In ancient Rome, the Latin word pagus (plural pagi) was an administrative term designating a rural subdivision of a tribal territory, which included individual farms, villages (vici), and strongholds (oppida) serving as refuges,[1][2][3] 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.[4] These geographical units were used to describe territories in the Merovingian and Carolingian periods, without any political or administrative meaning.
Pāgus is a native Latin word from a rootpāg-, a lengthened grade of Indo-European*paǵ-, a verbal root, "fasten" (pango); it may be translated in the word as "boundary staked out on the ground".[5] 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 πήγη, pége, 'village well', or πάγος, págos, 'hill-fort'. William Smith opposed these on the grounds that neither the well nor the hill-fort appear in the meaning of pāgus.[6]
The word pagus is the origin of the word for country in Romance languages, such as pays (French) and país (Spanish), and more remotely, for English "peasant". Corresponding adjective paganus served as the source for "pagan".
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.[9]
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.[10]
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 onwards 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.[11]
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).[12] The province of Rouen included the civitas of Rotomagus (Rouen), which formed the pagus Rotomagensis (Roumois); in addition there were the pagiCaletus (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. Sagensis and p.Corbonensis (Corbonnais); and that of Evreux the p. Ebroicinus (Evrecin) and p. Madriacensis (pays de Madrie).[12]
The Welsh successor kingdom of Powys derived its name from pagus or pagenses, and gives its name to the modern Welsh county.[13]
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.
↑ Nicholson, Oliver (2018). The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity. Oxford University Press. s.v. pagus and pagarch. ISBN978-0-19-866277-8.
↑ Watkins, Calvert (1992). "Indo-European Roots". pag-. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Thirded.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
↑ Smith, William; Wayte, William; Marindin, George Eden (1891). "Pagus". A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Vol.2 (Thirded.). London: John Murray. pp.309–311.
↑ Commentarii de Bello Gallico 1.12.4: nam omnis civitas Helvetia in quattuor pagos divisa est ("for the Helvetian nation as a whole was divided into four cantons"). Pagus in this sense is sometimes translated "tribe"; the choice of "canton" may be influenced by later usage of the word in regard to Helvetia.
↑ Guy Jolyon Bradley, Ancient Umbria: State, Culture, and Identity in Central Italy from the Iron Age to the Augustan Era (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 56 online.
↑ Peter Brown, entry on "Pagan", Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, edited by G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar (Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 625 online: "The adoption of paganus by Latin Christians as an all-embracing, pejorative term for polytheists represents an unforeseen and singularly long-lasting victory, within a religious group, of a word of Latin slang originally devoid of religious meaning. The evolution occurred only in the Latin west, and in connection with the Latin church. Elsewhere, 'Hellene' or 'gentile' (ethnikos) remained the word for 'pagan'; and paganos continued as a purely secular term, with overtones of the inferior and the commonplace."
↑ West, Charles (2013). Reframing the Feudal Revolution: Political and Social Transformation between Marne and Moselle, c.800–c.1100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.140–143. ISBN978-1107028869.
The Alemanni or Alamanni were a confederation of Germanic tribes on the Upper Rhine River during the first millennium. First mentioned by Cassius Dio in the context of the campaign of Roman emperor Caracalla of 213, the Alemanni captured the Agri Decumates in 260, and later expanded into present-day Alsace and northern Switzerland, leading to the establishment of the Old High German language in those regions, which by the eighth century were collectively referred to as Alamannia.
Paganism is a term first used in the fourth century by early Christians for people in the Roman Empire who practiced polytheism, or ethnic religions other than Judaism. In the time of the Roman Empire, individuals fell into the pagan class either because they were increasingly rural and provincial relative to the Christian population, or because they were not milites Christi. Alternative terms used in Christian texts were hellene, gentile, and heathen. Ritual sacrifice was an integral part of ancient Greco-Roman religion and was regarded as an indication of whether a person was pagan or Christian. Paganism has broadly connoted the "religion of the peasantry".
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A thing, also known as a folkmoot, assembly, tribal council, and by other names, was a governing assembly in early Germanic society, made up of the free people of the community presided over by a lawspeaker. Things took place regularly, usually at prominent places accessible by travel. They provided legislative functions, as well as social events and trade opportunities. In modern usage, the meaning of this word in English and other languages has shifted to mean not just an assemblage of some sort but simply an object of any kind. Thingstead or "thingstow" is the English term for the location where a thing was held.
The title of imperator originally meant the rough equivalent of commander under the Roman Republic. Later, it became a part of the titulature of the Roman Emperors as their praenomen. The Roman emperors generally based their authority on multiple titles and positions, rather than preferring any single title. Nevertheless, imperator was used relatively consistently as an element of a Roman ruler's title throughout the Principate and the later Roman Empire. It was abbreviated to "IMP" in incriptions. The word derives from the stem of the verb imperare, meaning 'to order, to command'. The English word emperor derives from imperator via Old French: Empereür.
The follis was a type of coin in the Roman and Byzantine traditions.
The County of Hainaut, sometimes spelled Hainault, was a territorial lordship within the medieval Holy Roman Empire that straddled the present-day border of Belgium and France. Its most important towns included Mons, now in Belgium, and Valenciennes, now in France.
Late Latin is the scholarly name for the form of Literary Latin of late antiquity. English dictionary definitions of Late Latin date this period from the 3rd to the 6th centuries CE, and continuing into the 7th century in the Iberian Peninsula. This somewhat ambiguously defined version of Latin was used between the eras of Classical Latin and Medieval Latin. Scholars do not agree exactly when Classical Latin should end or Medieval Latin should begin.
Etymology is the study of the origin and evolution of words, including their constituent units of sound and of meaning, across time. In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study. Most directly tied to historical linguistics, philology, and semiotics, it additionally draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics, and phonetics in order to attempt a comprehensive and chronological catalogue of all meanings and changes that a word carries throughout its history.
Folk etymology – also known as (generative) popular etymology, analogical reformation, (morphological)reanalysis and etymological reinterpretation – is a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a more familiar one through popular usage. The form or the meaning of an archaic, foreign, or otherwise unfamiliar word is reinterpreted as resembling more familiar words or morphemes.
Gau is a Germanic term for a region within a country, often a former or current province. It was used in the Middle Ages, when it can be seen as roughly corresponding to an English shire. The administrative use of the term was revived as a subdivision during the period of Nazi Germany in 1933–1945. It still appears today in regional names, such as the Rheingau or Allgäu.
The Franks were a western European people during the Roman Empire and Middle Ages. They began as a Germanic people who lived near the Lower Rhine, on the northern continental frontier of the empire. They subsequently expanded their power and influence during the Middle Ages, until much of the population of western Europe, particularly in and near France, were commonly described as Franks, for example in the context of their joint efforts during the Crusades starting in the 11th century. A key turning point in this evolution was when the Frankish Merovingian dynasty based within the collapsing Western Roman Empire first became the rulers of the whole region between the rivers Loire and Rhine, and then subsequently imposed power over many other post-Roman kingdoms both inside and outside the old empire.
Dominus is the Latin word for master or owner. Dominus was used as a Roman imperial title. It was also the Latin title of the feudal, superior and mesne, lords, and an ecclesiastical and academic title. The ecclesiastical title was rendered through the French seigneur in English as sir, making it a common prefix for parsons before the Reformation, as in Sir Hugh Evans in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor. Its shortened form Dom remains used as a prefix of honor for ecclesiastics of the Catholic Church, and especially for members of the Benedictine and other religious orders. The title was formerly also used as is, Dominus, for a Bachelor of Arts.
In Ancient Rome, the Latin term vicus designated a village within a rural area or the neighbourhood of a larger settlement. During the Republican era, the four regiones of the city of Rome were subdivided into vici. In the 1st century BC, Augustus reorganized the city for administrative purposes into 14 regions, comprising 265 vici. Each vicus had its own board of officials who oversaw local matters. These administrative divisions are recorded as still in effect at least until the mid-4th century.
The Tigurini were a clan or tribe forming one out of four pagi (provinces) of the Helvetii.
Poutrocoët was an early medieval pagus in Brittany. The term "Poutrocoët" is Breton, and contemporaries translated it literally into Latin as pagus trans silvam, the "country beyond the forest", as in certain charters in the cartulary of Redon Abbey.
Liugas, Leuwa-gau, or Luihgau, was a small pagus or gau from the late 8th to mid-11th centuries, east of the Meuse river roughly between Liège, Maastricht, and Aachen, an area where Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands meet today. There were only a small number of mentions made of this territory, all between 779 and 1059.
The Tardenois is today a natural region of France. It is known among archeologists for the epipaleolithic culture known as Tardenoisian after its characteristic arrowheads, originally found at Coincy in the Tardenois in 1885. The etymology of "Tardenois" is not known.
The Lomme gau or pagus, often referred to using Latin, Pagus Lomacensis, or German Lommegau, was an early Austrasian Frankish territorial division. The oldest Latin spellings were Laumensis or Lomensis. It included the city of Namur, and the region where the County of Namur later came to form in the 10th century.
The Maasgau, Masao, or Maasland, was an early medieval region or pagus, on both sides of the Meuse, stretching north of the city of Maastricht.
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