ABSTRACT
As the English evidence demonstrates, it is possible for key building blocks of the rural economy and of the rural landscape to remain substantially intact or seemingly unaffected, in the context of a society in which a great deal of agrarian change was actually taking place. Located on the Anatolian plateau, near the border of the old Roman provinces of Galatia and Cappadocia, one finds the remains of a Byzantine rural settlement known in Turkish as Cadir Hoyuk, or ‘Tent Mound’. At the level of legal and economic institutions, for example, the category of tied agricultural labourers, bound to reside on the estate of their landowning employer, was a constant of the Byzantine legal tradition, one which survived across the caesura of the seventh century. Until the Seljuk advance of the late eleventh century, therefore, in the core territories of the middle Byzantine empire, landowners came and went, but estates remained the same.
