Ancient Roman Serfdom and Manorialism

The idea that certain institutions of the medieval period lend themselves in genesis or evolution from the days of the Roman Empire is not a new one. Perhaps the most apparent case of this is with the development of monasticism, with the first monks being hermits living in caves in Roman Egypt, and the now famous Rule of Saint Benedict building off of and revising what was at the time already centuries of monastic tradition. Perhaps an even better example is the Catholic Church itself, which continued on the use of the Latin language for over a thousand years after the conventional fall of the Empire in the West. However, as soon as other glaringly Medieval institutions are argued to have had a distinctly Roman origin, things can get… controversial. Timestamps 0:00 - Introduction 4:02 - Slavery in the Republic 5:24 - Codex Theodisanus 6:58 - Crisis of the Third Century 8:11 - Diocletian's Reforms 11:25 - Capitatio-Iugatio 14:51 - Who Were the Coloni 15:33 - Manorialism in Roman Egypt 20:17 - Constantine's Senate 23:13 - Patronage System 26:05 - Tax Loopholes 27:27 - Clarifications and Archeology 30:47 - After Western Rome & Outro Bibliography Bonnassie, Pierre. From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Cole, Joshua, and Carol Symes. Western Civilizations. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023. Elton, Hugh. The Roman Empire in Late Antiquity: A political and military history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Firmiano, Lattanzio Lucio Cecilio, and J. L. Creed. De Mortibus Persecutorum. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Francovich, Riccardo, and Richard Hodges. Villa to Village: The Transformation of the Roman Countryside. London: Duckworth, 2003. Harper, Kyle. “Slave Prices in Late Antiquity (and in the Very Long Term).” Historia 59, no. 2 (2010): 206–38. https://doi.org/10.25162/historia-201.... Nicols, John. Civic Patronage in the Roman Empire. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Pharr, Clyde, and C. Dickerman Williams. The Theodosian Code and Novels: And the Sirmondian Constitutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952. Sarris, Peter. “The Origins of the Manorial Economy: New Insights from Late Antiquity.” Late Antiquity on the Eve of Islam, 2017, 109–41. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315250809-5. Scheidel, Walter, Richard P. Saller, and Ian Morris. The Cambridge Economic History of the greco-roman world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Temin, Peter. The Roman Market Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.