The Fall of the Roman Empire by Michael Grant

had already been one of the worst trouble-spots, and now there were major outbreaks once again. These Gallic bands assumed, at some stage or other, the old name of Bacaudae or Bagaudae, meaning 'rebels'. This designation, like their whole quasi-military movement, may have had certain nationalist overtones. For this was an epoch when the decay of central control meant a revival of regional sub-cultures, particularly in countries such as Gaul where the people had still, in some areas, retained their own language.
    And so Ammianus reports a serious Gallic upheaval in 369. Later, for a number of yeas between 401 and 406, gangs of marauders were active in the Alps. Next, during the decade that followed, armed men in Brittany turned out to be not so much the local defence-groups for which the Emperor Honorius was hoping, as brigands operating almost on the scale of a nationwide uprising, in which tenants and slaves rebelled in unison against their landlords.
    In 435, a further large-scale Gallic disturbance of the same kind arose under a certain Tibatto, who once again appealed to the slaves, and held out against the Romans for two years. The 440s witnessed a serious revival of similar troubles, under the leadership of a physician named Eudoxius, who eventually fled to the Huns. In Spain too, not for the first time, disorders continued to break out, until a Visigothic army sent by Aetius finally crushed the militants in 454.
    A curious verse play called The Protester (Querolus), which appears to be attributable to the early fifth century, tells how the Bagaudae formed rudimentary political structures, holding their own People's Courts, 'where capital sentences are posted up on an oak branch or marked on a man's bones'. Such was the disorder reigning over wide areas of the provinces that these desperate characters, runaways from government and landlords alike, had been forced, as best they could, to take matters into their own hands.
    In vain the Imperial officials uttered their menaces. In the later years of the fourth century it was enacted that anyone giving aid or comfort to brigands would be flogged, or even burnt alive. The right of using arms against all such men was granted to every member of the public in self-defence: a law of 409 suggests that 'shepherd' and 'bandit' had virtually come to be regarded as synonymous terms.
    Seven years later, however, owing to the 'overwhelming calamities of the times', it was decided to declare an amnesty, in the hope that more lenient policies, for a change, might bring these warlike gangs to reason. Yet none of these measures, whether stringent or conciliatory, availed to restore public order.
    And can you wonder, asks Salvian? Unlike most of his contemporaries, he was extremely hostile to the measures taken by Aetius against the bandit gangs, whose flights from society and disorders he blames entirely upon the Roman rulers and their upper-class supporters. The brigandage, he admits, is universal, and no one is safe from it. But in his opinion the so-called brigands themselves are not in the least guilty. Once again, their actions are wholly due to the deeds of their wicked and bloodthirsty oppressors.
. . . The poor are being robbed, widows groan, orphans are trodden down, so that many, even persons of good birth who have enjoyed a liberal education, seek refuge with the enemy to escape death under the trials of the general persecution. They seek among the barbarians the Roman mercy, since they cannot endure the barbarous mercilessness they find among the Romans. . . .
We transform their misfortunes into crime, we brand them with a name that recalls their losses, with a name that we ourselves have contrived for their shame. We call those men rebels and utterly abandoned, whom we ourselves have forced into crime. For by what other cause were they made Bagaudae save by our unjust acts, the wicked decisions of the officials, the proscription and extortion of those who have turned the public