Settlement, Taxation and the Condition of the Peasantry in Post‐Roman Central Italy

Abstract

This article considers the development of two features of central Italian society in the post‐Roman period (approximately the mid‐fifth to the mid‐ninth centuries) that have been thought to have affected significantly the condition of life of the peasantry there: rural settlement and the taxation system. It argues that we should be wary of attempting to reconstruct the settlement landscape from the surviving documents: too often, references to agrarian structures are misconstrued as references to settlements. The shape of the latter is rarely visible in the textual evidence, but can be appreciated far more certainly from archaeological surveys and excavations, which present a picture of the evolution of the human landscape that is far more varied than a simple transition ‘from villa to village’. Documentary sources are more helpful in tracing the fate of the Roman taxation system. They point to structural continuities in the way that the peasantry was exploited that did not significantly vary between neighbouring political territories, and that reveal how the powerful continued to affect both the location and the condition of peasant life.

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