The Material Fall of Roman Britain, 300-525 CE

"Yes, as a bit of background: at the end of the fourth century, the western Roman Empire is one half of a Mediterranean-spanning empire that has turned the Mediterranean Sea into a Roman lake. It has survived for centuries, gone through multiple crises. But by the start of the fifth century it starts to come apart. This is a very complex process that happens in different ways in different parts of the empire. If you lived in Constantinople or Egypt, in the eastern empire, you probably wouldn’t notice any difference. You might see some refugees from the west, nothing more. If you lived in Gaul or Italy, you’re going to see upheaval, violence, warfare—but nothing out of the ordinary for the late Iron Age. But in Britain, partly due to its unique geography as an island, you see a much more dramatic collapse of the social fabric. Entire industries fall apart overnight. Things like pottery, metalworking—industries that were supported by the Roman economic system—as Britain’s connections to the mainland are suddenly severed. Almost the entire urban culture of Britain falls apart in a matter of decades. Robin Fleming is a brilliant historian who works in the US. She looks at how this played out on the level of objects, the real material culture of Britain. She brings up fascinating little details, like the fact that after the collapse of the Roman Empire in Britain, people stopped eating stew. They were simply no longer making the large earthenware or iron pots you need to make it. The loss of connection to Roman market gardens meant that coriander, parsley, and so on disappeared from the British diet too, and were replaced by native herbs that had been foraged. “We don’t need to go to science fiction to see how the world ends. We can go back and see how it happened in history” People began to scavenge in towns like Londinium and Colchester. And since metal was no longer being mined or processed at scale, they set to work scavenging the ruins of these ghost towns where the streets would have been completely overgrown, looking for metal that could be repurposed and melted down. You started to see people drift back to the ancient Iron Age hill fortresses where they had lived before the arrival of the Romans. As they did, they brought with them heirlooms and treasures they had taken from the ruins of the Roman towns: bits of patterned pottery, for example, that they treasured and passed down through families. The chiefs would still be eating off Roman silverware. So you get a remarkable sense of how—as I have always tried to evoke—we don’t need to go to science fiction to see how the world ends, but we can go back and see how it happened in history. I tried to write my own book in an accessible style, so people can come to it with any level of historical knowledge. Although I hope I give a new angle that historians will enjoy too. I also wanted to look at material culture—in Cambodia, with the Khmer, what happened when the silk cotton trees started taking root in the stones, what did the process of a temple like Ta Prohm decaying and deteriorating look like in the real world? And to see that kind of dissolution and ruination as a natural process that has its own beauty as well."