Roman civilization was city-based. Outside of Rome itself the cities were small, at most ten thousand people and maybe only a few thousand, but they were still the centers for religion, government, communication, and economic exchange, and these cities persisted into the Middle Ages. The big Roman provinces were divided into smaller units, called pagi, and each was comprised of a central city and its surrounding countryside.
But how about the countryside beyond the city, the pagus that the city governed? There were small groupings of people in what we might consider a village, a vicus as it was called, an administrative sub-unit. But the rural population was scattered thinly, most involved in agriculture. The countryside was dotted with villas, homes of wealthy Romans who oversaw the big plantation-style agriculture of the time.
The term villa could mean either an elegant home or the property attached to it, usually both. Villas were the country estates of wealthy aristocrats, places they went when they wanted to relax, though they also maintained city dwellings, where the excitement and action took place. Villas were high-status homes, large, full of atriums, flowering shrubs, mosaics, and bath houses. They were not a single structure but a collection of structures. A great many people lived there, under the kindly or not so kindly direction of the head of the household. Villas also functioned as the centers of the plantation agriculture that marked the Roman Empire. The slow disappearance of these villas between the third and sixth centuries (it happened at different times in different places) was an indication that the civilization was changing.
A big part of it was the end of plantation-based agriculture. The Romans had used slaves, not worrying if they were worked to death because new ones were always being captured as the Empire expanded. But once the Empire stopped conquering new territories and bringing home new slaves, this became a much less viable way to raise crops. The new Germanic peoples setting in the Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries (Goths around the Mediterranean, Angles and Saxons in Britain, Franks in Gaul) had never used plantation agriculture. The climate disasters and Black Death of the sixth century, leading to rapid population loss and shrinking of cities (where the produce of the plantations had been bought and sold), meant that people turned to small-scale agriculture.
But what about the villas? With their economic purpose gone, they became much less viable. Some of the wealthy Romans instead moved to much smaller, semi-fortified structures on hilltops, feeling the times were much too dangerous for the open villa layout. But most of the aristocrats who survived moved to the cities with their walls, which were rebuilt around a much smaller population center.
The elegant villa structures themselves fell into disuse. Because they had been founded in places that were chosen because they were quiet, bucolic, and good for large scale agriculture, rather than at strategically important spots as the cities had been, there was no incentive to maintain them. Fields once worked by slaves became overgrown with first shrubs, then trees.
The land attached to villas increasingly became the property of the bishops. Early medieval bishops in Gaul were mostly from the old aristocracy (and centered in cities), and if they inherited or acquired villas, that land now belonged to the church. Wealthy families who had moved permanently to the cities considered it an act of piety to give bishops land they no longer wanted, and for which there was no buyer.
In some cases rural monasteries, which really first appeared in Gaul in the seventh century (earlier monasteries had been primarily built in or near the cities), took up the lands and sometimes even the remains of the buildings of the old villas.
From the sixth-century population collapse to the first signs of population growth in the late eighth century stretches a little-documented period in which the pattern of rural settlement thoroughly changed. The cities were still there, but the little rural hamlets of the Empire, the vici, disappeared. Archaeology suggests that much of the reduced rural population lived in isolated farms.
New villages began appearing in the late eighth century, but they were usually not in the same locations as the old villas, even though the villages (farming communities) were called by the same name in Latin (villa). The old Gallo-Roman aristocracy had mostly died out, and the new aristocrats established new manor houses for a new form of agricultural organization. A few old villa structures became repurposed as palaces for the wealthy, but for the most part their mosaics (as seen above) and their pillars were something discovered by accident.
Alexandra ChavarrÃa Arnau discusses the evidence for the decline of late Roman villas in in the volume The Oxford Handbook of the Roman World (ed. Effros and Moreira, 2020).
© C. Dale Brittain 2024
For more on the Roman-medieval transition, see my ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.
