Abstract
The great landowners rarely exploited their lands directly: instead of the labour services and miscellaneous dues of the past they drew rents, increasingly money rents, from a dependent peasantry whose rights in the land varied from hereditary tenure to a mere temporary leasehold, and whose status had long ceased to conform to the older categories of free, 'half-free', and servile. As in the north too the disintegration of the great estate was accompanied by the disintegration of the traditional unit of 'manorial' tenancy, the mansus. As a result the Italian lord was soon a mere receiver of rents, usually fixed rents, which might be added to the valuable revenues of seigneurial authority or the tithes and other dues pertaining to a church. It shows that by the late tenth century these estates, composed in large part of scattered gifts from small freemen, included only a small demesne, which was increasingly reduced by perpetual grants to members of the local nobility.
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