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Confiscation, appropriation, and barbarian settlement 30+ years after Goffart

W. Goffart’s Barbarians and Romans, AD 418-584: the techniques of accommodation (Princeton, NJ 1980) had a profound effect upon studies of ‘barbarian’ settlement in the later Roman and post-Roman West. Based upon the detailed discussion of legal and epistolographic evidence especially from the 5thand 6th-c. Burgundian Kingdom, Visigothic Toulouse and Ostrogothic Italy, his book argued that incoming barbarian soldiery was accommodated, not through the forceful appropriation of estates, or clumsy billeting on unfortunate landowners, but rather through the systematic re-assignment of tax revenues on the part of a still-functioning administrative machinery. Goffart maintained that any widespread appropriation of land would have resulted in considerable social and economic upheaval among the existing landowning class though there is little evidence of this in our extant sources. In due course, incoming élites would certainly have invested in estates, thereby becoming landowners in their own right, but Goffart argued persuasively that this was not an inherent feature of the earliest barbarian settlements.