With the benefit of hindsight, Roman Britain’s end might seem inevitable. Rome’s cultural and military hold on Britain was never total, and in some areas no better than tenuous. The high archaeological visibility of Roman culture dominates what survives to such an extent that anything affecting the towns, villas and forts is bound to have a dramatic effect on the archaeological record. The late treasure hoards look very much like the work of wealthy people desperate to hold onto their valuables. The deterioration of public buildings is symbolic of the decline of the economic network on which the whole of Roman Britain depended. But the end of Roman Britain was no more inevitable than the conquest in the first place. What brought it to a climax were particular events at a particular time, and accidents of fate that meant the key players were the people they were and made the decisions they did.
We have a distorted impression of Roman Britain because building the province at all involved a colossal amount of effort. Since Britain in 43 had none of the infrastructure of a Roman province, it was necessary to create it from scratch. It was not until the middle of the second century that the administrative towns had the facilities they needed, the northern frontier was anything like consolidated, and the legionary fortresses were substantially complete. The effort was vast, the resources used enormous, and the results astonishing. Britain had been dragged from a world of rural farmsteads and dirt tracks, and from a society in which a very few could indulge themselves in manufactured luxuries, into a completely new way of life. The fundamental parameters with which everyone defined their lives had been changed out of recognition, through the unique combination of Roman patronage and the willingness of some Britons to measure their own status in this new context.
The idea of a town is so familiar today that we give it no thought. The Britons, within a few generations, had been exposed to urban institutions and facilities that would have been unthinkable before the invasion. For rural people in parts of the remote north, their world had now become overrun with forts and roads that carved up the landscape, and transformed it into part of an economic and social system that stretched to Egypt and beyond. Even Chinese silk made it to Colchester. The most obscure locations had access to the Roman economic system. In Scotland, Northumberland, Cumbria and parts of the southwest, there would be nothing like this again until the arrival of the railways in the nineteenth century.
This is absolutely no exaggeration. The Roman ‘achievement’ was unparalleled in the ancient world, and would have been remarkable by any historical standards until electricity and mechanization arrived. Britain in many respects is where the results were most dramatic, simply because there was so little to build on in the first place. That most Britons seem, by and large, eventually to have accepted the change is one of the key points of this book. It was said on a news bulletin after the Iraq war of 2003 that ‘the Iraqis care far more about their electricity supply than who rules them. A matter of opinion, of course, but the point hit on an important truth. The Boudican revolt offered only chaos and disorder, and, not unnaturally, the bulk of the population found it easy enough to accept an alternative that offered stability, security and economic well-being. It is easy to say that the Britons had no choice, but this credits Rome with the ability to impose and sustain brutal oppression without quarter. The Roman army was simply not big enough to do that, however large the garrison of Britain, and nor did the Roman government consider this a desirable way to rule. Inclusion through patronage, however insidious and cynical, was the way Rome maintained her power, not by the sword.
The ‘Multangular Tower’, part of the reinforcements made to the legionary fortress defences by Constantius I in the early fourth century.
The change in Britain was so significant that it unavoidably creates a dramatic impression in the archaeological record. London is the principal example. Scattered traces of prehistoric settlement are well known in the London area, but not in any great abundance, and the same is true for after the Roman period. But Roman London in the first and second centuries is the most prolific source of archaeological material in the area until early modern times. Vast quantities of building debris, pottery, coins and innumerable other artifacts bear witness to the sheer explosive impact of the arrival of Rome [248]. As Britain became more Romanized, towns, public buildings, potteries and other industries were established, and imported goods gave way to home-grown products. Therefore, it is easy to gain the impression that Britain’s towns had started to decline. There may well have been economic decline, but the lack of new public buildings is not necessarily evidence for it. After all, once a town has a basilica, there is no good reason to build a new one. Evidence for maintenance and repair of the existing structure may not be very evident in the archaeological record. But change in use, like metalworking practices in Silchester’s basilica, is
Perhaps just that: evidence for change, and not necessarily for terminal decline. When the theatre at St Albans fell out of use and became a rubbish dump in the late fourth century, it did so probably because the outlawing of paganism made it a redundant part of town life, and not because that town life had fallen apart.
Fragment of a Trajanic samian Form 37 bowl found in London but made in Les Martres-de-Veyre (central Gaul), depicting a matched pair of gladiators. Made by Drusus I. Early second century.
While the towns had reached some kind of plateau, rural Britain in the fourth century was booming. There is no doubt that expenditure on some rural seats was enormous, and that some of the wealth trickled down into the economy via patronage of the industries and labour that made the luxurious lives of those who lived in the grand villas possible. There was, of course, inequality, but the Roman state was not an egalitarian one, and its whole social and economic system was founded on an institutionalized hierarchy in which land and wealth were qualifications of status. In an
Economic sense, Roman Britain was certainly more egalitarian than what had gone before. That much is transparently obvious from the comparative quantities, and distribution, of artifacts.
The villas of fourth-century Britain reflected the success with which the Roman way of life had been inducted into the mindset of the Romano-British. The ancient traditions of a tribal warrior aristocracy had been converted into the ostentatious luxury of rural villa culture, with all its selfconscious emulation of older Italian traditions. But judging the villa culture is not really the point. Enlarging a villa and improving it was an inherently optimistic thing to do. No villa owner expected, or indeed wanted, Roman Britain to come to an end. Given this, how is it possible that when Roman control of Britain was given up, the highly visible Roman culture dissipated at all?
Inscription recording the ‘holy god Viridios’. Probably from a temple precinct, the slab was reused in a late or post-Roman grave.
Hoards in Roman Britain
Hoarding was a routine activity in antiquity, and remained so until early modem times. Concealing valuables in times of insecurity, or just for safekeeping, was the best way of hanging onto them. In the normal course of events, hoards were recovered by their owners and do not survive in the record. Those that turn up today, usually found by metal-detectorists or farmers, were left behind, whether through death or forgetfulness.
Thousands of Roman coin hoards have been found all over Britain, the greatest of which is the Frome Hoard, consisting of 52,503 coins dated from AD 253 to 305, and discovered in 2010 (see [ 65]). The most remarkable series are the treasure hoards from late Roman Britain, several of which come from East Anglia. They seem to belong to the last few years of Roman occupation, or to the years immediately after.
The Mildenhall Treasure
When the Mildenhall Treasure [251] came to light in the 1940s, it was still believed that Roman Britain was far too much of a backwater to have produced such high-quality silver plate. It was even suggested that American airmen might have brought the treasure back from North Africa during World War II. Since then, analysis of other hoards has shown that individuals in late Roman Britain were not only extremely wealthy, but had access to silver and gold plate manufactured to the highest standards available in the ancient world. The treasure included no coins, but the quality and style of its plate suggest that it could have belonged to any wealthy person in the Roman Empire around the end of the fourth century.
Found in 1942, this silver treasure hoard consisted of 34 objects, including eight spoons, several bowls, dishes and platters, ladles, and a pair of goblets. The largest of these is the Great Dish (60.5 cm/24 in wide), with its Bacchic figures and Oceanus central motif. Despite the pagan associations, educated Christians in the late Empire were quite at ease with pagan imagery. Probably fourth century. (British Museum).
The Hoxne Treasure
Understanding the hoards is very difficult since we have no idea who buried them. The Hoxne treasure consists of a number of personalized items of plate, including five silver bowls, four pepper pots, 78 spoons and 20 ladles, as well as around 15,000 gold and silver coins [253]. The coins demonstrate that the assemblage, which was closely packed in its deposit, could not have been buried before 408 and was probably buried shortly afterwards. The value in antiquity would have been enormous, so the possibilities are that this was the property of
One or more families, stolen loot, or goods seized by the authorities to pay off barbarians. Another hoard, now lost, was found nearby at Eye in the eighteenth century and may have been another part of the Hoxne assemblage, separated for security.
The Thetford Treasure
The Thetford treasure falls into a completely different category. Stylistically the material belongs to the very late fourth century, and coins that may have originally formed part of the hoard date up to 388. Superficially the hoard seems divided into two parts: the gold jewelry and the silver spoons. The jewelry includes a gold belt buckle [ 252] and 22 gold rings, into which much older gemstones had been set. A number of the spoons were engraved with personal names, while other words referring to drinking, along with a wine strainer, suggest that the spoons may have been associated with a late Roman pagan cult of Faunus, an obscure ancient woodland deity. Unfortunately, we have no idea if the original owners buried the hoard, if it had been acquired by someone else, or if the cult was active in Britain or Gaul, which is where some of the items are thought to have been made.
A gold buckle depicting a satyr. Part of the treasure hoard associated with the cult of Faunus. (British Museum).
Other hoards
These are by no means the only treasure hoards of this late date. The Corbridge
Silver lanx is the only surviving piece of a treasure that was broken up and lost soon after its discovery in the 1730s. The Risley Park silver lanx (see [ 246]) has survived, but only as a cast made from the fragments into which it was cut after its discovery. Other treasures include the collection of late Roman silver spoons found at Canterbury.
Overall, the late treasure hoards are an extremely important witness to the quality of material culture available to the elite in late Roman Britain. Their survival is remarkable, but it is probable that the goods themselves were considerably less remarkable at the time. Roman Britain’s upper classes had access to bullion goods of outstanding quality that would have compared with the best the Roman Empire had to offer.
Silver pepper pot in the form of an empress and a silver leopard from the early fifth - century treasure hoard found at Hoxne. (British Museum).
THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE END
During the fourth century Britain went through political turmoil, but it would be a distortion to imply that she was somehow especially badly off. A series of usurpations meant the garrison was systematically denuded, and was used to support the imperial ambitions of men like Magnentius (35053) and Magnus Maximus (383-88). There is little evidence that this disrupted normal life in Roman Britain. Indeed, the problems were probably less than in other parts of the Roman world. The various pretenders conducted their fighting in Gaul, not in Britain, and they posed as restorers of Rome, not destroyers. Much of their support came from those who wanted to see Roman values reinforced, not wiped away, even though they did a great deal of damage to Britain’s defences. The barbarian incursions that wrought havoc in Britain, like that of 367, are notorious events in the historical record. However, these events were far less damaging than uprisings across the Rhine or in the East, and rebellions led by usurpers. Theodosius I (379-95) had first to deal with a Gothic invasion in the eastern provinces, followed by a war with the British usurper, Magnus Maximus, and then another rebel, Eugenius. In 406, the Vandals led an invasion across the Rhine to devastate Gaul. The complicated events and loyalties of the rebellion of another British usurper, Constantine III (407-11), left Honorius entirely unable to provide any more resources to support Britain [250].
250. Constantine III (407- 11).
A gold solidus of Constantine III. Constantine’s coins were the last to reach Britain before the end of the Roman period. (British Museum).
After 410, Britain was formally on her own, but the population was still Romano-British, and it would be another two or three generations before living memory of the Roman province would disappear. The migration of Anglo-Saxons, which had begun when mercenaries were absorbed into the garrison, was important, but involved very small numbers of people. Most of the population was Romano-British, or at least of Romano-British descent. Making sense of what happened is complicated by the very limited archaeological evidence. In a practical sense, the separation made little difference in the immediate short-term. All Honorius had said was that Britain must now defend herself, but this meant no more imperial taxes to pay for troops. It was this lack of funding that made the critical difference, because it totally disrupted the complex cash-based cycle of wages, trade and taxation, and ended patronage through office.
Pelagius was a Briton, but almost all of the significant events of the heresy that he led took place on the Continent. Pelagius rejected the Augustinian view that God had chosen his elect for heaven, and that no amount of good works could undo this predestination. His own beliefs, in an echo of paganism, suggested that men could choose to do good, thereby intervening in divine judgment to decide their own fate.1 This heretical view caused a ruction in the church, and was popular in Britain. The ecclesiastical hierarchy in Britain was unsettled by the success of Pelagianism. In 429, Germanus and Lupus, bishops of Auxerre and Troyes, respectively, were sent by the church in Gaul to suppress the heresy. This they did with a mixture of spin, miracles and bravado in battle against the Saxons, and even presided over the healing of a tribune’s daughter. The account of their visit is a conflation of history, allegory and moral fable. The story reveals that an ecclesiastical organization was operating in Britain and remained in contact with the Continent, and that people still held positions with Roman titles.
Christianity had become the mechanism of order and the unifying factor in international society, and it did so in a Roman idiom. While government links had been broken with Britain, it was the link with the church in Gaul that led to the arrival of Germanus. Many of the administrative terms and offices of the late Roman Empire, such as those of vicar and diocese, were adopted by the Christian church and survive today. St Patrick, who died
Sometime between c. 450 and 493, was bom near Bannavem Taberniae, a place that has never been identified, but, since he was taken to Ireland after being captured at the age of 16, it was probably in western or northwestern Britain. His father, Calpornius, owned an estate and slaves and held positions as a decurion and deacon. This is important because much of what seems to have survived of Roman Britain did so in the west. It is here that the Celtic names of rivers have more frequently survived, and in the southwest where finds from the reoccupied hillforts show that Continental contacts were maintained. In Wales Latin words have survived from antiquity, and Magnus Maximus is remembered as ‘Macsen Wledig’ and attributed with founding a line of Welsh kings.
Life-sized limestone bust from the cult statue of Mercury. The statue was carefully buried in the ruins of the temple, probably in preparation for the construction of a fifth-century timber Christian basilica on the site. (British Museum).
The posts Calpornius held suggest that, despite the physical
Degeneration of buildings and infrastructure, society was still organized in a Romanized manner well into the fifth century. They also remind us of the palpable psychological fear the detachment from Rome provoked. This is hard for us to appreciate, but in the fourth and fifth centuries the prospect of Rome falling created a desperate sense of apprehension, and compromised any sense of security and equanimity. Constantine III had been elevated to power largely because of the historical symbolism of his name, a century after Constantine I had done so much to unify the Roman world under the Christian banner. Continuing to maintain Roman administrative positions was a powerful way of sustaining a semblance not just of normality, but more importantly a sense that the forces of disorder could be kept at bay.
Despite the lack of historical information, we can see that Britain was still attempting to function as she had under Rome. It is evident from the archaeology that things were very different, but the intent to remain Roman still seems to have been intact. It was not until the 440s that there was a dramatic turn of events. The contacts with Gaul this time were used to make a series of direct appeals for help against barbarian attacks in 446. The next 50 years changed Britain forever. Exactly what happened next is not entirely clear, but seems to have involved a British leader, Vortigern, who in 449 called in a warrior force of Angles and Saxons, led by Hengest and Horsa, to repel barbarians. Hengest and Horsa were successful, but soon turned against the Britons and defeated them in a series of battles. More Angles and Saxons arrived, for example, Aelle, who defeated the Britons at Pevensey. The implication is that the Angles and Saxons gradually gained control in eastern Britain. There is much to argue concerning the exact sequence of events, and a definitive chronology has never been produced.
Eventually, the Britons began to reorganize themselves, and, under the leadership of a man of Roman origin called Ambrosius Aurelianus, defeated the Saxons at the battle of Mount Badon in or around 493. 3 The battle ushered in only a temporary period of stability, until the Saxons started up their wars of conquest again. Ambrosius Aurelianus, who was probably a descendant of the Romanized aristocracy of Britain, is the last truly Roman-type figure in Britain’s history, and his moment of triumph is a good point at which to leave the story. The chronicler, Gildas, was born in Britain at about the time of the battle. The training and style so evident in Gildas’ work shows that educated Latin culture was maintained and still available Well into the sixth century, largely through the spread of monasticism. Men like Gildas maintained scholarly links with the surviving classical world. He may have been trained in Gaul, though a monastery in western Britain or Ireland is equally likely. The Latinity exhibited by the composers of fifth-and sixth-century tombstone epitaphs, especially in western Britain, illustrates a significant level of cultural continuity from the Roman period. 4 Some surviving late Roman manuscripts, now stored in the Vatican, may have originated in fourth - or fifth-century Britain, being preserved for a time in Ireland.5 As far as Gildas was concerned, Ambrosius Aurelianus symbolized the end. He was right. In 577, the Saxons won a decisive battle at Dyrham, and seized Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath. By then any idea that any sort of semblance of Roman Britain could be maintained must have gone forever.
255* Nassington (Cambridgeshire).
An early sixth-century bronze cruciform brooch. Derived in part from the late Roman ‘crossbow’ brooch, Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooches evolved into highly elaborate designs. Usually found in burials, they help track the adoption of a new culture across Britain after the Roman period.
The question of Roman interest in Ireland has often been raised, usually because Tacitus implies that Agricola considered a campaign there, with the assistance of an exiled Irish chieftain. Some Roman material has been found in Ireland, most notably (and controversially) in the i6-ha (40-acre) fortified promontory at Drumanagh, near Dublin. Whether this represents a Roman military base or a trading settlement has never been resolved, not least because Roman material does not seem to have filtered out more widely into Irish settlements. Other pockets of Roman material, for example at Leinster, also appear to be self-contained. But if Roman influence was very limited to begin with, by the 500s it had become more conspicuous in, for example, the form of the penannular brooch. In some respects, early medieval Ireland was the unlikely refuge of aspects of Romano-British culture.
THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE END OF ROMAN BRITAIN
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was believed Roman Britain had disappeared with unnerving suddenness. Pelagian Britain had tribunes, and St Patrick’s world had deacons and decurions. Such positions invoke the idea of a Roman province enjoying a thriving urban and villa economy, but such a world had ceased to be. Roman Britain’s towns and villas fell into disrepair, and then total ruin. The time scale is usually a matter for debate, but the outcome is not. Lullingstone is a perfect example. What had been a house for which someone in the late fourth century had been prepared to spend money on remodelling the structure and installing mosaics, had burnt down by the early fifth century. Houses had always been susceptible to fire, but they were usually rebuilt. Now here, as just about everywhere else, the house was abandoned. Portable villa wealth found its way into hoards like Hoxne, was appropriated by what remained of the provincial government to buy off barbarians, or was simply stolen. The Traprain Law [256] and the Coleraine hoards from Scotland and Ireland, respectively, are Hacksilber hoards, meaning that the treasure they
Contained had been accumulated purely as bullion. Chopped up, crushed and damaged silver plate seems to have been gathered by weight, with no interest or concern for aesthetics, unlike the hoards from Hoxne, Mildenhall, or Thetford, whose pieces were clearly individually treasured. The Traprain and Coleraine hoards, the latter datable to post-410 by coins, represent either booty or bribes.
256. Traprain Law (East Lothian).
Fragment of a decorated silver flagon from the hoard of Hacksilber found at Traprain Law. Late fourth or early fifth century.
Meanwhile, coinage in Britain ended with the reign of Constantine III (40711). The coins bearing his name in the Hoxne hoard were amongst the very last official supplies to arrive before the end. No coins were manufactured in Britain to make good the shortfall. The silver siliquae coins that remained available, including some of the Hoxne coins, were often clipped. It was both a reflection of the breakdown in law and order, and the fact that bullion was hard to come by. The only Roman coins that came in now did so in tiny quantities, probably with individuals. The Patching (West Sussex) hoard was made up mostly of coins dating to between 337 and 411. But the hoarder had also been able to get hold of later material. The latest coin was
Of Libius Severus (461-65), showing that the hoard had not been buried before then. But the hoard is so exceptional that it only emphasizes how the everyday small-change cash economy had ceased to function. The Libius Severus coin is one that would never have entered Britain by any normal route. Either the hoarder was a trader passing through, or someone who had Continental contacts. All the base-metal coins that made casual day-today transactions had disappeared.
Even pottery skills were apparently lost within a few decades. The massive industries, such as the Alice Holt potteries, were simply abandoned, presumably because the collapse of a broader town-based economy made them unsustainable. It is of course inconceivable that people ceased to need bowls and dishes, but they either made use of what was left, or turned to wooden vessels, which of course do not survive. There are exceptions. York’s calcite-gritted kitchenware industry seems to have continued in operation until well into the fifth century, though the evidence is very limited. But this is unusual and therefore, far from toppling the traditional picture of a general collapse of the Romano-British way of life, the possible survival of part of York’s pottery industry only emphasizes how much most of Britain had changed.
Every Roman settlement of consequence saw its buildings deteriorate and eventually fall into ruin. The villa at Frocester Court remained in use, but in reduced circumstances, until it too fell down. The villa at Orton Hall Farm, near Peterborough, was apparently abandoned, but Saxon timber buildings were erected in and around the old villa buildings, suggesting that the estate itself continued in use. A good case has been made for the survival of the villa estate boundaries at Withington (Gloucestershire) into the seventh century. Here the present parish boundaries preserve an estate granted to a convent in 690 by Aethelred, king of Mercia (675-704), which quite possibly included the same land once farmed from the villa. 6 The headquarters building of the legionary fortress at York may have survived until the ninth century, until it collapsed on top of evidence that it had been used for agricultural purposes.
Wroxeter has become the classic modern excavation, where nearly thirty years of work on the baths-basilica site has recovered an accumulation of evidence for the disintegration of the main structure by the fifth century, but not its abandonment.7 Instead, several timber buildings were erected within the ruins of the old baths basilica [ 257], and remained in use until some indeterminate time in the sixth century. Then much of what remained of the old Roman building was cleared away, and a new series of timber buildings erected. This has been used to argue for the maintenance of some sort of centralized authority, very probably ecclesiastical. Since the church is the one organization we have evidence for in the fifth century, the case is a good one but is, as yet, unsubstantiated.
Reconstruction painting of Viroconium Cornoviorum showing the timber buildings erected in the ruins of the baths-basilica in the fifth century.
At Birdoswald, the same pattern of physical degeneration of masonry structures, followed by replacement with two successive timber halls on the footings of one of the granaries, was uncovered. Accurate dating is impossible, but occupation stretching into the sixth century is feasible. If so, this may be evidence for continuity of occupation. However, strictly speaking it is also possible that the timber buildings were actually built somewhat later, following a hiatus. In a period when coinage and pottery effectively did not exist, dating spectral traces of occupation and timber buildings is more speculative than substantive. All that can be said with certainty is that the stone floor of the first timber hall sealed coins of the 380s beneath it. However, if we assume that the Birdoswald timber halls do
Date from the fifth and sixth centuries, then the tradition the fort and its garrison had enjoyed for centuries in the area is bound to have endowed whoever lived there with the resources and prestige to control the region. The most likely context is the survival of authority vested in those who held positions of power with Roman titles, and who commanded some sort of residual respect. Whether these were warrior chiefs, whose antecedents had been officers in a frontier fort, or bishops whose priestly duties were now blurred with those of old town councils, we may never know.
Wroxeter and Birdoswald have shown how occupation may have continued at some Roman sites. However, the picture of dramatic change remains intact: no one at Wroxeter was able, or inclined, to repair or rebuild the baths basilica, or to replace it with anything that matched it either as an architectural work or in its prestige. Those who lived at Birdoswald were unable or unwilling to repair the fort structures, whether or not they erected timber halls in the fifth century or much later. Villas with evidence of continued occupation always show that the people living there were unable to maintain the buildings properly, or to care for mosaics and baths, or anything else that required effort or skills beyond those needed for subsistence. All of the support crafts and the labour needed to maintain towns with complex public buildings, or villa houses and their attendant facilities, had disappeared. We do not have conclusive evidence about who these later occupants were. They could just as easily have been the descendants of wealthy fourth-century villa owners, or people who had simply moved into vacant premises and made of them what they could. Generally described in excavation reports as ‘squatters’, these ghostly figures lit fires on mosaic floors, executed ham-fisted repairs where absolutely essential, and otherwise let the dilapidation continue unabated until the houses were finally abandoned.
The villa remained in use during the fifth century, despite falling into disrepair. In a room in the west wing, this badly damaged fourth-century mosaic served as a threshing floor and was cut through with postholes. The roof later collapsed (indicated by the layer of tile and burnt timber), and radiocarbon dates from grain found on an adjacent floor suggest that the walls fell down no earlier than the 490s, an unexpectedly late date which shows that farming continued even if the resources and inclination to maintain the house no longer existed.
Everything that had made forts, towns and villas possible in the visible forms they reached had vanished. In one sense, this is exactly what we might expect. Since all of these highly visible features were wholly interdependent, economically and socially, it is not surprising that they all dwindled at the same time. Towns were part of a burgeoning economy that went along with a developed road communications system, imported goods, coinage and specialized industries. Likewise, the villas evolved as part of that social and economic system, both supplying and placing demands on the market. The army was an important part of maintaining that system, both through its manpower and influence, and also through wages and purchasing. The effects trickled down through the community, and even remote rural settlements had access to modest quantities of manufactured or imported goods. When something changed for the worse, these economic and social interrelationships made widespread dramatic change inevitable.
The result was the disappearance of much of what we define Roman Britain by. There was a demonstrable change in its quantitative character, and also in the qualitative expectations of its population. The reason for the vagueness about dating the fifth - and sixth-century phases is simply that the evidence itself is vague. There are virtually no coins, datable pottery forms, inscriptions, or anything else that makes the phases of occupation visible to us as historical periods in the way that the 367 years of Roman occupation are. Only where Roman goods or other datable material turn up in a settlement are we on firmer ground.
At York, the collapse of the headquarters building showed that the structure had been used simply because it was conveniently available. When it fell down, it was left in ruins. This is not to say that the people of the post-Roman period did not respect the Roman work, because they did. St Cuthbert, touring Carlisle in 685, was proudly shown a working Roman aqueduct. The Saxons admired the collapsed temple and baths at Bath as the work of ‘giants’, but the admiration partly stemmed from the awestruck belief that such things were no longer possible.
Power had probably become the preserve of local chiefs, who may have been warlords or bishops, or a combination of both. This is compatible with the idea that people with ecclesiastical authority wielded some sort of secular executive power. The positions that St Patrick’s father held also illustrate the problems of archaeological and historical evidence. Caesar’s invasions have no manifestation in the archaeological record, and were not even recorded or alluded to on coinage issued in his name. St Patrick’s world of deacons and decurions may have been vivid to him, but it is invisible in the surviving physical record. We might speculate about chieftain-bishops and deacons at Wroxeter, for instance, but they will probably remain in the realms of speculation.
In pockets Romano-British society continued, albeit in an archaeologically less visible form. The fifth-century reoccupation of hillforts like Cadbury (Somerset), or the coastal stronghold of Tintagel (Cornwall), was undertaken by people who had the inclination to use, and the means to import, goods from the Continent or even further afield. Tintagel has structural remains associated with glass from Spain and ceramics from North Africa and the Near East, dating right into the middle of the sixth century. These finds show that whoever controlled Tintagel not only had the trading and possibly diplomatic contacts, but also the aspirations and taste to sustain a cosmopolitan Romanized existence. The recovery of tin ingots off the Devon coast near Plymouth, and the discovery of nearby coastal settlements with fifth - and sixth-century imported pottery, suggests that the tin trade helped sustain Roman commercial links with Britain. Another possibility is that the Eastern Roman Empire was deliberately fostering contacts with what remained of Roman culture in Britain as part of its programme of patronage and influence. In this respect, Britain had reverted to some extent to the relationship it had had with the Mediterranean world before the Roman conquest. These instances also emphasize our dependence on visibility in the archaeological record. The physical manifestations of long-distance contact might be minimal in the fifth and sixth centuries, but the psychological, social and religious connections might have been very much greater than we can now measure.
CONCLUSION
Making sense of the fate of Roman Britain has taxed the minds of historians and archaeologists for decades. Numerous books and articles have been written that try to unravel the mesmerizing array of complicated, incomplete and contradictory historical information in sources such as Gildas, the Chronicle of 452, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Nennius and Bede.8 The result is bewildering to any reader, and sometimes impossibly arcane, especially when Latin phrases are meticulously dismantled in the search for lucid chronologies and insights. The results are usually inconclusive because all the sources have significant shortcomings, and in the end it comes down to a matter of opinion. But nothing really alters the fact that the basic procession of events is fairly clear: Roman rule came to an official end in Britain in 410, coinciding with a time when almost everything in the archaeological record that characterizes Roman Britain up till then starts to disappear. Of course, existing coinage, pottery, other artifacts, and some buildings continued in use. The point is that very little new material arrived or was manufactured in the next few decades, so as the items wore out, they disappear from the record. As that happened, Roman Britain unravelled. The process was haphazard and in some places relatively protracted. It remains to a large extent a mystery why the effect was so profound on Roman material culture.
Painting showing Canterbury as it might have appeared in the fifth century. The ruins of public buildings dominate an overgrown and virtually abandoned site. However, archaeology has shown that occupation continued at many sites, albeit at a much less sophisticated level than before. (Canterbury Museums).
This does not mean that the experience was an entirely negative one. To some extent, the change had more to do with an alteration in behaviour, rather than an explicit sequence of deterioration. We tend to see it as the end of Roman Britain, rather than the beginning of something new. Nevertheless, the phenomenon that was Roman culture in Britain was devastated by the withdrawal of Roman administration and a fundamental change in the economy. It took generations for Roman culture to dwindle away entirely, but much less time for the effects on material culture to bite. It is always worth remembering that the most conspicuous traces of Romanization in Britain to this day are associated with the military - a force that can never have amounted to much more than 40,000 men, perhaps one per cent of the population. Even with their dependants, this was a small proportion of the whole. In the fourth century, if we allocate 40 people to every known villa, regardless of size, we are still referring to a villa population of around 40,000-50,000. The administrative and economic changes would have had dramatic effects on these key parts of Romano-British society, and the end of the system that supported its way of life would have equally dramatic effects on the archaeology and the visible
Roman record.
Roman Britain was a phenomenon driven by a system, and when that system fell apart, many of the visible signs of what we know as Roman Britain went with it. In the beginning, some of Britain’s tribal leaders saw Rome as a vehicle for enhancing their own prestige. In the end, some leaders continued to see her as the source of authority by which they sought to control their communities. But when Rome ceased to fulfil those expectations, or to show any interest in doing so, the nature of power in Britain changed forever. Those who continued to maintain a semblance of Romanized existence found that apart from the church, Rome had ceased to be a source of support. Society in Britain fragmented, creating the building blocks for a different way of life based on regional kingdoms, where patronage and power derived their strength from other sources.
World History
