual capabilities of the east Frankish nobility. On this see McKitterick and Werner.
15 Bachrach (1994, 2001)
16 Bachrach’s study of the diplomacy and military operations associated with a Byzantine machination intended to place the Frankish pretender Gundovald on the throne of Aquitaine as part of a broader strategy to recover Italy and Spain illustrates the essential realpolitik that governed the actions of all the parties involved in the dispute, which many have supposed to be simply another example of Merovingian disorder.

of the size of the immigrating population currently put them in the high tens of thousands, a figure consistent with the size of armies accompanied by soldiers’ families and camp followers.
17
Even in England, where the invaders succeeded in imposing their language, the number thought to have crossed the narrow sea between 410 and 550 AD was on the order of 10,00 to 20,000 at a time when the indigenous population was probably three to six million. Even in the deficient state of demographic knowledge, it seems clear that the civilized indigenous populations were not submerged by masses of primitives. If so, it is improbable that institutions regulating the transmission of property, institutions of local government and religious practices of the natives were significantly affected by their arrival, any more than were the institutions of the Anglo-
Saxons affected by the arrival of the Normans six centuries later. The logic of the numbers, sketchy as they are, supports continuity over discontinuity.
The fewness of the invaders in relation to those whom they conquered raises the question what the ‘primitives’ were doing when they settled into their new homes, and how ‘primitive’ they really were. Recent studies reveal that the ‘peoples’ ( gentes ) who assumed political authority in the Western Empire after AD 400 were not ‘nations in arms’ but organized military formations (including families of military personnel) that had at one time or another been engaged by the Roman state under the ultimate command of the Emperor. Contrary to the popular vision of them as undisciplined bands, the German armies that fought for and against the
Romans were regular troops whose training and tactical skills were equal to that of Roman legions, in which many of their leaders had served.
18 Close analysis of the ‘barbarian’ legal codes promulgated between the fifth and eighth centuries suggests that far from being the Latin translation of barbarian custon, they are essentially military codes regulating relations between an organized army comprised mainly of German-speaking mercenaries and the local population among whom they were settled.
19 They were not an armed mob of land-hungry peasants, but a regular army with a code of military justice and rules regulating the transmission of property. It would be surprising if subsequent to their establishment within the boundaries of the empire the hierarchy and discipline that characterized the Frankish hosts would have disappeared just as centralized civilian administration in the West collapsed.
The criticism of the ‘primitivist’ thesis also extends to political life, which superficially seems to fit the model of invasion by peoples incapable of government. The key to this critique lies in the problem of political legitimacy (something that has once again come to the fore as a result of the American conquest of Iraq). By the late fourth century Frankish generals held the highest commands in the Roman military establishment, though supreme power was blocked by anti-Frankish sentiments that resulted in the massacre of thousands of German troops stationed in
Greece. That office was legitimate and titled. As Werner points out, German princes acquired the cingulum of office signifying legitimate possession by imperial nomination or recognition, which maintained the legal fiction of imperial unity through the succession of military coups d’état.
That fiction had practical significance; by legitimizing the authority of barbarian kings in the West, it ensured cooperation from the Roman officials who actually administered the state, which the German kings needed in order to draw resources from it.
20 From a fiscal and administrative perspective, the only change was a change of personnel at the top. This explains
17 The population of the western Roman Empire at the end of the fourth century was probably between 15 and 25 million, as compared with an estimated population for Germania of 3 to 4 million. (Jones, 1995: 8-
9)
18 Warfare was a highly skilled profession that demanded extended training to maintain tactical cohesion under conditions of combat. On this see Bachrach (2001).
19 Durliat (2001)
20 These points are copiously documented by Werner (1998).

why the ‘Romans’ put up so little resistance to their new rulers and oppressors.
21 One would expect people dispossessed of their land to fight, as happened in England after the Conquest, when a revolt in 1067-68 was put down by William with overwhelming and devastating force, the effects of which were still evident twenty years later in the Domesday returns. Nothing like this appears in the continental record, where war was a deadly, though not exceptionally destructive, form of factional politics.
22
The issue of political legitimacy bears on the question how the ‘invaders’ obtained their land, which is central to the interpretation of the manor as a unit of agricultural exploitation. It has generally been assumed from the histories and late impereial legislation that German troops that settled the territory of the imperium received one-third of the land of their ‘hosts’. Where this land came from, and exactly who was expropriated to supply it has never been made clear.
The question is all the more vexing in that the ‘thirds’ were granted by the Roman state that had to abide by a legal regime that gave maximum protection to private property in land.
23 Most historians assume the land was empty, which may have been the case in the territory of Belgium and northeastern Gaul, but not in Italy, Burgundy, southwest Gaul and Spain, where settlement remained dense through much of the fifth century.
24 The more likely scenario is that the newcomers received one-third of the tax revenues in the districts where they were billeted. As the imperial budget allocated one-third of the tax revenues to the army, the ‘hosting’ of troops simply redirected that third directly to them.
25 This hypothesis accords with the Roman law of hospitalitas , which required citizens living in towns along the line of march of an army to billet troops passing through or stationed there, for which they received a deduction on their tax account.
26
The economic evidence also suggests a smoother transition than the traditional story admits. A mass of new archaeological evidence acquired by excavation, field-walking and aerial survey indicates that except in Belgica and northeast Gaul which were repeated theatres of military action from the third century on, the territories of the empire settled by the Germans were densely settled, despite some decline in the fifth and sixth centuries.
27 These findings make place-names a doubtful instrument for tracing the ‘wave of advance’ of German settlement.
28
They also suggest military occupation rather than mass colonization.
29 There is also skepticism whether evidence of ash in excavated sites represents destruction layers from datable invasions
Given the wide confidence intervals of archaeological dating, a large proportion of the so-called destroyed farms and villas may have burned down by accident, if at all, as the ash from smaller
21 Except in Britain, where the German mercenaries invited by the Britons rose up against their hosts when they failed to receive what they had been promised. The revolt was apparently suppressed, but war between the Saxon soldiery and the Romano-British population re-ignited, and lasted over a century before the Germans finally emerged victorious. Jones (1995).
22 For a well-documented example, see Bachrach (little war)
23 Fustel de Coulanges (1889). See below for more extended discussion of this point.
24 Lewitt (1991)
25 See Goffart (1980) for an extended discussion of this point, which is hotly but unpersuasively contested by Barnish (1986) who thinks that aristocratic landowners in Italy were only to glad to give their land away to avoid paying tax on it.
26 Goffart (
27 Lewitt (1991), Zadora-Rio (2001).
28 Zadora-Rio (2001)
29 A prolonged occupation of Iraq by United States forces culminating in the settlement there of some of them would surely generate English place-names, despite the overwhelming predominance of arabspeakers.

habitations may simply be the normal residue of fireplaces.
30 A similar skepticism emerges from the massive prosopographical analysis of individual travels and goods by between 300 AD and
1000 AD by McCormick, who exploits the capacity for information retrieval created by the digitalization of the early medieval documentary record to demonstrate the continuity of trade and communications networks.
31 Although there were times when communications with the Levant were difficult – most notably in the late seventh century – on the whole the networks of international trade and communications were preserved. Information, if not goods, flowed throughout the territory covered by the old Roman Empire and well beyond it. There is no doubt that the western economy contracted. The indirect evidence of copper and lead production frozen as ash in the Greenland Ice cap suggests a contraction on the order of 25 to 35 percent, which is serious but not a total implosion. Markets survived, and specialized production along with it.
The regions of effective economic integration clearly contracted. But we are not in the naturalwirtschaft proposed by the German historical economists.
The Problem of the Manor
It is in the context of the traditional historiography and the new findings contesting it that the problem of the origins, extent, and meaning of the medieval manor needs to be reconsidered.
Of the objects of early medieval history none is more obscure than landholding and farm organization. The medieval manor is chiefly known from twelfth- and thirteenth-century seigniorial documents recording dues and services owed by tenants as incidents of tenure and certain fees and obligations that signify a hereditarily inferior legal status. Some incidents are territorial, like the obligation to grind grain in the lord’s mill, press grapes in his wine press, and bake bread in his oven, and appear to originate in the lord’s political authority ( bannum ), which was a legally protected right and therefore must have been constituted by a legitimizing act of state. Other incidents, like the obligation to perform compulsory plowing or harvest work, seem analogous to a rent payable in kind. The medieval manor thus seems like a hybrid of public and private rights that in classical antiquity were legally distinct and in modern times would segregate. The oddness of this institution, what to legal and constitutional historians seems to be an illogical mix of private and public rights and to economists seems a curious way of organizing farm labour, has nourished the view that the manor must have been the evolutionary product of unique historical forces present in later antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
To historians imbued with the progressive conception of historical process, the manor is the archetypical medieval economic institution. To Marxists it is a halfway house along the path from slavery to capitalistic farming; to legal historians it is a species of overlapping property rights to the same land; to political historians it was the economic support of decentralized feudal government; to economic historians it is an agrarian organization adapted to autarchic economy.
In all these guises the manor is fundamentally different from the agricultural institutions of classical antiquity and the modern era. In the conventional narrative it emerged out of the chaos and economic implosion of the early middle ages.
Once one leaves the stylized fact of a textbook manor problems of interpretation abound.
Of these problems two stand out. The first is the comparative rarity of labour services in France by the late twelfth century. The documents that come to us from the ninth and early tenth indicate heavy services on the order of three days work per week and other unspecified services to be rendered at the will of the lord. In England the sources indicate more extensive use of compulsory labour, but the use of serfs as the principal sourcew of labour for plowing and
30 Lewitt (1991) p.
31 McCormick (2000).

harvesting is by no means common. By the thirteenth century manors are common, but serfdom is rare. What caused it to disappear?
The conventional explanation is the rise of the market and growth in population. But the studies referred to above indicate that neither can be sufficient, because the market never ‘fell’ and population in the heavily manorialized districts covering western Europe’s most fertile territory was never thin. That market activity became more intense and population rose is not in dispute. But the supposition that serfdom was a product of economic autarchy and labour scarcity is not supported by the evidence.
The second problem is the enormous variability of labour obligations. Some peasants have huge and in principle unlimited liability to deliver labour services to their lord; 32 others owe little more than a payment recognizing their servile status. The link between the size of holding and the obligations is weak or perverse – tenants of smaller holdings owe more labour than the tenants of large ones. If the corvée was a kind of rent, how can this be? The standard explanation is that peasants were conscripted into the manorial regime over several centuries on varying conditions of entry. Custom froze those conditions, so that the cross-section of tenures and obligations maps the time-series of their entry into the manor. The flaw in this explanation is is the presumption that the freezing represents a ‘primitive’ adherence to custom. But why should custom be so inflexible, and why should it should the structure of obligations be preserved like a topological property across several centuries and numerous transmissions and divisions of the tenanted property? That kind of constancy presumes a stable legal structure that protected and defined the property rights implicit in villein tenure from an early date. But this hypothesis conflicts with the notion that tenants were conscripted by force.
A final problem relates to the size and geographical location of individual holdings, which even as early as the ninth century are also highly variable. This problem defines itself in the context of the stylized model of the bi-partite estate in which serfs maintained themselves on their holdings, and provided surplus labour time to the demesne as the condition of tenancy. That model logically implies certain constraints on the size and location of the holdings. As selfsufficient farms using the same technology and working the same quality of land, the tenements had to be roughly equal in size. As a source of labour for the demesne, they had to physically close to it. Nothing is further from the statistical truth. Farms very in size; farms of different sizes often owe the same labour service, while farms of the same size owe services that differ greatly. Some holdings are clearly too small to support an individual, much less a family. If as has been argued, the manor is the product of seigniorial action, one would expect more regularity.
Manors also display a remarkable geographical dispersion, with pieces of manors separated by distances of up to 15 to 20 miles. As Maitland comments with respect to the information contained in Domeday Book. ‘land is constantly spoken of as though it were the most portable of things.’ 33 The manor is not necessarily a spatially cohesive unit.
The most common response to the paradox of tiny tenements is to propose an initial egalitarian division that was subsequently destroyed by population growth and partible inheritance.
34 Apart from the doubtful presumption that partible inheritance operated continuously and universally among the peasant population, this hypothesis runs up against two objections. The first is the failure to document the posited originally parceling out of tenanted
32 The most prominent examples are from the polyptique of the Abbey of Prüm. See Morimoto (1995)
33 Maitland
34 ‘There had, of course, to be a rough equality, if ‘seigneurs’ were not to sacrifice dues by foolishly undertaxing some farms and spread unrest by scandalously overtaxing others.’ P. 84

land in shares of equal size, which would have equally to apply to freeholds brought into the ambit of manorial organization; the second is that by the beginning of the ninth century, some documented farms are too small to support a small family, much less a large one, which implies that the division was incompatible with steady-state manorial operations. Some historians have proposed that the surveys undertaken by Charlemagne and his successors represented an attempt to arrest this disintegration by registering the holdings in a kind of land book; but independently of the absence of any documentation suggesting such intention, the hypothesis is invalidated by signs that the most complete surviving inventory shows signs that it was amended over a period of perhaps two generations to take account of changes in the size and ownership of the tenancies.
35 The reason behind the enormous expense of recording all the peasant obligations owed to the Abbey of St-Germain-des-Près was surely to fix something, but that something does not seem to be the structure of an bi-partite agricultural estate.
The stylized description of the early medieval manor, then, does not supply credible explanations of the anomalies referred to above, and others to be considered below. As the seigneurial regime is universally considered to have greatly decayed between the ninth and the thirteenth century, when the rural documentation starts to become reasonably abundant, the anomalies cast doubt on the basic conception of the manor as an economically significant production organization. They raise the fundamental question of what exactly was the medieval manor, and how typical it was in the allegedly formative period of the modern European economy. The raising, much less the answering of these questions is greatly impeded by the weight of a historiography that denies any stability and institutional continuity between the
Middle Ages and Antiquity. As we have seen, recent work in a wide range of early medieval problems suggests considerable continuity. We now turn to a particular type of continuity affecting the formation and functioning of the manor.
The Manor and the Conventional Wisdom About its Origins
As an ideal type the medieval manor is defined as an agricultural estate divided into two parts. The first was the demesne or ‘reserve’ owned and often managed by the lord; the second was composed of small farms held by peasants on terms that required them to perform labour services for the lord and to make incidental payments to him in kind and cash. In the stylization the labour services were mainly dedicated to cultivating the demesne and performing carting and other transport services. Superficially, the tenancies seem like leaseholds in which rents were paid in a mixture of labour services, farm produce, and cash. That analogy, however, overlooks the inferior civil status of tenants charged with performing labour services, limits imposed on their geographical mobility and liability for fines like formariage (a fee payable to the lord upon the marriage of a daughter to someone not of the manor) and heriot (death duties) that clearly denote a degraded legal condition. Further complicating the analogy is the role of the manor as a unit of administrative and legal jurisdiction within which the lord exercised political authority
( bannum ), which included the right to arrest and judge malfeasants, levy tolls on goods sold within the manorial boundaries, and compel its members to grind grain in the seigniorial mill, press grapes in the seigniorial winepress, bake bread in the seigniorial oven, and fold their sheep on seigniorial fields. Yet despite servile incidents, the tenants held land in forms approaching freehold. Subject to paying the required fees and fines, they could bequeath it, sell it, and even hypothecate it as security for a loan, just like property-owners today. They could hold land in other manors, and their labour obligations, even when registered as indefinite ( quidqui ei
35 Devroey (1989)

precipitur operatur ), were essentially fixed.
36 They could defend their rights in court. In this respect the manor appears as an administrative jurisidiction in which some of the taxes supporting local government are paid ini labour services, kind, and cash.
Both elements appear in the standard characterizations. To the historical economists of the nineteenth century, the manor typified the reversion of the agrarian economy to the stage of naturalwirtschaft ; economists also represent it as an efficient adaptation to an economy without markets and without an effective state to collect and redistribute taxes.
37 Fenoaltea proposed that the compulsion associated with labour on the demesne was a way of preserving or introducing progressive farming techniques supposedly known to lords but not to peasants.
38 Perhaps the most widely accepted historical assessment is that it internalized the social economies of fixed investment in mills, new equipment and local law and order that made it profitable for farmers to invest in raising the productivity of agriculture.
39 The motivation for that investment, however, was not originally market opportunity, but rather the social and political competition generated by the emergence of a new landed upper class.
40
The origins of the manor are conventionally situated the Roman estates described by the
Latin agronomists around the turn of the Common Era.
41 According to the standard account of
Roman agrarian history, the consolidation of property into large landholding was continuous from the end of the Punic Wars to the fall of the Empire.
42 The disorders of the third century and the heavy taxes on landed property that followed hard upon the restoration of imperial authority in the 280s accelerated that consolidation. To ensure that the holdings rendered their tax, tenants were tied to their holdings by legislation, and required to render their tax to their landlords, who were responsible for them before the government, in return for which the obtained the right to requistion the tax in the form of labour services. Rapaciousness of tax-gatherer and increasing disorder in a failing state caused free peasants to place themselves under the protection of powerful landlords, ceding them their holdings in exchange for a permanent right to inhabit them as tenants. By the fifth century the agricultural economy of western Europe was essentially an economy of large self-sufficient estates, which subsequently passed into the hands of the barbarian invaders and the church.
43 In the troubled centuries that followed the Fall of Rome, the estates were distributed as benefices in lieu of salary to officials and soldiers. By the ninth century at the latest, the grants of land had become hereditary possessions of a new aristocracy that provided what little government there was in an illiterate and desperately poor new world.
The Problem of the Mansus and the Interpretation of the Polyptiques
The above narrative is empirically anchored by documents dating to the early decades of the ninth century from the reign of Charlemagne (768 – 814) and his son and grandson Louis the
Pious (814-43) and Charles the Bald (843-77). They appear to be inventories of rural estates
36 Morimoto (1995)
37 North (1980)
38 Fenaoaltea (1976)
39 Duby, Guerriers et paysans . The origin of the model is Marc Bloch, Feudal Society .
40 This view is especially pronounced in the works by Duby.
41 Fustel de Coulanges (1889) provides the classic statement of this view. The classical authors in question were Cato the Elder, Varro, and Columella, all of whom had occupied high posts in the Roman administration.
42 Finley (1973); A. M. H. Jones (1964)
43 Gaupp (1962 [1854])

possessed by of monasteries and the royal fisc.
44 The most complete describes the rural possessions of the Paris Abbey of Saint-German-des-Près, which inventories some 2300 rural holdings ( mansi ) grouped in 43 domains ( villas ) that are conventionally interpreted as manors.
45
For each mansus is listed the area, tenant, number of dependents and the dues, services, and taxes it owes. Among the mansi is a mansus indominicatus , usually rendered as the domain or demesne, on which is situated a court or ‘palace’ where dues are rendered, and for which are reported the quantity of seed used in planting its arable along with the dues, cash and services the villa was obligated to render to to the Abbey. Analysis of the document’s handwriting indicates it was revised to take account of changes in the composition and wealth of the enumerated households that affected their obligations to the villa .
46 The polyptych of Abbot Irminon seems to be a picture of the ideal manor. It has a demesne, peasant tenements owing services to it, and various dues and fees owed to the lord of the manor. Like the manors listed, though not in such excruciating detail in Domesday Book, it appears to be the end point of a long insitutional evolution.
There are approximately a dozen extant documents of this type, most of which being mutilated fragments of more extensive documents copied to establish establishing a specific claim to income, property and service.
47 Contemporaries termed the originals polyptycha after their format, which was that of a multi-leafed book.
48 The use of the Greek in preference to the Latin libris suggests a connection with late Roman tax registers, which were also called polyptycha in
Latin-speaking parts of the Empire.
49 The question that chiefly concerns this paper is whether that lexical correspondence maps a deeper correspondence between the corvées registered in the
Carolingian polyptychs, and liability for labour services known have been recorded in the Roman ones. This raises the question of the connection between the evolution of fiscal institutions in late
Antiquity and the early Middle Ages and the development of the hybrid agrarian form of the manor.
The management of the mansus indominicatus is described in a capitulary dated around
812 to which is appended three examples ( brevium exempla ) of estate inventories.
50 The
44 The fisc or fiscal lands belonged to the state or the Emperor. No small part of the confusion concerning the documents resulting from grants of these lands is that like other property they also paid tax, so that the land might be granted out while at the same time the Emperor retained its tax revenue, or vice versa.
45 The range of dates for this document are 806 to 829, the early date being the that of the accession of the
Abbot Irminon who is known to have ordered its confection, and the terminus ad quem the date when some part of the Abbey’s endowment which does not figure in the polyptyque was dedicated to financing the monks’ mess. The most likely date is the early 820s.
46 Devroey (1989, p. 453). The additions suggest that the inventory was kept up to date for about two generations, which would date the last emendations to the last years of the reign of Charles the Bald.
47 Note here giving bibliographic reference to the list. The use of the term polyptych as a record of peasant services survived to the twelfth century. Magnou-Nortier and Racinet (1993), Rouche (1993).
48 From the Gree teucha , meaning leaf.
49
Roman tax declarations were entered on sheets ( polyptycha ) tied together in bundles, a format much more suitable to the work of revising than the roll. The term eventually came to designate the register itself. Goffart (1972), Pp. 378-380.
50 De Villis et curtis imperialibus . See Magnou-Nortier (1998) for a copy of original text with a French translation and commentary. She dates the capitulary to 811-813. A capitulare was a royal decree divided into chapters ( capitula ) promulgated consequent to deliberations by an assembly of notables in the presence

capitulary De Villis describes the administration of entities whose revenues and produce are intended to defray expenses incurred by the Emperor’s household. The document is original. It specifies the duties of the estate administrator ( judex
), which include supervising field hands, (§
5); ensuring that vineyards are replanted with good cuttings and that wine is aged in good barrels
(§ 8); that the draft animals are kept in good condition and that the stock of other farm animals is not allowed to diminish (§ 13-15, 23); that arable land be completely manured (§ 38) that those who make sausages, hams, mustard, cheese, butter, vinegar, and blackberry wine keep their hands clean (§ 34), and so on. The document mentions corvée services and enjoins the judex not to affect them to his private use (§ 3). The capitulary and the exempla seem to show the classical bipartite manor.
At the same time, however, De Villis has elements that do not belong in the conventional picture of the manor. Article 45 mentions blacksmiths, silversmiths, carpenters, shield-makers, turners, bakers, fowlers, soap, beer, and cider-makers and other specialists. Chapter 43 enjoins the judex to supply workshops ( gyneceae ) with wool, linen, dyestuffs and tools. Chapter 64 specifies that supply wagons constructed for the army must be covered with leather sown tightly enough so they can be floated across rivers. Was is the origin of the multiple services owed by the craftsmen? While they doubtless possessed land, they were unlikely to be full-time farmers.
Archaeological excavation of a Carolingian village east of Paris shows that such craftsmen were present in significant numbers.
51 The likely explanation of their obligation to render services and products to the villa is that it was a tax on non-agricultural income, and not a form of rent for land that the documents do not show they held. This takes us back to the meaning of the document.
Craftsmen appear in the capitulary (and in contemporary surveys) in relation to the services they had to perform, which constituted small proportion of their annual labour supply. Most of the time they must have been working on their own account. But the same is also true of peasants, whose compulsory labour dues were also low in relation to the amount of labour they controlled.
52 In the appended exempla the term villa sometimes refers to a village with its church and lands, sometimes to an ensemble consisting of the manorial court with its reserve of arable and woodland, and sometimes to the tax base or fisc. In short, sometimes it refers to something like a manor, and sometimes to a territory on which the taxes are collected.
53
The conventional interpretation of De Villis and the polyptyques is that they document the presence of the bi-partite manorial system. This interpretation is largely due to Benjamin
Guérard, who was the first scientific editor and commentator of these documents.
54 Guérard, whose consideration of the possibility that the documents might reflect a fiscal purpose was heavily influenced by Montesquieu’s opinion that the Franks were incapable of public finance, interpreted the polyptiques as documents of internal administration of an agricultural estate based on the livery of labour services to the mansus indominicatus . He supposed that this organization had been created by the masters, who had created it prior to the confection of the polyptyques and the issuing of the capitulary, which could be seen as an attempt to ‘freeze’ an organizational form that was continually tending slip out of control as a result of exchanges of holdings among of the Emperor. It had the force of constitutional law. See Ganshof (1968), pp. 4- 7, and for a more complete treatment Ganshof (1958).
51 Cuisenier and Guadagnin (1988).
52 See below for more details.
53 Magnou-Nortier argues: ‘On peut très bien imaginer toutefois deux cas limites. Le premier serait celui d’un terroir villageois dépendant d’un fisc, où l’empereur n’aurait eu ni cour, ni terres. En ce cas, il encaisserait tous les revenus fiscaux, aucune corvée agraire. Le deuxième serait celui où l’empereur se serait approprié toute la terre (par exemple comme châtiment lors d’une guerre), transformant ses habitants en contribuables asservis, dont il recevrait toutes les prestations, peut-être plus lourdes qu’ailleurs. (p. 677)
54 Guérard (1844, 1853).

peasants. Guérard’s model required that the entities identified by the term mansus refer to a family farm on which services and taxes were levied. On that interpretation the document permits us to ‘see’ the actual units of production, and to know the names of their occupiers and those of their dependents. Seen thusly, it is almost like an agricultural census.
Guérard’s interpretation was adopted by subsequent historians and constitutes the foundation of the conventional wisdom on Carolingian agricultural organization. That wisdom holds that the mansi that are listed in the polyptyques are family farms and that the villa was a manor. Here is Marc Bloch defining the villa :
‘The soil of Frankish Gaul seems to us to be divided into a very large number of seigneuries. They were then generally called villae , although the term was already beginning to slide into the sense of an inhabited place. What was, in that time a seigneurie or villa ? In space a territory so organized that a great share of the profits of the soil went directly or indirectly to a single master: in human terms, it was a group obeying a single chief.’ 55
What was a manse? Here is Duby
The word designates an inhabited parcel in the village, site of a homestead. But by extension it applies to the entire farm of which the home is the center. The mansus is thus flanked by appendicia scattered about the territory of the village.
56
The natural framework of agricultural production and family life, the manse thus appears as the major pivot around which turned transfers of wealth and services connected with the exercise of power and the existence of the seigneury.
57
[Contemporaries] attribute a customary value to the manse, as a measure defining the amount of land needed to maintain a household.
58
According to a current dictionary of medieval terms, ‘the primordial functionof the manse is to lodge and feed the tenant and his family.
59 Noting some of the ambiguities in the term, Herlihy argued that it was a heritable family holding that in many cases had been carved out from unsettled land.
60
The identification of mansus with family farm makes for a neat interpretation of the documents. The holdings of tenants are identified along with their labour obligations. The large lord’s mansus is also identified. The taxes listed as being owed by the mansi can be interpreted as a land tax on specified properties and persons. The villa and the mansus are well-defined sociological types, whose presence can be explained by the disorder of the preceding age. The mansus is the family farm brought into the manor at some time in the past.
Paradoxes of the Manse
55 Bloch (1968)
56 Duby (1962), pp. 88-89
57 Ibid. p. 90.
58 Duby (1973), p. 46.
59 Pierre Bonnassié, cited in Magnou-Nortier (1989), p.
60 Herlihy (1960).

As has been already noted, the sociological depiction of manse does not explain its huige range of variation. Some tenants are reported as holding fractions of a manse; other manses are tenanted by multiple families. The largest manse recorded in the polyptyque of St-German-des-
Prés is twelve times larger than the smallest, which is little over a hectare, and therefore physically incapable of growing subsistence for its peasant occupiers, much less render the dues it owed the seigneur.
61 Assuming that the land yielded at the highly un-Carolingian ratio of 8:1, many of the St-Germain-des-Près manses would have had estimated deficits exceeding family consumption and their tax liability by 50 percent. The other side of the coin is the huge surpluses from the demesnes of St-Germain, which at an estimated 5166 muids was more than eight times the Abbey’s probable consumption, which included the consumption of visitors and alms.
62 What did they do with all that grain? If the Carolingian manor was designed to match production with consumption, the situation at the beginning of the ninth century had gotten pretty far out of hand.
How did this situation come to pass? The conventional explanation is population growth and partible inheritance. Whatever had been the agricultural coherence of the villa when it was formed, the growth of population, and the inevitable partitions resulting from inheritance, marriages and family settlements had irretrievably deformed the original structure into a bastardized relic.
63 The odd thing was that the dues had not changed, so that small and large manses of the same legal status owed approximately the same amount of dues and service. As a means of seigneurial exploitation, the villa had clearly lost touch with its underlying social reality.
The productivity implications of the documents also give rise to paradox. Duby inerpreted the stocks of seed and grain enumerated in the brevium exempla for the monastery of
Annapes attached to De Villis as indicating yield ratios of 0.6, 1.6, and 2.4 for one. In other words, the seed gave at most twice and usually only a little more than an equal amount of harvest.
64 ‘In spite of an enormous expenditure of labour, and an immeasurable extension of the cultivated land, he wrote, we must imagine these rural families pinched by hunger….The whole economy of that time seemed to be dominated by a permanent menace of famine.’ 65 Farming was almost a matter of digging sticks, hardly producing enough food for a peasant family, much less surplus for the lord. The picture is one of an agricultural society at the lower limit of primitive farming. Yet the hypothesis contradicts the definition of the manse. If yields were as low as 4 or
5 hectolitres per hectare, how could a 1.5 hectare manse, of which many are recorded, support a family of two adults and several children who consumed two to three hectoliters per head?
In a path-breaking but neglected article published in the Journal des Savants in 1976,
Raymond Delatouche demonstrated that Duby’s interpretation of the grain stocks at Annapes and from similar sources was deeply flawed.
66 The volume of grain recorded in the inventory as that of the previous year is roughly 50 percent greater than the amount recorded set aside for the current year’s sowing. This suggests of 1.5. The inventory, however, was taken not after the harvest, but in spring or summer, when half to three-quarters of the previous year’s harvest would have already been consumed. Adding the seed and a minimum doubling of the stocks to account for consumption up to that time raises the yield ratio to 4:1, which is a respectable, though hardly outstanding yield for the pre-industrial period. He tested this approach by applying Duby’s
61 Durliat (1989), p. 470-71.
62 Magnou-Nortier (1993)
63 Perrin (1949); Duby (1962)
64 Duby (1962), p.
65 Duby (1962), p. 87.
66 Delatouche (1976)

method to later medieval data for which the actual yields were independently known, and came up with Duby’s abysmal projections, which proves that they are an artifact of his method.
Devroey then proceeded to analyze the burden of labour services levied on the manses, which at three days and more days a week would seem to leave little time for servile households to grow the food they needed to supply those services. Comparing the amount of labour services supplied by the manses with the area in the reserve of the villae reported in the polyptiques, he found that as a rule, the total suim of compulsory labour services would have cultivated only a small proportion of the demesne, or alternatively, a small demesne. Taking the St-Germain lands amounting to 36,505 hectares in all, of which some 17,000 were peasant tenements that he believed were intensively cultivated, the combined labour requirements of the servile tenements and the services rendered to the demesne amounted to only 21 percent of their available labour.
67
If the lords were exploiting the serfs, they were doing it extremely inefficiently, because the serfs apparently had a lot of free time. The mandatory plowing services are often very small – defined as an area requiring no more than nine or ten days a year.
68 How were the peasants on such small holdings employing all that free time?
The conventional conception of the manor creates another paradox, this time of origins.
The earliest documentation that seems to describe a functioning estate is the polyptique of Abbot
Irminon, which as we have seen seems to describe a manor well on the way to disintegration. If the manor had been created, it must have been constructed from family farms at an earlier date, which by the logic of the primitivist hypothesis would have had to be in the Merovingian era.
But the few documents surviving from that period show a very confused situation. The villa of
Trisson, which was donated in 572 to the church of Saint-Vincent du Mans is reported as covering an area of 4000 to 5000 ha. According to the document describing the transfer, the estate’s entire population consisted of one household with a small child, 4 hired hands or servants, two maids, and a stable boy, with no mention of manses or colons.
69 What exactly was this villa and how were all those hectares exploited?
Only a handful of documents contain the term mansus prior to the Carolingian polyptyques, and none unambiguously denote the self-sufficient family farm which it is supposed to represent. The earliest notice is from a document dated to the last quarter of the sixth century, which records the cession for cash payment of a couple and their manse to a domnus magnificus frater – i.e. an official of the church of Angers.
70 The transaction seems to show the passage of a poor peasant family into serfdom. The problem is that it states that the manse is part of a villa described as belonging to the church of Angers, which would imply that the couple had ceded to the church land that it already owned, and that the church had paid them for it. Moreover, the couple had sold the land they did not own without securing its owner’s consent. The document speaks of their renting ( locare ) a manso , but why would they sell the lease back to the lessor, rather than just have it cancelled? And on what did they live after they gave of their land? In one of the contracts preserved in the formulary of Marculf, 71
In a document dated June 5, 769, a wealthy
67 Ibid. pp. 98-99.
68 Magnou-Nortier 1987.
69 Magnou-Nortier, 1987.
70 The document is analyzed in Magnou-Nortier (1989), pp.
71 Formularies contained the early medieval equivalent of legal boilerplate. They contain examples of standard contracts that could be copied out, inserting new names, dates and places.

couple concede a manse that has a sitting tenant on it. The diploma states that the land has been surveyed, but the tenancy is so tiny its tenant could not have possibly survived on its produce, much less paid a rent. On one villa enumerated in the Polyptyque of Abbot Irminon, two armorers and one smith are recorded as ‘paying’ a half a manse in metal work (three lances, three piques, and some ironwork). What exactly does this mean? Finally, what are the vacant manses sometimes reported in the polyptyques, the mansi absi ? What are they vacant of, and why are they vacant, when so many manses seem to be overpopulated?
The solution to these paradoxes and anomalies appears to be connected to the fiscal role of the manse and villa, and thus the connection of the manor with the fiscal system. Historians have long recognized that the villa and the mansus of the polyptychs are somehow connected with taxes.
72 Abbot Irminon’s polyptych shows mansi owing hostilitium , which was a tax levied in support of the Frankish army. The mansus was also the unit of perception for the tribute to the
Vikings in the ninth century; 73 the English hide , which appears have a similar meaning , was the unit of assessment for raising the Danegeld , and after the Conquest, the taxes and services owed to the Norman kings.
74 The term condama employed in Italy and in the south of France to denote a group of tax-payers seems to have the same connotation.
75 In the records where the term mansus appears, the taxman is almost always present.
The conventional explanation for this fiscal connection is that taxes as well as seigniorial dues were levied on the family farm, which is an unforced interpretation of the term, because it settles tax liability on the only organization from which any significant amount of tax could be obtained. When the state had to extract resources from its subjects, it fit its fiscal system to a preexisting economic and social structure dominated by family farms. With the exception of tolls on merchandise levied at bottlenecks in the transportation system and tithes lifted directly from the fields, the only way that authorities could touch income was through a tax on the resources that generated it. On this view taxes, soon to be absorbed into the panoply of seigniorial exploitation, were just an additional draft on peasant resources.
76
As a taxable entity, the mansus and its English and German equivalents hide and hufa, represented a defined area of cultivated land associated with a family farm. That reading is all the more persuasive in that when regular taxation of rural wealth was re-introduced in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, it assumed the form of a tax on ‘hearths’ whose share of the burden was determined by an assessment of their wealth.
77 The unit of assessment was the
‘charrue’ which also appears as the unit of taxation (‘ploughland’) in Domesday county returns
72 Guérard (1844).
73 Coupland (1999).
74 Maitland
75 Goffart (1972).
76 The Edit de Pîtres (no. 29) restates the obligation of certain peasants to transport marne as part of their obligation to the fisc. This raises the implicit question why they refused, (which is the reason for the clause) and why they also to perform the manopera for threshing grain. A plausible reason is that the services were originally defined as limited amounts of labour defined by tax liability. The law may have been on their side, but the administrators of the imperial domain had committed abuses of authority for long that the Edict, which was issued to secure their political support, simply legalize them.
76
77 Note on English lay subsidies here. For France see Henneman (1971)

(the unit in Kent was the related ‘yoke’).
78 The question of exactly what the fiscal ‘hide’ represented has been much discussed in England. The traditional view concords with Chareles-
Edwards’ assessment that the tax system adapted itself to the underlying structure of agricultural production.
‘In the historical period the hide appears as a territorial unit for the assessment of taxes, rents, renders and services for kingdom and lordship. … The hide and the manse were used by lords and kings. Yet it is unlikely that this system of land measurement was a creation of royal or seigneurial administration. There is no evidence that early Anglo-
Saxon kings had the necessary administrative resources to carry out the task of surveying their kingdom and creating a unit of assessment for exacting taxes or food-renders. They used a unit bequeathed to them by the past evolution of the societies over which they ruled; they did not create a new unit. The hide was not a legacy of the Roman empire.’ 79
This definition exactly matches the definitions of the mansus given above. A nagging question is whether the tax is an addition to labour services defined within the framework of the bi-partite manorial structure, or whether the services presumed to define that structure are in fact or were originally also taxes.
Durliat has shown that if one classifies the manses listed in the St-Germain polyptique by the modal sizes of each class of holding (servile, free, etc.) and adjusts their potential income by the like productivity as measured by the amount of seed employed per hectare (on the presumption that more fertile land was sown more thickly) there is a rough proortionality between their presumed income and the amount of tax levied on them to support the army (the hostilitium ).
80 The significance of this finding is that it indicates that a tax system based on estimated income was still operative in the ninth century; the payments imply administration by rational rule, and not arbitrary levies by barbarian lords and kings.
78 Harvey (1985); Baker and Butlin (1973), pp. 406-407
79 Charles-Edwards (1972), p. 4.
80 Durliat (1989)

If the interpretation of the mansus as a real farm from which taxes and other services were collected leads to impossible or at the least implausible conjectures, what exactly was this institution? The answer to this question appears to lie in the obscure history of late Roman taxation. To make sense of the polyptychs that seem, but in fact do not, describe the organization and productivity of agriculture in the early Middle Ages, we have briefly to review that history.
As the discussion that follows is unavoidably complicated, it is useful here to summarize the main points: (1) the assessment and perception of taxes on land and wealth in the late Roman Empire was recorded in an abstract unit of account called the jugum ; (2) the taxes were farmed out to individuals who not only collected the taxes for the government, but also assigned the revenues on its behalf; (3) the tax farms were defined by abstract geographic units termed fundus, mansus and villa ) representing aggregated units of tax assessment or liability that were defined independently of who ultimately paid the tax.; (4) the farm of the fundus, mansus, and villa was in law real property, and so could be alienated by sale, gift and inheritance; (5) when the tax farm was held by land-owners to whom the state had reason to make payment, they could direct the labour services due in lieu of taxes to their own use; (6) the system survived the barbarian invasions to endure in modified form down to the end of the ninth century, where its vestiges are recorded in the Carolingian polyptychs; (7) the ‘great estate’ of the Carolingian documents is in fact a vestigial tax farm.
The History and Significance of a Tax
The Roman state drew revenue from three sources: income from land owned by the state and the imperial family; tolls on trade collected at ports and toll stations; and the property and head tax. The state lands were known as the fisc ; they were augmented by confiscation and diminished by alienation. Upon the fall of direct Roman administration in the West they passed into the possession of the barbarian kings. In the conventional account of the growth of feudalism the granting of fiscal lands on beneficial tenure to officials and military leaders was the underlying cause of disintegration of the Carolingian state..
81 The tolls taxed long-distance trade; 82 they also survived the fall of the Empire, though most of what we know about them comes from charters granting certain monasteries exemption from them. By far the most important tax, however, was the property tax, whose surviva into the medieval period is the principal question at hand.
Prior to the third century the property tax was collected by the provinces, which forwarded a share of the receipts to the central government and retained the balance to finance local public works, charities, and administrative expenses. Prior to the late third century the tax assessment was evidently based on self-reporting, like the modern income tax declaration. It listed taxable objects, of which the most important would have been land, buildings, livestock and slaves. The listed assets were proxies for earning capacity, as no government before the nineteenth century had the administrative capacity directly to assess individual income. For this reason tax was also levied on persons ( caput ) in order to capture income not directly attributable
81 Ganshof (1961), Westfall (1935).
82 Local trade was exempted. The survival of the tolls after the fall of the Empire is documented in charters granting exemptions to certain monasteries. Fustel de Coulanges (1922), vol. 3, pp. 253-54 for examples.
Also McCormick (2002).

to a physical asset.
83 The tax assessors calculated the value of the objects listed under each individuals name in the census , the resulting sum being his assessment, which determined his share of the total tax to be raised in the district where he was registered.
This system broke down during the prolonged civil disturbances in the second and third quarters of the third century, when massive inflation made it difficult to calculate the value of assessments, and taxpayers and assets disappeared from increasingly outdated tax registers. After the restoration of stable government in the 280s the Imperial government tightened up the fiscal system, a task all the more urgent owing to the need to maintain and appease the armies employed to matain external defense and internal order. The need for a stable flow of resources for the central government resulted in two major changes in the administration of the land tax that were to have a major impact on the subsequent evolution of agricultural organization. The first was the assumption of responsibility for collecting the land tax by the central Imperial government, which in principle meant creating a large bureaucracy of local tax receivers. The second was the creation of abstract units of fiscal accounting intended to simplify the administration of the tax system and imperial budget, and to shelter the assessments from the disrupting influence of monetary debasement. We begin with the units of account.
The Jugum
From the fourth century onward the Roman system of fiscal accounting was based on a unit called the jugum , a term that recalls Roman areal measure of farm land ( jugerum ).
84 The system worked by first listing taxpayers land and other assessable assets ( descriptio ). This assessment was recorded in juga , the number of which was entered on the tax rolls accompanied by a list of the assets that supported it.
85 The transformation of the values of the assets into a common measure of tax liability expressed in juga was accomplished by a calculation known as jugatio . We know how this was done from a fourth-century Romano-Syrian law book, which gives the rate of transformation of specific areas of arable, vineyards, olive groves, and land of lesser fertility into fiscal juga .
86 The coefficients for other items of assessable wealth are lost to us.
83 Goffart (1974). Goffart argues that the caput also functioned as a residual category for assessments that did not add up to a jugum . It may also have served to designate individual assessments entered in the tax registers (Durliat 1999), p. xx. The exact meaning of this fiscal term of art – which may have evolved over its history – is frightfully complex. The most important element, however, seems to be the tax’s function in tapping revenues not otherwise captured by assessments based on visible wealth.
84 The jugera was approximately a half acre (.25 hectares). The term is derived from the Latin word for yoke, and must have originally referred to the amount of land that could be plowed in a day by a team of oxen.
85
th
86 The transformation rates in the law book indicate that a fiscal jugum was constituted by five jugera (an areal measure) of vines, 20 jugera of arable, 450 olive trees, and lands of lesser grades of productivity 40

The value of a jugum in terms of tax liability was the same throughout the Empire. It seems originally to have been based on the assessed value of a typical Roman family farm of 8 to
10 hectares, which would explain the terminology.
87 The word ‘value’ in this context is somewhat misleading, however. It was not an amount expressed in monetary units of account, but instead represented a unit share of a regional assessment. For example, a district might have an overall assessment of 1000 juga . A taxpayer whose assessment was 30 juga would have been liable for three percent of the amount of tax that had to be raised. This simplified the government’s fiscal accounting, since all that had to be recorded in the registers were the juga of liability, the actual amount of tax raised each year varying with the aggregate demand for income by the state. It also made it easy to predict revenues, since the census that established the basis for the jugatio was carried out at fifteen year (often longer) intervals.
Fundus and Mansus .
How were the taxes collected? Despite what is commonly asserted concerning the topheavy bureaucracy of the late Roman state, the number of functionaries directly attached to the central administration was astonishingly small. At its peak in the fourth and early fifth century, the Imperial administration in Gaul, whose population was 7 to 10 million million people did not exceed 3000 officials.
88 The main reason is that except for the army, finances and law, the real work of government was carried out by local officials, in particular the officials of the provinces and their subdivisions, the cities ( civitates ).
89 The Imperial household had its separate administration. As noted above, in the late third century the Imperial government assumed responsibility for levying imperial taxes. But how could a government with so few officials actually collect a land tax? The solution was to preserve local responsibility for maintaining the tax register, and to farm out the collection of taxes.
Tax farming was not new, but until the end of the third century it was limited the indirect taxes vectigalia ) that went directly to the Imperial treasury.
90 Farming tolls spared the imperial government the expense of monitoring the collectors, who would otherwise have been tempted to accept kickbacks or embezzle the proceeds. Tax farmers had a strong incentive to minimize collection costs one may presume they were immune to the temptations to accept kickbacks, since they had already paid the government for the right to collect the tax. The other wide of the coin is that they had every incentive to exploit their position as gate-keepers, but such exploitation held no interest to a state whose first priority was to secure financial stability.
When the imperial government took over the administration of the land tax from the provinces and cities, it had few alternatives to tax-farming. Once a farmer had contracted to and 60 jugera , respectively. That the jugum was an abstract unit and not a ‘real’ areal measure is shown by the fact that the lawbooks speaks of ‘giving the annona of one jugum , which is to say ‘one jugum ’s share of the tax liability. (Goffart, 1974, p. 33).
87 Jugum is related to the Latin word for ‘yoke’. An eight-hectare farm would have employed one yoke of oxen. In the early modern period, the French government employed a similar convention for assessing farms subject to the taille , which were rated in charrues (plows) according to their area. As in the case of the jugum , the amount of arable land contained in a fiscal charrue was inversely related to the fertility of the soil. [cite dictionnaire des institutions de la France]
88 The estimate of the number of officials directly under the Imperial government has been computed by
Durliat (ibid. p. 51) from figures given by Jones (1964), 592-94.
89 The civitates (a subdivision of the province) were responsible for maintaining the roads, bridges, city walls, aqueducts and schools. They also handled famine relief. Durliat (1990), Pp. 39-42).
90 Goffart (1972), Pp. 7, 19. .

collect the tax from a given district, he was legally responsible for it, whether or not he could collect it.. The system seems to have worked as follows. Municipal officials working under the direction of the local tax officials ( curiales ) carried out the census of wealth ( descriptio ) on which the assessments were based. From the information recorded in the registers the tax farmers levied the tax, crediting or remitting the proceeds to the Imperial government local government.
91 The amounts remitted were net of the collection costs and the farmers’ profit, which appears to have been on the order of four to five percent of the gross tax take.
92
Given an accounting system that recorded the tax obligation of a district in juga , tax farming was a flexible and relatively efficient means of raising revenues to defray the expenses of the state.
93 That flexibility was based on the ability of tax-farmers who dealt directly with the government to sublet the right to collect tax to persons on the spot. As in early modern times, the contracts would have involved advancing funds to the government, so that the system represents a cumbersome form of short-term state credit. The system lent itself to organization by consortium.
Holders of the largest farms sublet to local tax farmers who in turn could sub-let them to other farmers, and so on down to persons who actually came in contact with rural taxpayers. The abstract system of accounting for tax shares in juga permitted the pyramid of debt created by this system to be recorded in simple units that remained unchanged from one tax exercise to the next.
There remained, however, the problem of keeping track of who or what was to be taxed.
The documentation associated with the farming of the Imperial land tax has bequeathed a number of terms the interpretation of which determines our understanding of the social, political, and economic development of Western Europe between 300 and 900 AD. Only a few of those terms can be reviewed here. The essential terms are fundus , mansus , possessore, possessio, and dominium . They are conventionally thought to refer to real property, real farms, and their owners. As we have seen, that interpretation is the basis for the reading of the Carolingian polyptyques as documents of a bi-partite manorial estate. The alternative reading is that they refer to fiscal entities and persons holding the right to collect the tax that is defined on specified properties. The terms also point to a distinction that was to be of supreme importance to continental jurisprudence from the twelfth century to the French Revolution: the distinction between the ‘droit utile’, or property right enjoyed by the owner-occupier of a farm, and the ‘droit
éminent’ held by the seignior over the same real property. On this distinction rested the whole manorial form of agricultural organization. The historical issue raised by the fiscal interpretation of the above terms is whether that organization was imposed on a free peasantry by force of arms in an age of anarchy – as the currently conventional interpretation supposes – or whether it represents the deformation of a tax system that while necessarily based on compulsion, nevertheless had a limited claim on peasant resources. In short, it raises the question of exactly how burdensome was the medieval manorial regime.
94
The easiest term to decipher is possessor . The possessor was a tax farmer who
‘possessed’ the right to collect tax from persons in a specific jurisdiction or from tax farmers to whom that right was sublet. The possessores , were necessarily wealthy men, usually local officials and large landowners not necessarily of noble status A possessor could also be an
91 The local government retained one-third of the receipts.
92 Durliat
93 The expenses are described in Durliat (1990), pp. 40ff.
94 It also raises the question how continuous and effective was the legal system that regulated the transmission of property and the status of persons in the early Middle Ages. On these questions and the broader interpretation of the political structure of the successor kingdoms, see Magnou-Nortier (1993).

institution like a church, or originally a pagan temple. Most of what we know from the medieval period about them comes from ecclesiastical documents that assert a right to possessio The possessio was thus a claim on a tax stream, implying a right to enforce its collection ( dominium ).
That claim seems to have had the legal status of real property, in that it could be bequeathed, alienated by sale or gift, and parceled out into smaller pieces. In many, though not all, respects, it shares the legal properties of the medieval rente , which was an income stream secured by real property. The right to a tax stream, however, had to be geographically situated, since ultimately it was based on an assessment of physical assets, and it is here that the other terms come into play.
The most difficult term is fundus , which was the traditional Latin word for agricultural land or rural estate, a meaning that survives in the terms latifundia and minifundia.
95 It is clear from how the term is used in the texts, however, that fundus was borrowed by the fiscal administration to serve as an accounting unit of fiscal liability.
96 The origin of the fiscal use of this common word has not yet been clarified, but it would seem to be analogous to the the way the jugum came to be an abstract unit of fiscal accounting. Fundus clearly designates a geographical unit representing a share of the fiscal burden. Unlike the jugum , however, its value does not seem to have been uniform throughout the Empire, which suggests that it was a measure of convenience. But what was the convenience?
Fundi are what a possessor possesses. As units of fiscal revenue, they could be
‘assigned’ to support the cost of maintaining the public baths, the cost of supporting specific churches, and the cost of educating and feeding orphans.
97 When the Visigothic mercenaries were settled in Italy in the fifth century, they were assigned shares of Italian fundi as remuneration.
98 Grants to churches are also expressed in fundi or an equivalent such as millena .
99
No document like the Romano-Syrian lawbook unambiguously defines the fiscal sense of the term fundus, however. Its meaning has therefore to be inferred from the way it is used in the texts where it appears. The term appears in a fiscal sense in an inscription dated to the early second century, where it seems to describe a tax liability associated with definite landed estates.
100 In that inscription fundi are located by geographical landmarks and the persons responsible for paying their tax. This is also the case of an endowment by Constantine of certain lands in Rome to the Roman Church in 330 is described as
‘The fundus Laurentum located between the Sessorian aqueduct, the via Penestria, the via
Latina, and Mount Gabus, in the possessio of August Helen, and paying 1,024 solidi.’
The donated ‘estate’ was thus situated at the edge of downtown Rome. Before Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, the fundus Laurentum was the property of the pagan emperors and had a Christian burial ground, which implies that Christians owned the property; and they were not the only landlords in that crowded quarter. If so, exactly what was the the fundus the Emperor gifted to the church?
101 The parsimonious answer is that he endowed the church with some of its
95 Fustel de Coulanges, L’alleu , p.
96 Durliat (1993)
97 Examples in Durliat (1990; 1993).
98 Goffart (1980).
99 Goffart (1972). The fiscal concept denoted by the term fundus appears to have many equivalent names.
100 Durliat (1993). The inscription records the assignment of revenues from a list of fundi in North Italy to the support of 245 orphaned boys and 34 infants.
101 The example is analyzed by Durliat (1993), pp. 18-19. The evidence for the burial grounds is archaeological. Durliat argues that it is unlikely that the Christians could have leased the grounds from emperors who were persecuting them, which implies they must have owned the properties in question.

tax revenue – or rather the tax base—of a district geographically circumscribed by two avenues, an aqueduct, and a hilltop.
The fiscal fundus seems to be a geographically defined unit. Two documents dated 489 or 490 from the Ravenna papyrus (P. Ital. 10 – 11) record a grant by the Visigothic king Odoacre to a certain count Pierius in compensation for loyal service.
102 The first document records a grant of 690 solidi to be taken from the Dalmation island of Melita and the Sicilian city of Syracuse. It specifies the sum to be taken from each massa (another fiscal term designating a territory) described in the grant. At the same time it also grants a fundus that is physical situated inside one of the listed massa , which supposing the king was granting real property implies that he same land do double duty as payment to the Count, which is absurd, as the grant specifies the funds raised on each property granted. What appears to be the case is that in granting a fundus the king was diverting to Pierius part of the tax on that subdivision of the massa that would otherwise have gone to the local government.
103
The second document records the ceremony that transferred the fundi on the island of
Melita. It describes how agents of Pierius (or perhaps the Count himself) entered the fundus , convoked its serfs and residents, and walked its boundaries, after which the transfer was notarized before the local magistrates, who provided an acquittance to its previous holder.
104 Who exactly were the residents who walked with the new owners? If they were tenants, there would have been no reason for them to certify the boundaries of the domain, which could have been done by witnesses; if they are property owners, then how could the King give away their property? On the other hand, if they were taxpayers, the convocation and the walking of the boundaries is explained. The Count was establishing and certifying the persons whose property was situated inside the boundary of the massa or fundus that had been granted to him by the King.
These and other documents establish that the fundus and other equivalent terms designate a geographically defined tax district. That the districts did not correspond exactly to the administrative divisions should not be offensive to Americans who pay special taxes levied by water districts, school districts, and other ad hoc entities created to finance local bond issues. The units created in antiquity were probably not so ad hoc, and probably corresponded roughly to existing patterns of settlement and landholding. In districts where property was highly concentrated, the fundus would have probably corresponded to the great estate and whatever other properties sufficiently attached to it geographically to make the district to be a natural unit of perception.
The reader whose eyes remain unglazed by the forgoing discussion will have noticed that the sentences in the foregoing paragraph have shifted from the declarative to the hypothetical. It is fairly clear that the fundus and its variants like villa were geographic units of fiscal assessment.
If so, they must have completely covered the territory subject to the land tax. There is, however, no document that describes precisely how the size of these tax districts was determined. To anticipate the discussion below, however, we may infer from an instruction in the Capitulary De
Villis limiting the size of districts administered by intendants to an area they could ride around in
102 The Ravenna papyrus are along with the letters of Cassiodorus, who was the pretorian prefect (head of the administration) in the Visigothic state, are the primary source of information concerningthe Roman tax system in Italy after the Fall. Much of the current controversy turns on the interpretation of these documents. The standard edition is
103 The example is analyzed by Durliat (1993)
104 Durliat (1993), pp. 22-26.

a day.
105 Supposing that circumference to be 25 to 30 kilometers, the maximum size for effective administration of taxes paid in labour services was five to seven thousand hectares.
106 Count
Pierius or his agents walked the boundaries of their new property, which suggests an area about the size of a rural commune of two to three thousand hectares. If so, the region corresponding to the basic geographical unit of tax perception corresponds roughly to the area of later rural communes or townships. Such correspondence is all the more likely in that even where rural settlement was non-nucleated, the countryside was punctuated by small population centers ( vici ) that handled local trade and local administrative services. In districts characterized by large property, the natural locus for local administration of the tax would have been the great house of the landowner, a site all the more probable in that the wealthiest and most powerful man in a district was the person most likely to have the right to collect the tax.
107
The Naming of Fundi
This brings us to a phenomenon first commented on by Fustel de Coulanges. Fustel believed the term possessio signified a landed estate, and that possessor or dominus referred to the owner of such estate, who under the Roman law of property had an untrammeled right to use and dispose of his property as he wished, a right that supervened a public interest in it for works of public utility.
108 He observed that rural domains appearing in the ancient texts are always identified by a proper name, which was rarely the name of the actual owner. The diplomas that record the bequest or transfer of a domain rarely indicate its geographical location, but instead indicate that the property that bears such and such a name.
109 What was even more astonishing is that centuries later in the regions settled by the Germans, estates continued to be called by their original Latin appellations, which survive in modified form to the present day in the names of towns and rural communes. Some bear Latinized forms of German names, like Childufovilla,
Childriciaca, and Beudegisilovallis in the valley of the Seine, or Grimoaldovillare and
Childinovilla along the Loire. The majority of these names are found in northeastern France and in regions where the common language eventually became German, Flemish and Frisian.
110 It was clear to Fustel that the names pre-dated the German invasions, and that they had remained unchanged despite their passage from Roman to German, and in some instances, back to Roman hands. He conjectured that the Roman names descended from the original owners of the villae , which had been attached to them by custom, and preserved in much the same way that towns in the western United States preserve the names of speculators who plotted them out.
111 Through all
105 Maiores vero amplius in ministerio non habeant, nisi quantum in una die circumire aut pridere potuerint.
106 Magnou-Nortier (1998), p. 685, n. 20.
107 Magnou-Nortier (1989), p.
108 Fustel de Coulanges (1889), p. 11. Fustel used the absence of a state right of eminent domain to demonstrate that the Roman law of property recognized only ‘propriété utile’ in land, which was direct and complete. He believed the later distinction between a seigniorial eminent right and the cultivatoroccupier’s direct right over a property was a product of the feudal age.
109 ‘Regarder le titre qui traite du legs et où les jurisconsultes citent quelques clauses testamentaires, vous remarquez qu’un testateur écrivait rarement, “la propriété que j’au eu en tel lieu”; il écrivait plutôt, “ma propriété qui porte tel nom.”’ Ibid. p. 17.
110 Fustel de Coulanges (1889), Pp. 220-238. For a recent survey of the situation in Franconia see Peschek
(1978)..
111
‘Il y a eu comme une sorte de fondation, et, dans les idéees anciennes, ce première propriétaire ressemble quelque peu à un fondateur de ville. … la persistence du nom ancien est la règle ordinaire.’
Ibid . p. 19.

the social and political flux flux of the fifth through ninth centuries, one thing remained unchanged: the name of the estate.
Because Fustel believed possessio signified landed property, he inferred from the permanence of the names that the thing they signified enjoyed the same permanence. On the strength of this supposed concordance he constructed the theory that the estates inventoried in the
Carolingian polyptychs were direct descendants of Roman properties created between the first and the fifth centuries, which having passed into the hands of the Germans, or remained in the hands of the local indigenous elite, gradually evolved from slave plantations into bi-partite estates cultivated by a hereditary class of serfs, who were descended from slaves who had been allotted land on which to grow their own subsistence, freedmen who remained subject to the jurisdiction of their ancient masters after emancipation, and colons , who were legally free but under late
Roman law tied to their holdings to ensure the payment of the land tax, and subject to the domination of large landowners whom the state had made responsible for that tax.
112 The possessor was thus a proprietor of men as well as land, and in the diminished economic circumstances of the fifth through seventh centuries, a natural way to exploit this double ownership was to allot a small holding to families without land, and to extract labour services from families that had it.
113 The variation in dues and services demanded of individual households ( mansi ) could be attributed to the variation in their status at the time they came under the dominium of the proprietor of the estate. A villa , then, was an economic unit whose constituent parts were the demesne ( mansus indominicatus ) and the servile tenements. A mansus was a farm; and all manses with this exception of the lord’s manse were family farm. We have returned by this route to the original definition given at the top of this essay.
While Fustel’s theory that the seigneury was essentially Roman in origin was later contested by historians who explained it by the barbarian conquest or the later feudalization of political authority, the underlying conception of the villa as a landed estate and the mansus as a constituent peasant holding within it was never challenged. Nevertheless, the theory rests ultimately on a conjectured equivalence between possessio and land that reflects a real sociological and economic unit. It is on this correspondence that the conventional model of the rise of the manor, the nature of feudalism, and the ‘style’ of the early medieval economy rests.
Let us return to the permanence of the names. We have seen that the fiscal fundus represented the tax base of a definite geographical region within which resided the properties and persons that constituted the ultimate object of taxation. The polyptychs for such a region would have listed all assessable persons and lands lying within it, the value of which would be expressed in the abstract juga . To keep the accounts straight, each fiscal would require a title in the official tax registers, which by the nature of things would either be the name of its population center, or that of its dominant landowner. Another possibility is that it took the name of the original farmer of its tax, who in all likelihood would also be the dominant landowner. Once a name had been entered in the register, there was no reason to alter it, since its function was the purely utilitarian one of keeping an accurate record of a district’s tax obligation.
112 Fustel de Coulangs (1889). See Goffart (1974) for a thorough analysis of the relevant laws, which date to the late fourth century.
113 ‘De ce que nous avons vu jusqu’ici, il resort que le propriétaire du sol était en même temps un propriétaire d’hommes. Il possédait des escalaves, il possédait aussi des affranchis. Le domaine était vaste; il ne pouvait le cultiver lui-même. Il faisait donc cultiver par ses hommes. Voilà le fait general qui domine tout le moyen age.’ L’Alleu , p. 560.

That record, however, had a further implication. It seems probable from the evidence amassed by Durliat (1990) and Magnou-Nortier (1989) that villae and fundi were themselves units of account. This is probably the most controversial, as well as the crucial premise of the
‘fiscalist’ interpretation of the polyptyques. The documents show villae , fundi , and mansi being sold, divided, bequeathed and donated like any real property, which is how the conventional interpretation of the transactions treats them. As we have seen, the interpretation of these terms as designating real economic organizations implies insoluble paradoxes. If on the other hand, the terms are read as designating the right to levy tax (or to a certain amount of tax) in a particular district, the paradoxes are readily resolved.
In many ways, the proposition that the words are fiscal rather than real is similar to the ideas of continental drift prior to the discoveries of the rifts in the crusts of ocean floors that established the theory of plate tectonics. In the present case, however, no new data will ever become available, so we must argue from the small amount of known fact.
114 Of these perhaps the fundamental one was that the tax-farmer was legally obligated to deliver the value of the tax for which he had the farm. Because of this the government agency that received the tax or services did not have to maintain accounts for each tax-payer, which would have required them to give an acquittance for each tax liability that was cleared by a payment. All the central and provincial governments needed to know was the debt owed by the tax farmer and the amount of it that had been cleared by a remittance or other credit against it. The natural unit of accounting for this purpose was the geographical one on which the lease of the farm was situated. In short, a fundus or a villa was simultaneously a geographical identification and a unit of fiscal accounting.
Thus, when the Emperor or one of his German successors desired to fund a particular activity, endow a temple or church, or pension off an official, he simply ordered the fisc to ‘assign’ the product of one or more (or a fraction of) a specific fundus or villa to the recipient of the grant. In his capacity as receiver of the tax, the possessor of a tax farm might in turn assign the revenues from specific tax-payers, which included the munera sordida of labour services. Taxpayers’ accounts with the receiver would be credited for the value of the services rendered, while the tax farmer’s account with the central administration would be credited for the payment to the grantees as a certain number of fraction of villae .
The transformation of a fiscal geographic unit into a fiscal accounting unit can be explained in part by the stability of the revenue raised on a fundus , which encouraged the conflating of the assessment share the monetary value of the tax it represented. Something like this seems to have happened in the successor kingdoms, and may have already occurred under the
Empire. Given this conflation, a villa would represent a predictable income stream, and thus a unit of account for assigning tax receipts. Such assignments were a critical part of the ancient fiscal apparatus. We have already noted that one third of the impositions were credited to the account of the city or local government. Local taxes also paid local imperial expenses; imperial officials and armies stationed in a particular region would similarly have had assigned to them revenues from the two-thirds share going to the Imperial government. In the later Empire many of these taxes were paid in kind or in services, which meant that they were accounted for in artificial units of account. An accounting system that registered the number of juga owed by a district, and that assembled them in larger units like the villa or fundus greatly simplified the
114 This assessment is too pessimistic. There remain unread and unanalyzed Byzantine papyri that may hold some record of the internal fiscal accounts of the Roman Empire in the East. As the laws governing the fiscal regime covered the whole Empire, there is no reason to accept Wickham’s (1993) assertion that
Durliat’s use of this evidence to establish the methods of fiscal accounting in the west is illegitimate. Even when the rulership was divided among two Emperors and four Augustus’s in the early fourth century, it remained one (Werner 1984) pp.

accounting of what was by any accounts an extremely complex payments system. Only the possessor coming into immediate contact with taxpayers and the province within which they were located had to keep accounts for individual taxpayers, who were listed by fundus or villa . The higher levels of government needed only to record the credits and debits attached to the the latter.
115
The accounting system made it possible to effect interregional transfers by crediting and debiting villae in different regions. As with the virtual transfers of later times, any outstanding balance could be cleared in specie.
116 The flexibility of the system as a payments system can be seen in the use of exemptions from tax or a part of tax as compensation. Such exemptions are recorded in the fiscal unit of the fundus , villa or mansus . In effect what was being transferred were ‘shares’ of tax revenue.
There is a further practical reason why the system of tax collection had to be based on an abstract geographic unit rather than an actual unit of agricultural production and administration.
As Goffart points out, the Roman tax was a tax on wealth, not enterprise.
117 We know from studies of agricultural organization in early modern Europe that the territory of individual farms was often assembled by combining freehold and rented land to exploit economies of scale or to make farms more compact.
118 In a fiscal system based on the assessed value of landed property, there was thus no necessary correspondence between the unit of ownership and the unit of agricultural exploitation. A fiscal system that levied tax on property had to be based on local records listing properties under the name of the real owners responsible for the tax so that the collectors could know from whom to collect. To the imperial government, however, knowing who owned a particular piece of land was irrelevant to its budetary process. All it needed to know was the assessed value of a given fiscal district, which once established could serve as the basis for assigning its tax revenue to the various purposes of government.
The significance of the assignment of tax shares denominated in fundi and other geographical units of fiscal accounting is that unlike the specific area to which they were attached, the shares and the tax streams they represented could be indefinitely divided and exchanged. At some point in the history of Roman taxation – possibly from the beginning – the farm of the tax became a form of real property, whose owner enjoyed all the rights to which that legal status applied, subject to the condition that the obligation to render the taxes to the state be continuously observed. It was this property that gave the fiscal possessio its incredible mobility.
To a Church in Rome are assigned the … [more examples to go here …]
Perhaps the most significant assignment of fiscal revenues by the state were the ‘thirds’ of Italian and Gallic fundi assigned to the German mercenary troops by the Kings who succeeded the Roman Emperors in the West. In this the long-haired kings 119 imitated a practice that dated
115 Durliat (1990), pp. 82-84.
116 Goffart (1972), Pp. 172-73 gives an example of a shipment of specie from Ravenna to the Dalmatian provincial government to cover a fiscal accounting deficit caused by a large shipment to Ravenna of taxes in kind raised in the Province. The internal accounts had to be balanced year by year for all levels of government.
117 Goffart (1972), p. 168.
118 Grantham (1980); Moriceau and Postel-Vinay (1992); Moriceau (1994). Another important reason was that a tenant farmer’s freehold property stood as security for the liability assumed in taking a lease, which in law was a debt to the landlord payable over the term of the lease. (Postel-Vinay (199x).
119 Princes of royal blood had the right to wear their hair long. By the end of the fifth century, fewer than a half dozen families of German descent enjoyed that right. For an example of a Merovingian pretender

back to the ‘settling’ of German troops on the lower reaches of the Rhine and the Meuse at the end of the second century. The conventional account of these ‘settlements’ holds that the German troops and their families seized or were given one third of a particular territory, which in the case of the northern settlements is supposed to have been previously emptied of most of its inhabitants as a result of disease, endemic warfare and the collapse of the plantation system. The argument is based on the Roman law of hospitalitas . In Burgundy, Italy and elsewhere, the troops allotted holdings are designated in the diplomas and law codes as ‘guests’, though if they had been given land belonging to the locals, they must have been unwelcome ones.
Goffart has shown that this reading of the law of hospitalitas is incorrect. It was essentially intended to billet imperial officials and Roman troops passing through a district on the way to their stations. The owner of a house was expected temporarily to make available one-third of its living space. The same facilities applied to German mercenaries who from the middle of the fourth century increasingly staffed the Roman armies.
120 Goffart demonstrated that where the documentation permits the settlement process to be observed, it seems to show an allocation of tax revenues from the central government to the settled barbarian soldiers. If one recalls that approximately one third of the Imperial tax went to the army, and that to the extent possible the troops were paid in money and kind raised in the districts where they were stationed, the device of settling groups of barbarians inside the Empire by means of a tax assignment was not entirely novel. It would also explain why there seems to have been so little protest from indigenous landowners who on the interpretation that their land had been seized by the government – something entirely at variance with the Roman law of property. What the barbarians received was either an annona or salary in cash and kind made over to them by a local tax farmer who simply ordered his charges to deliver their tax to the German troops, crediting his account for tax paid, or the right of the farm itself. All this requires that the administration of the tax system survived the ‘fall’ of the last Roman emperor in the West, something that is now generally conceded.
The theory outlined above has been subject to vigorous attack by adherents of the conventional wisdom.
121 For the most part, the criticism against what one historian calls the
‘hyper-Romanist’ thesis rests on the primtivist assumptions discussed in the first part of this paper
– i.e. that the coming of the Germans was in fact an invasion leading to mass transfers of land, and that the Germans were incapable of running a state with a stable fiscal system, in part because they were illiterate. Absent these reasons, the defence of the conventional wisdom rests on the proposition that it is conventional. In the context of a historiography that for two centuries has stressed the decline of one civilization, and the birth of a new one out of chaos, the notion that taxes continued to be assessed and collected centuries after the ‘fall’ of the Roman Empire simply is inadmissible. Yet even in England, where the Roman Empire did cease to have an effective link with any successor kingdom, the units of tax assessment are strikingly like those of the old
Roman system. Is this simply a coincidence, is what Maitland called the ‘notional mobility of land’, which seems alarmingly like the notional mobility of the fundus and the mansus merely a consequence of primitive administrative methods? There is too much similarity in all these systems to imagine that they are alike by chance. And yet, there is little logic to suppose that they all found their similar and unlikely form by common processes of evolution, for the English developments were quite different from those on the Continent. A parsimonious explanation is that they derive from the same original fiscal system.
(Gundovald, a illegitimate son of Clothaire) who let his hair grow long after being persuaded of his right, see Bachrach (1994). pp. ; On the custom itself, see Wallace-Hadrill (1962)
120 Goffart (1980) Pp. 168-178.
121 In particular Wickham (1993)

How does this logic get us to the explanation of the medieval manor? Goffart (1982) has suggested a reasonable route. Individuals who were too poor to pay a tax in money paid tax in labour services. Where the tax farmer of a district was also its leading landowner, the services could be diverted to his holding, their value being credited against his account. Such a system lent itself to obvious abuses, but it is not certain that they were so extensive as to push all such peasants into serfdom. Persons owing labour services were still ‘free’ except in the matter of their tax liability. Moreover, such documentation as survives from Merovingian France indicates that tax farmers were closely supervised by the monarchy’s fiscal administrators.
122 Economic logic also argues for preservation of the system. Even when the tax revenues were assigned to churches and other persons, the receivers would have had every incentive to maintain the collection mechanisms, so that the stream of income would be maintained through changes of ownership of the properties subject to tax. Only by positing a regime of brute force can we think otherwise. But there is little evidence that medieval society was a society ruled by brute force.
The manor as it appears in the Carolingian texts, then, is a mirage. We see the tax system but not the real units taxed. Does this mean there was no bi-partite manor? To argue that would be to deny the evidence of the agricultural labour services. But what can be argued is that the extent of that organization was probably limited to those regions where large-scale farming was profitable, and where therefore affecting taxes due in labour to agricultural work was advantageous. As to the causes of the manor, they are to be seen not in the disintegration of society and economy, or to some optimizing logic that made the labour input contract an efficient way of coordinating land and labour, but in the survival and deformation of a tax system.
Implications of the Fiscalist View and the Problem of Continuity (By way of conclusion)
The implications of the fiscal interpretation of the documents that appear to describe or refer to seigneurial property are profound. From the standpoint of economic history, the most important consequence is their elimination as a prop for the hypothesis of low agricultural productivity prior to the twelfth or thirteenth century. In this respect, the new interpretation confirms the recent archaeological and iconographic evidence showing that the heavy plow and efficient harness are datable to the classical and Celtic age and not the early medieval centuries..
It is also consistent with the now rather abundant evidence of extensive specialization and trade through the late Roman age and the dark centuries that followed it. These findings require a complete rethinking of our ideas about not only the early Middle Ages, but the more fully documented central centuries of the millennium that reaches from the age of Diocletian to the age of Columbus. If agricultural techniques and agricultural productivity were potentially as productive in 600 or 700 AD as they were in 1700, we need to know why in fact productivity seems to have been so much lower, and why the economy did not exhibit more prosperity. For this it is necessary to think through an economics that can explain it.
The implications for agrarian, social and political organization are if anything even more profound, and it is largely for this reason that the reaction to the fiscalist interpretation of the
Carolingian polyptyques and the hypothesis of fiscal (and administrative) continuity from late
Roman times has been so strong. For most historians, such continuity as can be detected between
AD 300 and AD 1000 must be sought in the distribution of the ownership of land and the civil status of the mass of its cultivators. While the hallucinatory vision of a descent into utter barbarism that the writings of hagiographers and especially Gregory of Tours bequeathed to later
122 Magnou-Nortier (1989)

generations, 123 especially the philosophers of the Enlightenment, has long been abandoned by professional historians, and survives mainly among the unenlightened zealots who still believe that Irish monks brought civilization back to the Continent, the composition of the picture painted by Gibbon still dominates the mainstream view of the early Middle Ages. It is a picture of the dissolution of ordered legal and political life, of the emergence of a mafia politics and a mafia society. The timing of this descent has been subject to dispute. Gibbon and Montesquieu located it in the fifth through eighth centuries; Marc Bloch situated it in what he supposed to be the wreckage of the ninth and tenth. In either case the end result was the creation of a society based on sheer force. Feudal society was, in this view a mafia society. It was a society that reflected the disintegration of government.
The other side of this grim picture is the development of self-sufficient peasant cultures.
Here it is not Weber’s ideas that dominate the political sociology, but those of Durkheim and his nephew Marcel Mauss. It is from them that we owe the image of a peasant society that turned away from markets, that censured those who might break communal solidarity for personal gain.
It is an image of technological stasis. At the social level of the rulers, we have the gift economy.
Chris Wickham claims that these customs define the societies of the early Middle Ages.
‘The experts in comparison of this kind are sociologists and (for our purposes, above all) social anthropologists; they have generated the categories most useful for comparing whole societies, and have made the comparisons most explicitly. We must construct a rural sociology, in the widest sense, for ourselves.’
He goes on to add,that Marc Bloch’s famous characterization of feudalism in
Feudal Society was one such, and is still one of the best.’ 124
The rules that one observes in the few documents from this age, then, are a product of the balance between the muscle of an unregulated military aristocracy, and the deadening but often effective resistance of a numerous peasantry. The result of that balance was the seigneury, and the infinite variation in the local particulars of that institution no more than represent the variations in the local rapport de force at the time when it was established.
The above view leaves no room for any real continuity from Roman times. In particular, no continuity in law, politics and administrative procedures. Yet there is much evidence that these elements of social life exhibited significant continuity with the Roman past. When one examines the classic works like Ganshoff on Feudalism, one finds that the examples of the
‘feudal’ tie are all drawn from accounts of relations between princes, kings and dukes, or between
123 Wynn points out that Gregory composed his epic History of the Franks as a biblical sage, the Franks under Clovis playing the role of the early Israelites, other barbarians, the gentiles, and Gaul the promised land. And just as Israel had its moments of backsliding, so did their Frankish facsimiles. After Clovis – the
David of the Franks – came lesser kings, from whose polygamous proclivities and greed sprang the civil wars of the late sixth century. The moral, of course, was for Bishops like Gregory of good old Gallo-
Roman stock to direct the consciences and the acts of the semi-heathen Merovingians. Though his account of events seems to have been accurate – though riddled with judicious omissions – the coloring is all rhetoric. Philip Wynn, ‘Wars and warriors in Gregory of Tours
Histoire I – VI,’ Francia 28/1 (2000) pp. 1-
35
124 Chris Wickham, ‘Problems of comparing rural societies in early medieval western Europe,’
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 th Series, 2 (1991) pp. 221-246 (p.227)

princes and bishops. There is nothing to documen the ‘ties of dependence’ on which Marc Bloch based his account of Feudal Society claimed linked every free man to every other free man in bilateral contracts at levels below the highest nobility, and between that nobility and their immediate retainers. The ceremony of ‘hommage’ and oaths of fidelity were not Germanic but
Roman.
125 They were acts of a public, not aprivate politics.
The Roman and after it the Merovingian and Carolingian states did not dissolve into the smallest unit of the seigneury. Rather, they broke into large pieces that that had long had an identity and a local prince of their own – Burgundy, Aquitaine, Bavaria, Saxony, Thuringia, and that as a consequence were able to retain much of the old administration they inherited. These states, like the divided pieces of the Frankish kingdoms that preceded them kept those parts of the old Roman administration that it had always been profitable to keep – the tax administration. A major objection to the primitivist view of a disintegrating state is that at no time between 400 and at least 875 can one find a place and time when it could have taken place. The narrative record does not support that hypothesis for the continent. As to England, the emergence of a strong state from at least the early eighth century suggests that, despite the extreme paucity of source material, the same was true there. The only time when a descent to primitivism could have occurred was the tenth century; but there is really no evidence for this either, and by the year
1000 the regional states of Flanders, Champagne, Normandy, and England were administratively coherent.
The fiscalist interpretation of the Carolingian estate documents holds that the documents records fiscal operations, and therefore do not map the underlying agrarian structure. That interpretation presumes significant continuity in the administration of taxes over several hundred years of political evolution. It is inconceivable that the system exactly or even closely reproduced late Roman practice. Yet the logic of a revenue source that no government had any interest to abolish, and no person or institution to which it had ceded some of that revenue had an interest to forget suggests that the taxes continued to be levied. What seems certain is that the system became increasingly decentralized. But even this was not new. The Roman system was highly decentralized, in the sense that one-third of locally collected taxes went directly to local authorities without passing through the central budget. The decentralization could be increased simply by affecting part of the tax base to a church or magnate who employed the proceeds to support the recruitment and training of troops. In time this led to an erosion of the tax base, but only when the magnates acquired an independent voice in the state. This was a product not of primitivism, however, but of the political errors of Charlemagne’s successors.
The objections to the fiscalist position rest on the presumption that the end of the Roman
Empire ushered an age of anarchy. As this review of the literature has shown, that presumption is not warranted by the facts. This is not to deny the frequency of warfare, but one would be hard pressed to find any significant stretch of time in the Middle Ages Europe when it was absent.
Most of the evidence for extreme social disintegration comes from the Jeremiads of ecclesiastical writers, who were drawing on the Biblical trope of destruction visited upon a people that had strayed from God’s path, along the line of Reverend Fallwell’s charge that the attack on the
World Trade Center was God’s punishment for the various sins of the American people and their leaders. The primitivist vision is striking, exciting, and exotic. But it is probably wrong. The case for continuity is stronger than the case for marked discontinuity..
As to the law, there is no evidence that the legal forms that provided continuity in property ownership were ever abandoned. Notaries continued to utilize the old forms; individuals
125 Werner (1998), Pp.

still contested rights to particular pieces of land; gifts to heirs or to the church still had to be authenticated. If one considers the common sense of any society, that for all its internal conflict still must live from one day to the next, it is hard to accept the disappearance of the basic legal forms that made that settled life possible. In whose interest was it?
What about the land? There can be no doubt that land and power were highly concentrated in antiquity and in the centuries that followed. It is nevertheless also true that the documents from the fourth to the twelfth century reveal a large and persisting body of allodial holdings.
126 They survived the ‘invasions’; they survived the so-called breakdown of government in the ninth and tenth centuries; and they survived the early phases of the feudal age. This alone argues in favour of the survival of the basic property of the Roman law of property, of which the most important tenet was the sacral character of private ownership of land.
127
The sociological interpretation of the early middle ages eschews markets, settled government and settled legal institutions. The dominant historical force is political power, imposed on the poor for the benefit of the rich. It implies a forcible expropriation. But need this have been the case? Those of us who live in an America under a government by the rich, of the rich, and for the very rich have learned that it does not require much force to effect a massive redistribution of productive assets towards the powerful. Could it not have been the same in late antiquity and in the early Middle Ages?
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