poliphilo | The End Of Roman Britain

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 By the time the troops were withdrawn, Britain, like the rest of the western empire, was already seriously impoverished by comparison with its position a century earlier.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.

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Um - yes - -
But did withdrawing the troops mean that there was no longer any Roman occupation at all?
No settlers?
It's never occurred to me before that I know nothing about this period!

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wemyss.livejournal.com

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Imperial-Possession-Britain-Empire-History/dp/0713990635.

(Not fiction, of course.)

I'll say no more just now, as am busy.

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rosamicula.livejournal.com

Learning about this was one of the shocks of my school history lessons (which were brilliant; unlike the present national curriculum which is all 'let's do the nazis three times in five years because there's loads of videos') is that things can regress or be unlearned.

I found that terrifying; Britons inventing giants to explain how roads were built. It reminded me of the end of Planet of the Apes, which, as a child, I found horribly upsetting.

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The question to ask here is, four hundred years after the first Romans arrived, how meaningful would the difference between 'Roman' and 'British' have remained?

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shewhomust.livejournal.com

Had they forgotten how to build in stone or did they prefer not to?

Like

strange_complex, I'd look for explanations in the economy; and in the difference between what can be built by organised workers with an infrastructure behind them, and what an individual or small group of artisans can patch up after they've done their stint on the day job.

Bear in mind, too, that the remains didn't get any respect just for being old: they were a resource to be used, and often no more than a quarry where the hard work of cutting the stone had already been done for you.

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Wouldn't that depend on the proportion of Roman citizens to the rest of the population? And how meaningful was citizenship after the Empire withdrew?

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Yes - economy - and, as you suggest, direction of labour.

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sovay

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?

Rosemary Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers (1959) is about life in immediately post-Roman Britain: the legions withdraw and the protagonist stays behind. I do not know how well it matches with contemporary archaeology, but it's a great book.

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Well, it all also depends on how one defines 'Roman'. Someone born in Rome? Someone legally possessed of Roman citizenship (as all free people in the empire were after AD 212)? Someone who chose to align themselves with Roman culture? (And, in the latter case, how static or universally-agreed-upon was 'Roman' culture anyway?) All of the same questions can be asked of 'British' identity, and that's before even starting to think about what happens when the two are brought together for an extended period.

In other words, what I'm trying to say is that removing troops which had been paid by the Roman state from Britain certainly didn't mean that all signs of Roman influence in Britain suddenly vanished. But it isn't possible to identify the remaining influence in terms of readily distinguishable 'occupation' or 'settlers'. Everyone in Britain was Roman on at least some level by the time the troops left.

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Depends how you define Britain - resistance was very strong in what is now called Wales - otherwise, I still think that it makes a huge difference whether people were officially Roman citizens or simply governed by Roman occupation

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I still think that it makes a huge difference whether people were officially Roman citizens or simply governed by Roman occupation

Well, that goes back to my original point, which is that I don't think this distinction was at all clear any more in Roman Britain by AD 410. There certainly wasn't a technical difference, given the ruling of AD 212 which I referred to above, and which made all free people Roman citizens. Other social and cultural gulfs, such as that between the wealthy elite and ordinary subsistence farmers, were far more significant.

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Yes, I agree with that - and that might partly explain the question of repairs in wood - the traders who were using the place wouldn't be skilled in stonemasonry?

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Indeed - and also obviously couldn't commission anyone else who was to make the repairs. As

shewhomust puts it below, the whole system which developed and sustained skills of that sort had clearly collapsed.

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steepholm.livejournal.com

I was about to recommend the same book - but instead I'll second it heartily.

Another novel that deals with the same period, but with less effort at realism, is Ann Lawrence's Between the Forest and the Hills. You know how in Asterix one Gaulish village is surrounded by the might of Rome? In this, it's kind of the other way round (except the village is in Britannia).

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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?

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One possibilty- suggested in the article I read last night- is that small garrisons remained- and that they formed the nucleii of the petty kingdoms of the "Arthurian" period.

The problem is that there's very little to know. Written records are practically non-existent and the archaeology is sparse.

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Thanks for the link.

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That sounds like the book I want. Thanks!

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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.

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athenais.livejournal.com

I am very fond of Jo Walton's novels The King's Peace and The King's Name which deals with the changes after the "Vincans" left. It is a take on the Arthurian legend as well.

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Excellent.

It's been growing on me for a while that Sutcliffe is someone I ought to read.

Between the Forest and the Hills sounds like fun.

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Thank you. These sound promising.

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

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Most of us coast along on other people's expertise. A society like ours depends on an army of specialists. If the specialists were neutralised the rest of us would be helpless.

If our society collapsed tomorrow I wouldn't even possess the basic skills of a hunter-gatherer. I'd go round looting shops until the stocks ran out (which would be almost immediately) and then I'd die.

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That's a good point. If there's no economy to support skilled craftspeople the crafts will simply disappear.

Apparently some of the stone from Binchester eventually wound up in the little Saxon church at Escomb.

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xiphias.livejournal.com

I was going to mention these, too. It's my favorite Arthurian fantasy pastiche.

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sovay

If you're looking into post-Roman Arthuriana and you have not yet read Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave (1970), do not walk, but run to your nearest library; you are in for a treat. It is hands-down one of my favorite retellings in any field.

"So all through that winter he came to me. And he came at night. I was never alone in my chamber, but he came through doors and windows and walls, and lay with me. I never saw him again, but heard his voice and felt his body. Then, in the summer, when I was heavy with child, he left me . . . They will tell you how my father beat me and shut me up, and how when the child was born he would not give him a name fit for a Christian prince, but, because he was born in September, named him for the sky-god, the wanderer, who has no house but the woven air. But I called him Merlin always, because on the day of his birth a wild falcon flew in through the window and perched above the bed, and looked at me with my lover's eyes."
—Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave (1970)

The succeeding two books, The Hollow Hills (1973) and The Last Enchantment (1979) are not as strong or as striking—although still worth reading—possibly because they adhere more closely to the familiar Arthurian canon and have less to do with Merlin himself, Myrddin Emrys, the bastard son of a Welsh king's daughter with dark Roman eyes and a coiling glitter of dreams, but I would still recommend them. I read The Crystal Cave for the first time in seventh grade and it's shaped the way I think about the character ever since.

There is also Elizabeth E. Wein's The Winter Prince (1993), which is less canonical but more beautiful than almost any other retelling I know: the mummer's play of Arthur's bastard son and his legitimate children in the winter fields of sixth-century Britain, as narrated by Medraut to his mother Morgause. It's written like bright chips of mosaic, piecing together something precise and iconic and nearly lost. The sequels take place in the contemporary Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum and are less directly Arthurian, but equally worth your time.

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sovay

Another novel that deals with the same period, but with less effort at realism, is Ann Lawrence's Between the Forest and the Hills.

I haven't read that one!

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