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Meantime, that vast mass of the population of Western Europe whose condition was servile or semi-servile the Roman and German personal slaves, the Roman coloni and the German lidi were concurrently absorbed by the feudal organisation, a few of them assuming a menial relation to the lords, but the greater part receiving land on terms which in those centuries were considered degrading.
Nor can we pretend to know much more about the size and character of the estates which corresponded to the country-houses and farms of which remains survive. The 'villa' system of demesne farms and serfs or coloni which obtained elsewhere was doubtless familiar in Britain; indeed, the Theodosian Code definitely refers to British coloni.
Two of them would come, a bishop and a count, and they would perhaps stay a night at the big house as guests of the abbot, and the next day they would go on to Paris, and there they would sit and do justice in the open square before the church and from all the district round great men and small, nobles and freemen and coloni, would bring their grievances and demand redress.
War, plague, the evil results of slavery, and the outrageous taxation all combined to hasten the depopulation; for when it is hard to make a living, men are deterred from marrying and find it difficult to bring up large families. In order to replenish the population great numbers of the Germans were encouraged to settle within the Empire, where they became coloni.
This system made it impossible for the farmer to become independent, or for his son to be better off than he. The coloni and the more fortunate slaves tended to fuse into a single class; for the law provided that, like the coloni, certain classes of country slaves were not to be taken from the field which they had been accustomed to cultivate but were to go with it if it was sold.
In the course of that long period during which our records of the Roman Empire are most incomplete, the slave-gangs of the great Roman families became transformed into the coloni, whose origin and situation constitute one of the obscurest questions in all history.
Inspired by heroic epics Fracastor places before us the divinities of paganism, and supposes that a shepherd, whom he called Syphilus, had addressed words offensive to Apollo, and had deserted his altars. To punish him the God sent him a disease of the genitals, which the inhabitants of the country called the disease of Syphilus. "Syphilidemque ab eo labem dixere coloni."
But in practice they were allowed and even encouraged to accumulate possessions in the hope that they might some day buy their freedom, and with freedom would naturally come citizenship and the full ownership of their accumulations. Many of the poor peasants scattered through Italy were coloni of this type and they doubtless suffered severely in the evictions.
In the towns, if he tried to earn his living, he was forced to mingle with those slaves who were permitted to work for wages and with the freedmen, and he naturally tended to sink to their level. In the country the free agricultural laborers became coloni, a curious intermediate class, neither slave nor really free.
Though included in the lower courses of the feudal structure, they continued in many countries to render to the landlord precisely the same dues which they had paid to the Roman dominus, and from a particular class among them, the coloni medietarii who reserved half the produce for the owner, are descended the metayer tenantry, who still conduct the cultivation of the soil in almost all the South of Europe.