Pagus

A ''pagus'' (plural ''pagi'') was a Roman administrative term designating a rural subdivision of a tribal territory, which included individual farms, villages ('' vici''), and strongholds (''oppida'') serving as refuges, as well as an early medieval geographical term. From the reign of Diocletian (284–305 AD) onwards, the ''pagus'' referred to the smallest administrative unit of a province. These geographical units were used to describe territories in the Merovingian and Carolingian periods, without any political or administrative meaning.

Etymology

Pāgus is a native Latin word from a root pāg-, a lengthened grade of Indo-European *pag-, a verbal root, "fasten", which in the word may be translated as "boundary staked out on the ground". In semantics, *pag- used in pāgus is a stative verb with an unmarked lexical aspect of state resulting from completed action: "it is having been staked out", converted into a

noun

by -us, a type recognizable in English adjectives such as surveyed, defined, noted, etc. English does not use the noun: "the surveyed", but Latin characteristically does. Considering that the ancients marked out municipal districts with boundary stones, the root meaning is nothing more than land surveyed for a municipality with stakes and later marked by boundary stones, a process that has not changed over the millennia.

Earlier hypotheses concerning the derivation of pāgus suggested that it is a Greek loan from either ', "village well", or ', "hill-fort". William Smith opposed these on the grounds that neither the well nor the hill-fort appear in the meaning of pāgus.

The word ''pagus'' is the origin of the word for

country

in

Romance languages

, such as ''pays'' (French) and ''país'' (Spanish).

Roman usage

In classical Latin, ''pagus'' referred to a country district or to a community within a larger polity;

Julius Caesar

, for instance, refers to ''pagi'' within the greater polity of the

Celtic

Helvetii.

The ''pagus'' and ''vicus'' (a small nucleated settlement or village) are characteristic of pre-urban organization of the countryside. In Latin epigraphy of the Republican era, ''pagus'' refers to local territorial divisions of the peoples of the central

Apennines

and is assumed to express local social structures as they existed variously.

As an informal designation for a rural district, ''pagus'' was a flexible term to encompass the cultural horizons of "folk" whose lives were circumscribed by their locality: agricultural workers, peasants, slaves. Within the reduced area of Diocletian's subdivided provinces, the ''pagani'' could have several kinds of focal centers. Some were administered from a city, possibly the seat of a bishop; other ''pagi'' were administered from a ''vicus'' that might be no more than a cluster of houses and an informal market; yet other ''pagi'' in the areas of the great agricultural estates (''latifundia'') were administered through the villa at the center.

The historian of Christianity Peter Brown has pointed out that in its original sense ''paganus'' meant a civilian or commoner, one who was excluded from power and thus regarded as of lesser account; away from the administrative center, whether that was the seat of a bishop, a walled town or merely a fortified village, such inhabitants of the outlying districts, the ''pagi'', tended to cling to the old ways and gave their name to "pagans"; the word was used pejoratively by Christians in the Latin West to demean those who declined to convert from the traditional religions of antiquity.

Post-Roman ''pagus''

The concept of the ''pagus'' survived the collapse of the Empire of the West. In the Frankish kingdoms of the 8th–9th centuries, however, the ''pagus'' had come to serve as a local geographical designation rather than an administrative unit. Particular localities were often named as parts of more than one ''pagus'', sometimes even within the same document. Historians traditionally considered the ''pagus'' under the Carolingian Empire to be the territory held by a count, but Carolingian sources never refer to counts of particular ''pagi'', and from the 10th century on the "county" or ''comitatus'' was sometimes explicitly contrasted to the ''pagus''. Unlike the ''comitati'', the centers of which are often identifiable as the count's seat, towns are not known to have derived any special political significance from serving as the ostensible centers of ''pagi''.

The majority of modern French ''pays'' are roughly coextensive with the old counties (e.g., county of

Comminges

, county of Ponthieu, etc.) For instance, at the beginning of the 5th century, when the '' Notitia provinciarum et civitatum Galliae'' was drawn up, the Provincia Gallia Lugdunensis Secunda formed the ecclesiastical province of

Rouen

, with six suffragan sees; it contained seven cities (''civitates''). The province of Rouen included the ''civitas'' of Rotomagus (Rouen), which formed the ''pagus Rotomagensis'' (

Roumois

); in addition there were the ''pagi'' ''Caletus'' (Pays de Caux), ''Vilcassinus'' (the Vexin), the ''Tellaus'' ( Talou);

Bayeux

, the pagus Bajocassinus (Bessin, including briefly in the 9th century the ''Otlinga Saxonia''); that of Lisieux the pagus Lexovinus (

Lieuvin

); that of

Coutances

the p. Corilensis and p. Constantinus (

Cotentin

); that of

Avranches

the p. Abrincatinus (

Avranchin

); that of Sez the p. Oximensis (Hiémois the p. Ebroicinus (Evrecin) and p. Madriacensis (pays de Madrie).

The Welsh successor kingdom of Powys derived its name from ''pagus'' or ''pagenses'', and gives its name to the modern

Welsh county

.

The ''pagus'' was the equivalent of what English-speaking historians sometimes refer to as the "Carolingian shire", which in German is the '' Gau''. In Latin texts, a canton of the

Helvetic Confederacy

is rendered ''pagus''.

Notes

Bibliography

Ivan Sache, "The formation of the French provinces"

External links

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{{Types of administrative country subdivision

Western Roman Empire
Subdivisions of the Roman Empire
Types of administrative division