Byzantine Imperial Centuries (843-1204)
The Farmer’s Law, 7-8th Centuries
After the attacks by Persians, Arabs and Slavs, there is some indication that the great landed estates of late antiquity gave way, in the Byzantine heartland of Anatolia, to a system of free peasant farms. These peasants paid taxes to the state and enabled a functional local army to operate throughout the empire. Although this might be overemphasized, the contrast with western Europe is outstanding.
In the west the “state” as a function of society either disappeared or shrank to insignificant proportions and distinctions between public and private power were minimal. In Byzantium, by contrast, the state maintained its distinctive identity. The lives of Byzantine peasants are not entirely invisible to us: we can see them in hagiographical material, such as the Life of St. Theodore of Sykeon, as well as in legal sources. Here are extracts from the 7th-8th century Farmer’s Law, which regulated the behavior of free peasants.
The Farmer who is working his own field must be just and must not encroach on his neighbor’s furrows. If a farmer persists in encroaching and dock’s a neighboring lot – if he did this in plowing time, he loses his plowing; if it was in sowing time that he made his encroachment, he loses his seed and his husbandry and his crop – the farmer who encroached.
If a farmer without his landowner’s cognizance enters and plows or sows let him not receive either wages for his plowing or the crop for his sowing – no, not even the seed that has been cast.
If two farmers agree with the other before two or three witnesses to exchange lands and they agree for all time, let their determination and their exchange remain firm and secure and unassailable.
If two farmers, A and B, agree to exchange their lands for the season of sowing and A draws back, then, if the seed was cast, they may not draw back; but if the seed was not cast they may draw back; but if A did not plow while B did, A also shall plow.
If two farmers exchange lands either for a season or for all time and one plot is found deficient as compared with the other, and this was not their agreement, let him who has more give an equivalent in land to him who has less; but if this was their agreement, let them give nothing in addition.
If a farmer who has a claim on a field enters against the sower’s will and reaps, then, if he had a just claim, let him take nothing from it; but if his claim was baseless, let him provide twice over the crops that were reaped.
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