Farming and Agriculture in the Very Early Middle Ages: Old Theories and New Horizons

A GRIGULTURE WAS THE ALL-IMPORTANT factor in the economic activity of the Merovingian era. The flight from the towns, which set in at the end of the third century in the Western Empire, increased in pace during the fourth and fifth centuries. Moreover the Germanic peoples who penetrated into it, first by a process of slow infiltration, then in mass during the Great Invasions, were farmers, accustomed to a regime of individual ownership. The Merovingian civilization resulting from the fusion of the natives of Western Europe and these barbarians was a peasant culture.