Whatever at first the exact position and authority of these military and fiscal officers of the Emperor may have been, there is evidence that they easily assumed a kind of manorial lordship over the portion of the public domains under their charge in two distinct ways. «Were apt to assume a sort of lordship in their district.» In the first place, the 'villa' in which a military or fiscal officer lived was the fiscal centre of his district. He was the 'villicus' by whom the 'annonæ,' tribute, and 'sordida munera' were exacted. In some instances the services seem to have been rendered in the form of work on his 'villa,' or on the villas of 'conductores,' by whom the special products of some districts were sometimes farmed.[446] And there are passages in the Codes which complain of the tendency in these Imperial officers of higher and lower rank to oppress those under their jurisdiction, even sometimes using their services on their own estates, and thus arrogating to themselves almost the position of manorial lords, whilst reducing their fiscal dependants to the position of semi-servile tenants.[447] [p302] «Take persons and villages under their _patrocinium_.» In the second place, the practice also was complained of by which the fiscal officers, using their influence unduly, induced tenants on the public lands of their district, and sometimes even _whole villages_, to place themselves under their '_patrocinium_,' thereby practically converting themselves into semi-servile tenants of a mesne lord who stood between them and the emperor.[448] The question would be well worth a more careful consideration than can be given here how far these tendencies towards the gradual establishment under [p303] the later empire of a manorial relation between the 'coloni' and 'læti' on the crown lands, and the fiscal officer of the district in which they lived, were the beginnings of a process which ended in the division of the crown lands practically into 'villæ,' or districts appendant to the villa of the fiscal officer, which in their turn may have been the prototypes of the villas or manors on the 'terra regis' of Frankish and Saxon kings.[449] «Frankish 'Terra Regis' divided into _Villæ_, or _Manors_.»