The Farmer’s Law (Nomos Georgikos) – Source of Law Regulation and Collective Self-Consciousness of Rural Community in Medieval Byzantium
Abstract
The contemporaries of last centuries of Byzantine history, in the spirit of formed axiological attitudes, showed inexhaustible interest to the rural economy. As a rule, it was aroused as well as, by significant emphasis on the problem of law regulation and management of agricultural production. The Farmer’s Law (Nomos Georgikos) is a single legal monument of the Byzantine epoch, reconstituting the picture of communal existence in rural areas. And nowadays the Farmer’s Law, as well as other law monuments and acts, represents a reliable source for studying the agriculture and offers opportunity to penetrate deeply into the arrangement of medieval Byzantine village as a center of agrarian production and to reveal original methods of regulation of land relations of communal peasantry. The direct authority of Nomos Georgikos in Late Byzantium is displayed by documentary evidence. This is the decision of Constantinople patriarchate of 1325 on regulation of the privity of two land possessors. So the effect of this decision could be interpolated in the village. For centuries the Farmer’s Law Here had served as the legal expression of preimage community tradition, and as the source of law regulation of fellow-villagers relations, as well as realized self-consciousness and collective intentions among the medieval Byzantine peasantry.
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