The Frankish tribal people constitute a state founded on an oral culture, blood and alliance whose different groups do not present any real unity. Their economic and agricultural system is based on slave labor. Installed at the gates of the empire by a foedus 1 between Rome and the Franks, the latter will permanently settle north of the Somme for the Salian Franks and west of the Rhine for the Rhenish Franks. It will be established between Franks and Rome a face to face sometimes warlike but also moments of peace or will occur diplomatic and commercial exchanges and create societal alliances with Rome.

 

They will slowly settle in the Roman Empire. They will obtain, by negotiating officially with Rome according to three rules, to be individually enlisted in the Roman army, to be installed as Letes with their family on property developed at the gates of the empire or to have the status of federates (foedus ) and receive territories in exchange for the military service they will owe to the Empire. The Roman Empire is a centralized state, urbanized, unified and policed by laws and dominated by an elite. On the other hand, pagan culture or the family form a much larger solidarity group than the individual. In 486 at the battle of Soissons Clovis will deal a blow to the yoke of the Roman Empire marked by the crumbling of its administration by defeating the army of Syagrius, the last representative of the empire.

 

Almost all of the Franks of the Merovingian era were rural. They live to the rhythm of the seasons and work in a limited horizon and space. After the Roman occupation, large estates developed directly by settlers and slaves became increasingly rare. Among the Franks there is no longer any nobility after the great invasions. A de facto aristocracy was formed and acquired the great Roman estates, either by royal favor, by purchase, by violence, or by marriage with wealthy Roman women. The Villae model will survive in this new context and it will therefore only be a subsistence economy with the reduction in trade due to unmaintained Roman roads and the virtual disappearance of river trade. This situation condemns everyone to live in a closed vessel and to compose with the environment and to draw from it the essential subsistence.

 

The village as we know it with its current establishments does not exist or only partially. The research carried out in the field shows that we are in the presence of small-scale plot installations on different sites of the territory which are sometimes far from those we know today. Man does not have the sense of appropriating a territory, he lives in a space that he shapes for his daily life. There is no doubt that in its proximity a monastic home with the construction of the Benedictine Abbey of the Croix St Ouen founded in 694 by Saint Leufroy and the establishment of a Merovingian royal villa in Vaudreuil will change his horizon of life. This horizon prefigures the establishment of new territorial units the Pagi and the one that interests us the Pagus Madriacensis (Country of Madrie). It is mainly the ecclesiastics who will manage the pagus Madriacensis during this Merovingian period.

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1 The fœdus: treaty of alliance signed between Rome and a foreign people, which then takes the status of an allied city cīvitās fœderāta (federated people).