#landholding

In the Sasanian Near East, we know next to nothing about agrarian relations beyond the fact that much Iranian history revolved around the tensions or conflict between the ruler and powerful regional aristocracies. There is one fascinating reference in Ammianus to the Sasanian upper class wielding ‘the power of life and death over their slaves and plebeii obscuri’. Bandag was the standard Middle Persian term for ‘slave’ or ‘servant’, but how we should (reverse) translate the latter expression is anyone’s guess; perhaps it was Ammianus’ Latin equivalent of driyōšān. It referred presumably to the mass of commoners who survived through employment for the rich and probably also to the kind of social groups from which the revolutionary priest Mazdak drew his support early in the sixth century. These are described in the (much later!) Arabic sources by a profusion of terms, of which the most telling denote utter destitution. Patricia Crone, in a justly famous paper, argued that Mazdak drew his support from the peasantry, especially in the aftermath of fiscal reforms that introduced a fixed monetary tax. But this, of course, begs the question whether such a group (a peasantry) existed on any substantial scale by the sixth century. What does seem clear is that if Mazdak’s supporters were rural, they were landless, but on balance it is more likely that Mazdak attracted the urban poor, groups who had no access to food in times of scarcity, and, it seems, no access to women and a family life either. At any rate, the picture of late Sasanian society is one of a deeply divided formation where the antagonism between rich and poor was a constant source of anxiety for the ruling groups, and one of the most valuable survivals of an authentic Middle Persian text (via Arabic) shows a ruler, probably Khusro I, strongly advocating the attachment (ilhaq) of the poor to their closest aristocratic neighbours to reduce class antagonisms and ensure the continued submission of those stricken by poverty. The scale of destitution implied in all this fits remarkably well with the kind of agrarian picture reflected in a major work of agronomy written, almost certainly, in Syriac, in late antiquity, and translated by Ibn Wahshiyya at the start of the tenth century. Here, as Gunnar Lehmann points out in a review of a recent study of the massive redaction attributed to Ibn Wahshiyya, ‘In the rural masses of the kitab al-filaha an-nabatiya we are dealing with “free” agricultural workers in Marx’s sense. The population depicted there is employed solely by the large estates, it has no share in landed property’. That at the time of the conquest of southern Iraq the Arabs did not in fact find a substantial smallholding peasantry but villages ruled by dehqans, a minor gentry, and estates cultivated by mainly Aramaic-speaking ‘tenants’, is suggested by a tradition reported in Abu Yusuf’s Kitab al-kharaj, viz. ‘‘Umar b. al-Khattab first wanted to distribute [the lands of] al-Sawad amongst the Muslims and ordered a census. It was found that each of them would receive two or three tenants (al-ithnain wa-l-thalatha min al-fallahin) with their lands’ and he decided eventually not to proceed with the division. In short, an independent peasantry was not a major feature of the core regions of the Sasanian empire, and both here and in the Byzantine-controlled East Mediterranean landlessness and dependence on large and medium-scale landowners was widespread. Thus, proletarianization took very different forms in the east and west, flowing from the gradual dissolution of bondage and the structured creation of reserves of labour (labour tenancies) in one case, the West, and from the widespread landlessness of the peasantry in the other, the East, where the threat of eviction was a more powerful means of control.

Staying with the East, the second remarkable feature is the kind of sharecropping that prevailed there and its sheer ubiquity. Noting the frequency of indefinite durations in the Egyptian leases of the sixth to seventh centuries, Stefan Waszynski had concluded, correctly in my view, that the Byzantine sharecropper had become a pure and simple wage-labourer whom the landowner could evict at any time. No modern papyrologist has registered any serious disagreement with this view, because it is so obvious that tenants-at-will are entirely at the mercy of their landlords. Thus whether the georgoi were ‘bound’ to large estates as coloni or permanent farm workers or worked as sharecroppers and tenants-at-will, they were united by their common condition of landlessness and total dependence on the employer. It is this feature of East Mediterranean sharecropping that comes to the fore in the Islamic period. Here are two passages illustrative of this. Discussing a category of land called the ‘ard al-hauz or lands that have come into the possession (hauz) of the ruler and been appropriated by him, the ninth-century Iraqi jurist al-Khassaf writes, ‘the hauz is something that the Sultan takes possession of (hazahu). He brings the sharecroppers (muzari‘un) to it, so that they may cultivate it. In this way they become farm-hands (akara) of the Sultan, whom he may oust at any time he pleases’. And Abu Yusuf in his discussion of different types of agricultural contracts describes two in particular which are relevant to our theme. One of them is called muzara‘a and defined as an agreement where the tenant receives a third or fourth share of the crop. The other, not called muzara‘a, is described as follows: ‘A landowner hires a peasant to cultivate some land and bears all the expense, promising the peasant a sixth or a seventh of the crop as wages’. From al-Khassaf it is clear that sharecropping (muzara‘a) was widespread on large estates, even though it was rejected by jurists like Abu Hanifa and Shafi‘i on the substantial legal grounds that the ‘rent’ was non-existent and unknown at the time the contract was made. The jurists who defended its validity did so on the practical grounds that it was part of the way business (ta‘amul) was conducted in their countries. These later Hanafi models of sharecropping draw a clear distinction between labour and capital, basing the landowner’s claim to a share of the crop on his need to expand his property (i.e. the seed) and the worker’s claim on the contract alone. The fact that in most parts of the Islamic world muzara‘a typically involved shares varying from one-fourth to one-seventh is, I suggest, linked to an underlying conception of these contracts as a hiring of labour. Their sheer tenacity across the most diverse periods of the history of the Middle East is one indication of the peculiarly fragile nature of the peasantry in this part of the world.

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The third and final plank of my argument concerns the meaning of the word ‘estate’ in much of the Near East. Like its sharply polarized agrarian structure, this too is a legacy of late antiquity that survived best in the Muslim world, but one which drew more on Armenian and Sasanian traditions of landholding than on any Byzantine or late Roman equivalents. The form of landholding I have in mind involves the ownership of villages (usually entire villages and often many more than one) and contrasts sharply with the Byzantine large estate that turns up in the papyri of the later fifth to seventh centuries. The latter... grouped its workers into estate settlements that were visibly distinct from villages and never confused with them. Since these settlements were called epoikia, I have described this kind of estate as ‘epoikion-type’. It corresponds exactly to the ezba estates that proliferated in Egypt in the nineteenth century, as land was increasingly re-privatized and the ruling groups invested massively in cotton. The striking feature of the papyrological evidence is the singular absence of anything vaguely resembling the ownership of villages in late antique Egypt. In sharp contrast to this, Procopius refers to an Armenian collaborator persuading the emperor Justinian (in the early 530s) to ‘present him with certain villages (komai) of Armenia’. He became, Procopius says, the ‘owner’ (kyrios) of these estates (chorion). When this man was assassinated by the pro-Sasanian faction, Justinian handed the same villages over to his nephew Amazaspes. Now this, it seems to me, was primarily a Sasanian tradition, as Michael Morony has argued in a paper that describes this type of landholding as ‘village estates’. Thus Hormozdan owned a village which ‘Uthman later granted to Sa‘d b. Abi Waqqa as his iqta‘ (in its classical meaning, any concession of land). In the mid fifth century, another equally powerful Sasanian figure Mihr Narseh is described as ‘founding’ four villages and laying out orchards around them, and even earlier, in the fourth century, Shapur II is described as ‘building’ the village of Vardana near Bukhara. Indeed, in Bukhara, where a minor Iranian aristocracy survived down to the Samanid period, the tradition is abundantly attested in Narshakhi’s History of Bukhara, a tenth-century work of which the only exemplar is the Persian translation made in the early twelfth century. This refers to the buying and selling of villages, and in one passage to 75 ‘private’ villages (dihe khas) ‘on the river of Bukhara and the Upper Faravaz’. It is this tradition, I suggest, that survived both in Iran where, even in the late 1940s, the typical ‘large landed proprietors’ were described by Lambton as owners of villages, the ‘umdeh malikin whose ‘estates range from single villages to several villages, the number of which, in certain exceptional cases, is alleged to run into three figures’, and in those zamindari villages of the Mughal period which, though confusingly also known as dehat-i-taluqa, were the big zamindars’ private or exclusive possessions, as opposed to other villages, obviously the majority, over which, technically at least, their rights were essentially fiscal and the model of ‘ownership’ less full-blooded and closer to a hierarchy of shared claims. Ownership of villages also seems to have been widespread in Egypt in the nineteenth century, and as the term ‘uhda suggests, evolved at least partly from Muhammad Ali’s forced restoration of the iltizam system (which he had abolished in 1814) and the tendency of the muta‘ahhidun or tax farmers (more correctly, ‘tax guarantors’) to treat villages whose liabilities they assumed as their private property. Thus Baer points out that ‘a number of observers at the time of Muhammad ‘Ali simply stated that the system turned the fellahs into labourers working for the ‘uhda recipient. Artin asserts that ‘Abbas granted full ownership rights to some muta‘ahhidun’. Moreover, the ruling family’s çiftliks also consisted of villages which the peasantry had abandoned. Some of these were enormous; e.g. ‘Sa‘id’s at al-Khazzan near Alexandria covered 20,000 feddans. What the Egyptian example suggests is that a model that was predominantly Iranian/Sasanian was taken over and generalized after the expansion of Islam, almost certainly through the practice of granting villages to members of the ruling élite, either as pure land concessions (iqta‘at, qata’i‘) or, later, in lieu of cash salaries, and later still as tax farms.”    

Now, viewed teleologically, in terms of some inexorable evolution towards the  manor and its eventual triumph, the allotment holders of the post-Roman/early medieval countryside may seem like a transitional type, a sort of station between two terminals, one called Antiquity, the other Feudalism; or if you prefer, between Slavery and Serfdom. But this, I suggest, is absolutely the wrong way of approaching the issue. Between the ‘demesne slave’ or servi praebendarii and the peasant families in possession of substantial tenements (viz. 10-acre holdings at the lower end) lay a whole series of intermediate categories who are surely better defined as farm workers than as peasants: the Tageschalken in Germany, the geburs, bordars and cottars in Anglo-Saxon England, and so on. They were ‘a substantial proportion of the rural population of Anglo-Saxon England’ (Ros Faith) and doubtless the same is true of most countries on the Continent. If we choose to call them tenants, then worker-tenants is a better description of these groups than the tenants that Wickham seems to have in mind. Wickham discusses their legal status as largely irrelevant on the grounds that the distinction between free and unfree was typically and increasingly fuzzy. This is true, but the diminished legal condition of most or all of these groups was surely not unrelated to the fact that taken as a whole they formed a tied labour force on a model familiar to late Roman landowners and their free but tied coloni. Indeed, the laws on the colonate were themselves a major influence on the social condition of the medieval peasantry, insofar as the successor kingdoms absorbed them selectively and enforced them against their own dependent populations. The mancipia who appear in Merovingian charters were certainly not slaves in the strict Roman sense, but the fact that they were described in this way was not unrelated to the way large estates saw themselves using the labour of these workers.”

“...The seventh century, in the West, was crucial in two ways. First, it saw a reassertion of aristocratic control, and second it involved, I believe, the beginnings of a new agrarian expansion. These features would of course be linked if a strong case can be made for the view that the aristocracy financed much of that expansion. I don’t propose to do that here, but it may be worth indicating briefly some clear signs that such a connection existed. One of the most striking features of the Merovingian charters is the sheer frequency of references to the purchase of land that appears in them. Here is a typical example from the will of Hadoind, bishop of Le Mans, dated 643. Among numerous donations listed in the will, Hadoind says he donates to the church of St Victor of Le Mans ‘the estate (villa) called Aceruco, which I purchased for money, together with the houses, mancipia, vineyards, forests, meadows and pastures’ (dono tibi villa nuncupante Aceruco, quam dato pretio comparavi, cum domibus, mancipiis, vineis, silvis, pratis et pascuis). There are dozens of references of this kind in the private charters of the Merovingian period and the least this tells us is that the new aristocracy of the seventh century made substantial investments in the acquisition of land, usually whole estates (villae). They did the same in the great movement of land clearance that began in the seventh century, the ‘vaste mouvement de défrichement’ that Verhulst described as a key feature of the ‘evolution’ from the Merovingian estate to the Carolingian manor; and the same again in the construction of water mills... Here the crucial point is that the elements of a new organization of labour began to be laid out as landowners encouraged the expansion of peasant tenures as part of their reclamation of arable. This process must have thrown up hundreds of new settlements and I suggest that one term for these settlements was colonica. If the term colonica could refer both to the ‘“new settlements” located on the fringes, boundaries, or “appendages” of estates, suggesting an origin in the colonization of the wasteland’ and to the individual tenures that made up those settlements, this would explain why the word shows a mystifying semantic ambiguity, fluctuating between usages that manifestly refer to entire settlements, as in Bertram’s will, where Margarete Weidemann explains the term as ‘Ausbausiedlung im Bereich einer villa’, and other uses where colonica is undoubtedly a designation for farms, as when Abbo refers to various freed people of his holding colonicae ‘in beneficio’, this in Provence in the early eighth century. One imagines that these new settlements were the first proper signs of the emergence or re-emergence of a peasantry in Europe, and that the accolae who appear with increasing frequency from the later seventh century (they are there already in Hadoind’s will of 643) were essentially free peasants attracted to estates as part of their drive to expand cultivation. The ‘colonization of the wasteland’ was the seventh century’s major contribution to the history of the countryside in this part of Europe.

By contrast, another key term mansus, which is almost invariably explained in the same way or referred to the same context, in other words, the creation of peasant tenures, may well have had a more complex origin, the proper starting point for which must be our notions of Merovingian estate organization. New estates for a new aristocracy? The answer, as almost always in history, is yes and no. In a typically fascinating aside, Marc Bloch once suggested that the best historical analogy for the early medieval estate is the Latin American hacienda. What Bloch himself meant by this was that the regime of the hacienda was never so dense that it completely excluded the presence of ‘small independent landowners’. The more general point of the analogy, I take it, is that early medieval estates or let us say the typical Merovingian estate exploited a landless workforce comparable in this respect to the gañanes in Mexico. This emphasizes continuity with the Late Roman world, if unlike Wickham and the ancient historians he follows, we see the Late Roman estate as an enterprise still based on direct management and not pulverized into semi-autonomous farms or holdings. And again, that continuity is one of form rather than substance in the sense that the disappearance of the Roman aristocracy and the rise of new medieval nobilities signified a major rupture in the social and economic history of the West. Thus the best context to discuss the meaning of the term mansus surely has to be the way we visualize the transition from Late Roman to purely medieval forms of organization in terms of the way landowners structured the management and use of labour and of the kinds of workforces they deployed.

Again, the Merovingian charters are our best clue to the nature of the rural labour force in the sixth and seventh centuries. If the will of Remigius dated c.533 is any indication, slavery was still widespread in Gaul in the early sixth century. In fact, Remigius’ farms were based on a mixed labour force of servi and coloni, and the coloni clearly were tied labourers inherited from the late empire, still called by that name and referring in the will itself to half-free or unfree rural labourers distinct from slaves; for example, they could be bequeathed with the land, transferred between owners, manumitted (‘Vitalem colonum liberum esse iubeo’; ‘Cispiciolum colonum liberum esse precipio’), and their families could likewise be bequeathed. One of them had even owned a servus, and at least one of Remigius’ coloni was still called originarius. Moreover, Remigius’ servi also had families. Again, in 538 and roughly contemporary with Remigius’ will, a Gallic church council legislates that ‘no person bound by the condicio of a servus or colonus should be admitted to ecclesiastical office’; the precise expression used is Nullus servilibus colonariisque conditionibus obligatus.  At any rate neither slaves nor coloni disappeared with the disintegration of the Western empire; both were present in large numbers and merged indiscriminately into the labour force. The integration of these diverse categories of labour into an increasingly indiscriminate labour force also found a precise expression in the way Latin terminology evolved. The strict Roman legal term for a slave, mancipium, became the standard generic description for a labour force now characterized by looser forms of bondage, where the precise legal condition of the workers mattered less and less; for example, Remigius’ will is decisive proof that many families were of mixed legal status, that is, members of the same family could be of different legal condiciones. These distinctions were not rigid therefore. Mancipia included both slaves and freedpeople, but post-classical slaves and freedpeople still subject to domination, and the expression mancipia quae colonaria appellantur from the will of Aredius, dated 573 or 591, shows that former coloni, tied labourers, were included as well.

Now the Merovingian charters refer standardly to domus and mancipia among the appurtenances of the estate (villa) in formulas such as cum domibus, mancipiis, agris, etc. In the will of Bishop Bertram, the most substantial document of its kind from the seventh century, which has a wonderful edition and commentary by Weidemann, ipsam villam cum domibus, mancipiis, and so on is about the most common expression used. I may be wrong but it is my strong impression that in the seventh century charters domus are never mentioned without mancipia, which suggests that they were the dwellings of the labour force. Bertram had some 74 estates (villae) and they were almost all equipped in this way, together with land, of course, and land of various descriptions such as vineyards, arable and pasture, as well as more substantial constructions called aedificia. There is also repeated reference to forest land. Occasionally, Bertram refers to colonicae, but these were on the boundaries of his estates and as Weidemann suggests most probably the cutting edge of an expanding regime of arable. At one point Bertram refers to buying a villa or a portion of one, the estate of Brossay, where he ‘constructed homes and settled labour’ (ubi domus aedificavi et mancipias stabilivi). There is a fascinating passage in Gregory of Tours which shows that the drive to expand cultivation in this way was equally true of the first generation of the new Merovingian aristocracy, for Gregory describes a certain Chrodin, ‘a man of great virtue and piety’, almost certainly a Frank, deceased by 582, ‘often creating estates from scratch, laying out vineyards, building homes, and clearing the land’ (Nam sepe a novo fundans villas, ponens vinias, aedificans domus, culturas eregens). About a century later, Vigilius, bishop of Auxerre, donated vineland to his church cum mancipiis quos ibidem stabilivi. The remarkable feature of the will of Vigilius, dated c.680, is the repeated reference to mansi and servi. Medievalists generally agree that the term mansus is largely an innovation of the seventh century, but the precise agrarian function they tend to assign to it is as a kind of peasant tenure, the role it has within the economic framework of the bilateral estate. But bilateral estates were not a feature of the seventh century, they were a Carolingian innovation, and we have to explain the Merovingian mansus differently. One striking clue to its meaning is that while mansi appear repeatedly in the will just mentioned, there is no reference to domus! As Tits-Dieuaide suggested in an important paper, ‘mansus est utilisée ici à la place de domus’. In other words, the Merovingian mansi were not primarily peasant tenures but allotments created for the mancipia (= servi in Vigilius’ testament). Unlike the peasant tenures of a later period, notably the central middle ages, these allotments were still an integral part of the Merovingian Gutswirtschaft and their occupants a class of workers, both slaves and freedpeople, endowed with service holdings rather than self-sufficient farms. The most substantial argument along these lines is, perhaps paradoxically, Ulrich Weidinger’s excellent analysis of the ninth-century inventory material from Fulda, the Güterverzeichnisse, whose drafters used vocabulary rather differently from the people who drew up the purely economic documents. Weidinger shows at length that the mansi which figure in the Fulda inventories did not include the surrounding fields and meadows. They were kleine Hofstellenbetriebe that functioned as reserves of labour for a still largely integrated estate, the Gutswirtschaftssytem, and their holders were a class of farm workers, still servile of course, who were subject to almost unlimited exploitation. Weidinger also argues that estate owners would have carved out these plots with a view to preserving or creating some symmetry, either square or rectangular, in their home farms, which is why the mansi tended to fluctuate in size. In this sense and all these respects, then, the mansi were radically different from the peasant farms known as hubae (Bede’s ‘hide’), which of course did include fields, meadows and the like, and were of a size consciously calculated to yield the normative subsistence of a peasant family, hence more standardized.

There are two points I would like to draw attention to in this analysis. First, Weidinger offers a model, at least implicitly, of the gradual dissolution of the post-Roman Gutswirtschaft if the carving out of service holdings for allotment to the various groups of mancipia can, and it surely can, be construed as a mechanism that eroded the integrity of the classic late Roman estate.... My second comment is that Weidinger’s distinction between mansus and huba chimes remarkably well with the kind of model Ros Faith has developed for the Anglo-Saxon ‘inland’ and her sharp distinction between worker-tenants and the self-sufficient small peasantry that came to form the true backbone of serfdom in the great feudal reaction of a later period. ‘The inland’, Faith writes, ‘was an area likely to have been crowded with the dwellings of the workers and tenants who lived there’...”

New Post has been published on http://www.brianbrown.net/2014/10/30/federal-property-suitable-as-facilities-to-assist-the-homeless/

Federal Property Suitable as Facilities To Assist the Homeless

Building Alaska Yakutat Upper Air Inflation Shelter Yakutat Airport Yakutat AK 99689 Landholding Agency: GSA Property Number: 54201440003 Status: Excess GSA Number: 9-C-AK-00856AB Directions: Disposal Agency; GSA; Landholding Agency; Commerce. Comments: property located within an Airport Runway protected zone. Reasons: Secured Area Florida Instrumentation Facility K7.1557 Kennedy Space Center FL 32899 Landholding Agency: NASA Property Number: 71201440006 Status: Unutilized Comments: public access denied no alternative method to gain access w/out compromising Nat’l Sec. Reasons: Secured Area

Headquarters Building M6-0399/Headquarters Bldg. 1st Street SE Kennedy Space Center FL 32899 Landholding Agency: NASA Property Number: 71201440007 Status: Underutilized Comments: public access denied no alternative method to gain access w/out compromising Nat’l Sec. Reasons: Secured Area

Parachute Refurbishment Facility M7-0657 E Ave. SE Kennedy Space Center FL 32899 Landholding Agency: NASA Property Number: 71201440008 Status: Unutilized Comments: public access denied no alternative method to gain access w/out compromising Nat’l Sec. Reasons: Secured Area

Solar Array Test Building 60540—Hangar Road CCAFS FL 32925 Landholding Agency: NASA Property Number: 71201440009 Status: Unutilized Comments: public access denied no alternative method to gain access w/out compromising Nat’l Sec. Reasons: Secured Area

Hangar M Annex 14955 Hangar Rd. CCAFS FL 32925 Landholding Agency: NASA Property Number: 71201440010 Status: Unutilized Comments: public access denied no alternative method to gain access w/out compromising Nat’l Sec. Reasons: Secured Area

Central Instrumentation Facility M6-0342 1st Street SE Kennedy Space Center FL 32899 Landholding Agency: NASA Property Number: 71201440011 Status: Unutilized Comments: public access denied no alternative method to gain access w/out compromising Nat’l Sec. Reasons: Secured Area

Generator Building K7-1557A Kennedy Space Center FL 32899 Landholding Agency: NASA Property Number: 71201440013 Status: Unutilized Comments: public access denied no alternative method to gain access w/out compromising Nat’l Sec. Reasons: Secured Area Mississippi Bldg. 1106 EPA Storage Facility Stennis Space Center Hancock County MS 39529 Landholding Agency: NASA Property Number: 71201440012 Status: Unutilized Comments: public access denied no alternative method to gain access w/out compromising Nat’l Sec. Reasons: Secured Area

Bldg. 1107 Dioxin Lab Stennis Space Center Hancock County MS 39529 Landholding Agency: NASA Property Number: 71201440014 Status: Unutilized Comments: public access denied no alternative method to gain access w/out compromising Nat’l Sec. Reasons: Secured Area Tennessee Y-12 National Security Complex Bear Creek Rd. at Scarboro Road Oak Ridge TN 37831 Landholding Agency: Energy Property Number: 41201440004 Status: Unutilized Directions: 9416-12; 9416-14; 9416-41; 9424-01; 9424-02; 9610-01; 9616-10; 9770-06; 9616-09; 9720-17; 9720-22; 9720-24; 9111; 9112; 9204-04; 9206; 9401-03; 9401-04; 9404-16; 9404-17; 9404-18; 9404-20; 9959-01; 9977; 9949-17; 9826; 9811-04; 9811-03; 9803; 9770-11; 9770-10; 9811-06; 9811-07; 9949-37; 9976; 9990-03 Comments: highly classified secured area; public access denied no alternative method to gain access w/out compromising nat’l security. Reasons: Secured Area

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