Norms of Dependency in Late Antique and Early Medieval Societies

Even after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Roman law and legal terminology remained formative for late antique and early medieval societies. Their influence can, for instance, be observed with regard to slavery and other dependency relations. The Roman legal terminology to denote a person’s legal inferiority (like servus, ancilla, puer, colonus, famulus etc.) often appears in late antique and early medieval sources and thus suggests the continued relevance of the concepts connected to these terms. However, it is far from clear to what extent the use of identical terminology actually indicates the conformity of the phenomena described. For while particularly normative sources do indeed suggest the continued existence of chattel slavery and related legal practices, like e.g. the manumissio in ecclesia, they also point to the emergence of new forms of asymmetrical dependency.