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 an