J. C. S. Léon interprets the most completely assembled documentation and identifies the bagaudae as impoverished local free peasants, reinforced by brigands, runaway slaves and deserters from the legions, who were trying to resist the ruthless labor exploitation of the late Roman proto-feudal colonus manorial and military systems, and all manner of punitive laws and levies in the marginal areas of the Empire.
Their leaders are mentioned as Amandus and Aelianus, although E.M. Wightman, in her Gallia Belgica[5] proposes that the two belonged to the local Gallo-Roman landowning class who then became "tyrants"[6] and most likely rebelled against the grinding taxation and garnishing of their lands, harvests, and manpower by the predatory agents of the late Roman state (see frumentarii, publicani).
Mamertinus also called them "two-shaped monsters" (monstrorum biformium), emphasising that while they were technically Imperial farmers and citizens, they were also marauding rogues who had become foes to the Empire.
In the fifth century Bagaudae are noted initially in the Loire valley and Brittany, circa 409–417 AD,[8] fighting various armies sent against them by the last seriously effective Western Roman general, Flavius Aëtius.
In Hispania, the king of the Suevi, Rechiar (died 456 AD), took up as allies the local bagaudae in ravaging the remaining Roman municipia, a unique alliance between Germanic ruler and rebel peasant.
[9] That the depredations of the ruling classes were mostly responsible for the uprising of the bagaudae was not lost on the fifth-century writer of historicised polemic Salvian; setting himself in the treatise De gubernatione Dei the task of proving God's constant guidance, he declares in book iii that the misery of the Roman world is all due to the neglect of God's commandments and the terrible sins of every class of society.