The End Of Roman Britain

[poliphilo]

Something I've never really understood is the collapse of Roman Britain. We had 400 years of towns and roads and baths and then the troops were withdrawn and everything went to pot. I was reading an article last night about the archaeology of the Roman fort at Binchester in County Durham. It wasn't abandoned when the soldiers left. Instead the local tradesmen moved in and dug pits all over the place and spread offal around. When the fabric started to crumble they patched it up with wood. Had they forgotten how to build in stone or did they prefer not to?

I find it hard to imagine what that transition must have been like. Were people traumatised by the sudden collapse of their world or did they relapse into tribal ways the way one might slip into a stinky old dressing-gown at the end of the day? Did anyone struggle to maintain standards of governance and civilisation? The evidence suggests not.

I've read fiction about the last days of Empire and fiction about the so-called Dark Ages, but I've never read fiction that deals with the generation of the collapse- the people who lived in towns one year and in ruins the next. Does anyone know of any?

Comments

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

You might find it helpful to think in terms of the impact of a global economic depression to help you understand the reasons for and scale of the change. Britain was doing quite well economically in the late third / early fourth century, but over the course of the fourth century the whole empire suffered serious economic decline, with empire-wide trade and the spending power of the imperial state both shrinking dramatically, and affecting all whose livelihoods depended on either. By the time the troops were withdrawn, Britain, like the rest of the western empire, was already seriously impoverished by comparison with its position a century earlier. Roads and baths were just no longer sustainable.

Neither are fictional, but I can recommend two books which you might enjoy on this period. Bryan Ward-Perkins' extremely readable book, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation gives a vivid and up-to-date account of the reasons for the change on an empire-wide scale, and the sorts of effects it would have had on people living at the time. And Ken Dark's book, Britain and the End of the Roman Empire will give you more of the fine detail on Britain itself, while also setting it into the wider context of what was going on in the rest of the empire at the same time.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the suggestions.

The totality of the collapse- with the concomitant loss of skills and technologies- is alarming. Could something similar happen to our civilisation, or are we too well embedded?

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

I often wonder about that too, and the conclusion I usually reach is that it all too easily could. But the sheer quantities of books which we have produced, most of which are at least reasonably durable (in spite of digitisation), might mean that the period of regression was shorter.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Perhaps things would have gone rather differently if the Romans had had printing...