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." 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.

259. Canterbury (Kent).

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 etui 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.