Dan Snow's History Hit - The Fall of Roman Britain

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

By 410 AD, over 450 years after Julius Caesar first landed on its shores, the Romans had formally withdrawn from Britain. Burdened by military threats and political upheaval on the continent, the empire began to contract in on itself. The Romano-Britons were left to fend for themselves, facing internal strife and the growing influence of Saxon settlers.This is the second of a two-part series that tells the story of Roman Britain, from Julius Caesar's first expeditions through to its fall. For this, we're joined by Patrick Wyman, host of the Tides of History and The Fall of Rome podcasts.If you want to learn more about Roman Britain, you may like episode 1 of our Story of England series, 'Stone Age to Roman Days' - https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/story-of-england-stone-age-to-roman-daysProduced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Writing sometime, we think, in the 5th century, the British chronicler Gildas described how as the Roman Empire in the West was falling, contracting, changing, adapting, a group of Britons wrote to the leadership in Rome and said, The barbarians drive us to the sea. The sea throws us back on the barbarians. Thus two modes of death await us. We are either slain or drowned. Gildas never says whether the Romans replied to this mournful missive. Certainly, the 5th century sounded like a pretty rough time for the Romano-British.

Roman Britain, much of which had been conquered by the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD, had flourished. Great cities, aqueducts, roads, towns, forts had been built. Ports had been constructed, channels dredged, villas dominated productive farms. Food was exported around the empire and luxury goods and delicious treats were brought back to Britain in turn. But by the end of the 4th and the beginning of the 5th century, that was all changing dramatically. This is part two of our two-part series about Rome and Britain. In our previous episode, we talked about the rise of Rome and Britain. Now we're going to look at its fall.

A fall that was precipitous and dramatic. Back on the podcast to help us do that is the one and only Patrick Wyman. He's one of the world's best history podcasters. He's responsible for the legendary Fall of Rome podcast series. And he now hosts the Tides of History podcast. It was great finally getting him on the podcast. I've been a big fan of his for years. And he's here to tell us all about the remarkably abrupt collapse of Roman Britain. Enjoy. Patrick, welcome back to the podcast, buddy. We're talking Roman Britain. Give me a sense, in the late fourth century, what did the island of Britain look

like? How Roman was it? It's as Roman as anywhere else in the Roman world is because we have to understand Roman-ness is not an A or B thing. It's a spectrum. It's a bunch of different possibilities. There are a lot of different ways to be Roman in the later Roman empire. There are merchants who are from the opposite corner of the Roman empire. There are merchants who are from the opposite corner of the Roman Empire. There are merchants from Syria who are living in what's now London. There are soldiers from the Germanic frontier who are stationed in forts along the border. There's a lot of different ways to be Roman. But if you show up in Britain and you know how to speak common Latin, what they call vulgar Latin, you're going to be able to make yourself understood.

There's a local accent. You're going to be able to make yourself understood. There's a local accent. There's a distinctive local Romano-British accent that's going to sound different from other parts of the Roman world, but they're all mutually intelligible. You go into a wine shop, you're going to be able to get wine that tastes pretty much like anything else. You're going to be able to eat a meal that's not altogether different. There are probably some local peculiarities, but that's true of anywhere in the Roman world.

There's some evidence to suggest that the Romano-British liked their gladiatorial games a little more violent than elsewhere in the Roman world. There's some evidence to suggest that the Romano-British liked their gladiatorial games a little more violent than elsewhere in the Roman world. There's more evidence for decapitation in skeletons of people who died in Roman Britain, died violently in Roman Britain, usually in arena contexts. So the crowd in Roman Britain may have liked to see somebody get their head cut off, which is not necessarily something we see elsewhere in the Roman world. But that's still well within the bounds of what's acceptably Roman anywhere in the Roman world. It's, you know, you go to a town, you're going to see an aristocrat's townhouse that looks like a townhouse anywhere else. You got into the countryside, you go to a villa,

there's nothing particularly different about those villas. You may still see the houses of common folk of peasants that look a little bit different than elsewhere. I think that's where you're more likely to see real local peculiarities. You're more likely to hear language that's not Latin. But again, that's true of everywhere. There are pockets of local culture and local languages that survive all the way through the Roman period, no matter what part of the Roman Empire we're talking about. Britain is not exceptional in that regard. And as you say, these towns, whether it's what is now Lincoln, York, Chester, Bath, Colchester, London, these would look very

much like Roman towns across the empire. And presumably there's huge amounts of trade. There's quote unquote foreign food arriving in Britain's shores. There's British tin, probably Irish slaves, and some other commodities heading back the other way. Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the trade that's happening is going to be effectively state trade. So when you look at the economy of especially the late Roman world, supplying the army is the single most important economic activity that's happening. most important economic activity that's happening. The movement of grain, of horses, of new recruits, of all of the stuff that you've got to have to support the Roman military machine at all of these far-flung places. This is the baseline level of economic activity that everything else in the Roman world piggybacks off of. So the routes that are used to transport supplies for the army are the same routes that

traders follow because they're policed, right? They're patrolled. These are safe routes. They're well-maintained. The port facilities are maintained. The bridges are maintained. The roads, you know, if something gets washed out, somebody is going to go back and they're going to fix it because the army needs those supply wagons to be rolling along. So this is essential to understanding what happens later in Roman Britain is understanding the role of the state in driving the local and the regional economy. But yeah, there's goods moving, there's people moving. You go to Roman London and you're going to find people who are from all over the Roman world. These cities are like demographic vacuum cleaners. They're sucking up people from all over the Roman world. There's been some

controversy in recent years about diversity in the Roman world, but I think that's mostly about diversity in Roman cities. Roman cities are tremendously diverse places because people are showing up in them from all over the Roman world. You go out into the countryside and yeah, it's going to look a lot more homogenous. There's a lot less demographic turnover. And so when you look at the genetics of this, when you look at ancient DNA, the Roman period often looks more genetically cosmopolitan than the periods before and the periods after. And I think that's because people who are living in the cities who are the most diverse people are the ones who leave at the end of the Roman period. They're the ones who are having fewer children because cities are demographic sinks. Cities are

net consumers of people. So when you're talking about people moving in and out and the diversity of the Roman world and who's going, it's really the cities. It's cities and military bases are the cosmopolitan places. The countryside outside of an aristocrat's villa is, you know, there's not nearly as much movement, not nearly as much turnover, not nearly as much migration. Sounds very unlike- Very much so. Anyway, the problem with Roman Britain though, Patrick, if you look at a map that you and I love to do, it is a bit of an appendage. There are enemies or potential enemies on quite a few

different sides. You've got the Irish who, despite the urgings of Tastus, his father-in-law, the governor of Agricola, remain unconquered. You have got people in, who despite the urgings of Tastus, his father-in-law, the governor Agricola, remain unconquered. You have got people in the north of Britain, what is now Scotland, largely beyond Roman rule. And then you've got Norway and Denmark across the North Sea. So Britain is a tricky place to defend. And as you mentioned in the last podcast, it sucks in Roman resource.

Like it's heavily occupied militarily compared to the rest of the empire. Yes, it is extremely dependent on that baseline level of state economic activity and extremely dependent on the Roman state for defense. Because, I mean, look at Britain, incredibly long coastline, right? Like there are tons and tons and tons of places where you can land a boat, where you can park a squadron of ships and nobody's going to know unless you're actively patrolling for that. So the sheer amount of military resources that it takes to defend a threatened Britain is way beyond what the late Roman state is capable of when it's faced with a variety of other threats. It's not that they don't

try. They certainly do. They build a whole line of forts in southeastern Britain. It's called the Saxon Shore. They've got Hadrian's Wall, obviously. There's evidence of military activity in the west of the country. But this is just not something that the Roman state is going to be capable not designed to deal with sustained threats from multiple directions at any given time. That's why they do so much management of what's happening beyond their frontiers. It's why they pick favorites among tribal leaders who are living beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire. It's to prevent these attacks before they happen. It's much easier to subsidize a Pictish chieftain and say, you're our guy out here. Here's all the gold you can handle. And if you want to knock off one of your rivals, we'll send some soldiers to help you do that.

It's much easier to do that than it is to defend a full-blown invasion. It's a much better and more efficient use of resources. The problem is when you've got to do that with the Irish, when you've got to do that with Picts, and then you've got to do that with Germanic-speaking sailors and raiders along the coast of the North Sea, that's too many threats to deal with. That's too much. It is beyond the capabilities maybe of any pre-modern state, and it proved to be beyond the capabilities of the late Roman state in Britain. Let's talk about that late Roman state. I don't want to suck you into this discussion, which is the most fought over, frenetic, violent discussion among historians and people on the twitter.com in the world,

which is why did the Roman Empire in the West fall? And did it fall? Did it transition to something else? But let's just quickly try, if we can, and talk about some of the challenges that faced the Western Roman Empire at the beginning of the fifth century, so the early 400s AD. And how do those challenges seem to, well, they alter the course of Roman Britain in quite a radical way? Yeah. So the question of fall is a really

interesting one. Decline, fall, transformation, these are all terms that get thrown around. I think we need to reframe it a little bit and go back to something I mentioned earlier, which is that there are a lot of different ways to be Roman. There's no A or B, are you Roman or are you not? There's intersections of being Roman with local identities, with the idea of being a soldier, with the idea of being an aristocrat. There's a lot of different ways to be Roman depending on where you are, what your occupation is, how you feel ethnically. Ethnic identity is a whole other layer.

We have to understand that there's being all of these identities that people have, all of these different ways of feeling and ways of expressing who they are and to whom they're allied. And an allegiance to the Roman state is just one of those layers. layers. Now, when we look at different parts of the Roman world, the extent of Roman state control, Roman involvement, the extent of those identities is going to vary depending on where we are. So late Roman Britain has a lot more in common with Northern Gaul, the frontier, and what's now mostly like Flanders, Belgium, kind of along the Rhine. It's got a lot more in common with those places than it does with, say, Southern Gaul, which is much closer to the Mediterranean. So when people say, did the Roman Empire decline and fall? It really depends on where you're talking about.

It depends on who you're talking about. And even within Roman Britain, there are going to be variations, right? So there's different parts of Roman Britain, as we talked about, are connected in different ways to different parts of the Roman Empire. They're more or less Romanized. If you're in the countryside and you're a farmer and you're living pretty much the same way your ancestors were 300 years before, living in the same kind of house, growing the same kind of crops, your landlord speaks a different language. But that's not that important. I mean, what does that matter to you? language, but that's not that important. I mean, what does that matter to you?

That person is going to experience the end of centralized Roman authority much differently than somebody who's living in a city or living in a fort where you're a soldier and you need to get paid, right? Those are much different things. But the challenges that are facing the Roman state, first and foremost, ensuring the loyalty of generals. You have to delegate authority if you're the emperor. You can't lead all the armies everywhere all the time. The problem if you delegate authority is you give somebody 15,000 soldiers and they start to get ideas about maybe they should be emperor or that there are all of these threats all over the Roman world. It's really easy if you're a general to think, well, the emperor is useless. He is a child, a literal child. He is surrounded by idiots. is useless. He is a child, a literal child. He is surrounded by idiots. Maybe I should just take control of this group of four or five provinces and I'll be in charge there and we'll come to

an agreement later. So what you see in the late Roman Empire is these recurring rounds of civil wars where generals along the frontier amass a power base. They win some victories over quote unquote barbarians. And then they take the soldiers away and march off to the center to try to win control of the empire as a whole. And then they get beaten. And then there's suddenly there's no army along the frontier anymore, or they do win. And now they're concerned about problems at the center and not the frontier that they just took the soldiers away from. So what ends up happening is a movement of what has been happening at the frontiers of the Roman world for a really long time that moves from the frontiers to the center. It's like a frontierization of the formerly core parts of the Roman Empire, these dynamics that have been happening at the frontiers of invasions, of divided loyalties, of militarization. For a long time, the military is something that

you only saw at the frontiers of the Roman world. If you're living in Roman cities, in the core of the Roman world, you didn't see soldiers. You didn't talk to soldiers. You didn't know about what was happening at the frontier. Over the course of the late fourth and into the fifth centuries, the frontiers are moving inward. The stuff that used to be contained on the frontiers, a lot of the violence of the Roman world that was contained on the frontiers is moving inward. London gets a big wall in that period, for example. Exactly. This is a quintessential example of that.

The walling up of city cores all over the Western Roman world. Sometimes that's aristocrats just feel threatened and they want to exert some sense of control over what's happening to them. Even if this town's not actually directly threatened, it's that they think, well, you know, those guys down the road, they're not going to have walls and we're not. We're not going to let them have the walls. And so they're viewing this from the perspective of local prestige and competition between aristocrats. Even if they don't really need the walls, it becomes the fashion to build them. But I do think it's an indication of the decreased sense of security that you got to have something

you can withdraw behind. Like, I don't want my townhouse getting burned down. Like, if we can build a wall, absolutely. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. There's more to come. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions.

And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Peter Heather's got a great kind of expression about this, that in some places it would have felt like continuity, in other places it would have felt like pretty radical change. But if we are going to talk about the fall of Rome, we're going to talk about the end of something. The province of Britannia feels like a pretty good place to talk in those terms, right? I mean,

that was an extreme case. Yes. If you are determined to break things down into continuity or fall, then Britain is 100% fall. I always found this really frustrating as a historian who works on this period, the determination to focus on continuities and kind of long-term transformations when there are obviously places in the Roman world where fall is a much better description of what happens, where there is a massive material simplification. There is demographic contraction.

In the case of Britain, there's an enormous increase in sharp force trauma injuries in skeletons from the immediately post-Roman period or sub-Roman period compared to the skeletal sample from before then. So that looks to me like a much more violent, materially simple, dangerous world. And I think fall is an okay description of that. Yeah. And there's a massive spike in people hiding money underground in coin hoard recovery. So everyone in this period, for some reason, is digging a big hole and putting all of their valuables into it. Yeah. It's not a coincidence that when you excavate late Roman sites, the sites that people want to talk about from this period,

or that archaeologists wanted to talk about are, I think, outliers. And so you go to the west of Britain, right? And there are all of these new sites that pop up that are doing what looks like trade with the Mediterranean, where there hasn't been trade with the Mediterranean before. So in what's now Wales or Cornwall, where there are these little kind of hilltop trading emporia, where there are incredible goods from the Mediterranean that are being brought there. So there's direct trade being opened up between the West of Britain and Northern Iberia and the Mediterranean, where that wasn't happening before. But the flip side of that is that where there had been an enormous amount of trade and movement with the Roman world in the eastern part of Britain, that essentially disappears.

So these really cool sites, and they are really cool, that appear in the west of Britain that are showing you continuity and ongoing taste for Roman goods and Roman culture, I think those are outweighed by the fact that villas are being abandoned or they're being repurposed for different uses. Towns are being abandoned. Trade routes are falling apart. The soldiers who had been garrisoning forts are not getting paid. So what you see in this period all over the place is people having to make their own decisions about who they're going moving on, as they're pulling soldiers out, as the pay is not coming, as the supplies aren't coming for these garrisons, everybody is having to decide, what am I going to do? Where do my allegiances lie? from the North Sea. Sometimes they're with new chieftains who are showing up from across the Irish Sea. Sometimes it's local aristocrats who are taking charge of their own defense. And eventually some of them will decide they're just going to straight up leave. And that's why Brittany is Brittany. So there's this huge spectrum of choices that people can make. So as we're talking about Britain, absolutely, this is fall. But one of the great things about Britain is because it's so incredibly heavily archaeologically investigated, we have a much more nuanced sense of the tapestry

of possibilities of what can happen than might be the case elsewhere in the Roman world. So we can see this process of fall, but we can also qualify that. We can talk about the complexities and we can really dig into the minutiae of different regions. And even from one villa to the next, you can see that there are different possibilities. Just one villa right down the road from the next one, where there are two different routes that are taken in this period. The people who owned those villas, the people who were living there, they decided on different things. It's fascinating, isn't it? So your Brittany point there, just for people who want to unpack that a little bit, many Romano Brits do head off to Brittany and the name Brittany comes from the idea that lots of

Britons moved there. So fascinating hint in the place names there. In 410 AD, it's often cited as a key date, the Roman emperor officially kind of removes the garrison because he's got trouble close to home. So like a freezing man or woman and the blood being brought back to keep the inner organs vital and the extremities falling off and getting cold. Is that what's happening here with the Roman Empire? Yeah, there's a lot of debate about what actually happens in 410 with Britain. So in some accounts, it's they're removing all the troops and that there's still an active Roman presence up to that point. And after that, they're pulling the troops out and it's look to your own defense. I think the more likely interpretation of that written source is that it was formalizing a state of affairs that already

existed. Archaeologically, when we look at the late fourth and early fifth centuries, it sure seems like these trends were already happening, that the real divide is between 350 and 400, that that's when the biggest changes are happening, when you really see this material simplification start to take hold, as opposed to between 400 and 450. A lot of the really important processes are already underway or well-advanced, or sometimes even complete, by 410. So I really think this is probably in response to Romano British aristocrats saying, are you going to help us? We're out here. We're still trying to hang on. We still think we're Roman. And the emperor is saying, no,

we've been out of the Britain business for 30 years. That's my interpretation of that. Interpretations will differ. I think it depends on where you're talking about exactly. But certainly in the extremities, at the edges of the Romano-British world, that choice had been made decades before. What do we see in the 5th century, the most fascinating and not very well attested century in the last 2,000 years of British history? How do you see what's happening there? What's your interpretation?

Feel free to go out on a limb here, because nobody knows. There's talk of Vortiger and this kind of British leader that emerges, perhaps Romano-British. He brings over Germanic-speaking mercenaries to deal with a threat from the North and the West, so the Irish and the Picts and Scots. What's your guess about what's going on here?

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you get your podcasts. So I think what we're seeing is a scramble to pick up the reins of authority and that there are different ways that people try to do that. This famous source where Vortigern is a Romano-British leader and he brings in three boatloads of Anglo-Saxons led by Hengist and Horsa. I think this is a stylized way of understanding a process that was already happening, where there's already contact across the North Sea. Saxons have been raiding into Britain for the better part of a century by when this is supposed to happen. This is not unknown territory to them. It's not like they're showing up out of the blue. I think that that story is an attempt to understand a process of ethnic change and migration that was already well underway, that had already started by that point. infiltration or small-scale migration by barbarian groups or Germanic-speaking groups. A lot of the time, they're ex-soldiers. They're people who have spent time in the Roman army, which is how they know about these places, right? So we see this a lot with the movement of the Franks into

northern Gaul. This is kind of the quintessential example of this, where it's a slow, kind of steady movement of Germanic-speaking people across what had been the frontier into Gallia Belgica. We can trace this. This happens over the course of about 50 years, 100 years, where slowly but surely the linguistic frontier moves. But the Franks who are moving were all people who knew about the Roman world. A lot of them had fought in the Roman army. There's a lot of material overlap. There are Latin language epitaphs. We know that there are Franks who were serving in the Roman army. And when you get into the later part of the fifth a lot of material overlap. There are Latin language epitaphs. We know that there are Franks who were serving in the Roman army. And when you get into the later part of the fifth century, there's no real distinction between the ethnic group we call the Franks and the

late Roman field army of Northern Gaul. They're the same people. What we think of as Frankish identity develops in a late Roman military context. I think we can apply much the same logic to the arrival of Germanic speakers in Britain. I think that these are probably people, local groups who've been hired to do some coastal defense initially. They're like, well, you know, there are these Saxons. They could be pirates or we got this empty land right here. We can just settle a village of them and then it's their job to defend the coastline.

We have to look at local Romano-British leaders, former military commanders, looking for manpower and looking for people who know how to fight and saying that this is now our priority. And that's how the first Saxons end up showing up. Eventually, what you get is a process of chain migration, where you have an initial wave of migrants who are sending information about opportunities back to the homeland, and then more migrants show up and so on and so forth. And eventually you get migration as kind of this self-sustaining back and forth process that's happening. This is how we know migration works. It's dependent on information, right? So when you have small initial groups of migrants, I think who are probably Saxons who are showing up in Britain for military reasons or to raid. And maybe there's not

a distinction between those two things, right? Like you're either raiders, but if a local landowner wants to pay you gold to defend their land, you're like, oh, okay, that works. That's a reliable source of income. And so you end up with this tapestry of new migrants, mostly Germanic speaking from the continent with Romano-British landowners who are trying to hang on to the authority that their families have been exercising for a century or two, but they've got to be more military now. Nobody's going to let you retain your hold over your land. So the local aristocracy, after having been a civilian aristocracy for centuries, they're cultured, right? They're reading books, they're writing poetry, they're going to bathhouses. Now suddenly they've got to pick up swords and spears and they've got to be soldiers. And there's got to be some level of military mobilization among a populace that hasn't been exposed to that for a long time. Then you've got former military leaders who are camped out in a fort and they're like, well, the pay is not coming. So I guess I'm in charge of this area now. So you have all of these different potential responses and you end up getting a lot of small-scale migration. So former Romano-British landowners in the lowlands of Southeastern Britain who are like, well, now they're Saxons,

so we're going to move to what's now Wales, right? So they move west. So there's migration within Britain. There's migration from outside of Britain. There's choosing a whole bunch of new identities. So some local people who are like, well, all my neighbors are Saxon, so I guess I'm a Saxon now. But there's clearly a lot of migration. The genetic evidence is absolutely unequivocal on this, that there are first, second, third generation migrants who are coming from basically the region between Frisia and southern Denmark. This is their origin. That's the origins of the English language as we understand it. There is clearly a movement of people into Britain. There's no way around that. But it's just one of the kinds of movement that's happening here. There's also movement of Romano-British and British speakers

within Britain, out of Britain to the continent. So that migration, rather than seeing it as a kind of an exception to the rule, is part of the human movement that's happening in this period. London becomes a virtual wasteland, completely uninhabited. How quickly is all this happening, do you think? I mean, is this a lifetime? Is it even less than that? It's fast. It's really fast. I think we're used to thinking of these kinds of changes on the century scale. I think you could be born in Roman Britain in, let's say, 360, right? And again, it's as Roman as anywhere in the Roman world is. Maybe you're starting to feel some pressure around the frontiers,

but basically you're living a Roman lifestyle. You're seeing Roman material goods, you're using Roman coins, you're speaking Latin. Let's say you live an exceptionally long life. You live until 430, 440, so you're 70 or 80 years old. You're a true gray beard at that point. You will have seen the abandonment of most of the cities. You will have seen the last Roman payroll came through a long time ago. Trade has declined. Materially, things are much simpler. People aren't making pottery the way they did in your youth. They're not making metal goods the same way they did in your youth. You have watched over the course of one person's lifetime, a dramatic material demographic and economic change. You tasted your last olive as a young man.

Absolutely. Yeah. That's a really good kind of proxy marker for the kinds of changes that have happened. You're not drinking wine anymore. You're drinking anything. You're drinking ale or mead. There's no more wine being imported unless you are a fancy aristocrat who has picked up stakes and moved to the West of Britain, and you set up a little trading emporium to be sure that you can still get your supplies of wine delivered from the continent. And you've got a hill fort. You've mastered the more military aspects of life as well. Exactly. Yeah. Speaking of which, come on, man, I'm not gonna let you finish this podcast until you talk to me about Arthur here or Ambrosius or, you know, I need your hot take because you know everything about everything. What is One of those early chroniclers of Arthur, I say early, centuries later, but talks about

a Romano-British aristocrat whose family, I think, are killed in the sort of upheavals around the fall of Roman Britain. And he does transition to become a warrior and a warlord. And he's who many think could be behind the Arthur myth. What do you see as you look into this period? So I would say rather than looking for a singular Arthur, I think this is an age of many Arthurs. Rather than being the story of a single person, I think that's the story that a lot of different Romano-British aristocrats and local authorities and local leaders would have experienced in this period of time. Like I said, you've got to make choices. Are you going to submit to new authorities?

Are you going to try to take control of your own destiny? Warlordism is a perfectly logical response to the collapse of public order, the collapse of overarching political authority, to say, I'm going to get my boys together and you know what, you're not going to come and take our cattle. And it's a short step from there to people telling stories about the glorious battles that you've won, which, you know, if we're thinking about the actual scale of warfare in sub Roman Britain, it's probably a few hundred guys. You're not talking about massive armies of thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands. We're talking about local activity and local people who are banding together for

self-defense, local aristocrats who are turning to bands of clients, acting as patrons for them. I mean, I think the story of St. Patrick, which I mentioned in our last episode, is another really good one that St. Patrick is captured in a slave raid. This is something that everybody is having to worry about now, where there's no garrison that's coming to protect you. You've got to protect yourself. You've got to make your decisions. And I think that is exactly what the Arthur story comes out of. It's that this is now a world that is full of threats. Some of those threats are coming from elsewhere. Some of them are, if you've got a local aristocrat neighbor who decides that he's the authority now, that's

not necessarily a good guy, right? Like there's no guarantee that that person isn't going to try to centralize power or steal your cattle or turn you into slaves. Like all of a sudden, there is a tremendous scope for independent individual military activity. And I think that's what the Arthur story comes out of is that there's a need for this. I put it like this a lot in thinking about the fall of the Roman Empire in general, is we're used to thinking of it in terms of losers, right? That when the Roman Empire falls, there's a decline. There's people who are losing out. There's former elites who are losing out. People are losing their villas. But there are also winners in this, right? The process of the carving up of the Roman Empire into much more local and regional units is one in which some people win. So a lot of those people are Germanic speaking, former Roman military officers who embrace an Anglo-Saxon or a Gothic or a Frankish identity as a way of, you know, cementing a new kind of authority. But a lot of them are local landowners. They never would have had the opportunity to be a

warlord or to lead soldiers in the Roman world because they were never going to join the army. They were going to stay on their villas and they were going to be told that they had to write poetry. But if you're the second son of a Romano-British aristocratic family, and let's say you've always liked a sword, all of a sudden, this is a tremendously freeing environment for you. And I think that you see a militarization of the aristocracy, and that that works out pretty well for some folks, you know, that this is a world that they can survive in. I'm detecting worrying rhythms in your voice here. I'm thinking, you know, you're a civilized

podcaster and you find yourself in the breakaway republic of Appalachia or the Pacific Northwest and former British Columbia. And it turns out you're a military genius and you lead your men. I'm worried about you, dude. And the reason I can tell that is because I have empathy. I share those dark thoughts. See, this is the new dad fantasy, right? Is what happens if, could I become a local warlord in the era after the collapse of central authority in the 21st century? I'm not saying you can't. I'm not going to be the one who says you can't. I'm not saying I haven't trained for this day all my life. That's all I'm saying. I haven't trained for this day all my life. That's all I'm saying. I love it. Thank you for calling me on that because you're absolutely right.

You're 100% correct that that thought has crossed my mind. Well, it's important that you know that I called it because I recognize it. This is very much a kindred spirits kind of thing. And so it was thought originally that Christianity dies out and has to be reintroduced from Rome in a later period. But we now think there are communities, particularly in Wales, that where Christianity enjoys that, and Ireland, of course, ironically as well, which always lay outside the Roman Empire. What's the legacy of Roman Britain, given how

pretty effectively these Germanic incomers managed to stamp it out and replace its structures? What's the legacy? For me, at least, that is the legacy. It's the fact that you can have a seemingly durable imperial presence, part of a cosmopolitan culture that's extending over a huge area. The fact that that can be effectively stamped out and forgotten and reduced to ruins, that to me is an important legacy to know that that is a thing that can happen, that that is within the realm of possibilities, that no matter how solid the structures in which you build your life seem, the kind of political, economic, social identity structures, that those can collapse, those can fall apart, that those circumstances and foundations are nowhere near as solid as they might seem. I think that's a pretty important legacy to have. It may not be the legacy that we want it to be, but I think that's an important thing for us to understand about the range of possibilities that we live with.

Wow. I thought you were going to say London. I thought you were going to say the A1, the Great North Road, joining York and London. But no, we went somewhere altogether different there. That was profound. Also London, but I don't think they can take credit for London because there's a Bronze Age bridge over the Thames there. People have known about London. They knew that was a good spot. That is a very good point. It's the furthest point downstream on the Thames, where the water can still be bridged. And it seems to have attracted settlers before the Romans. You're right. So, Patrick, that was a tour de force. Thanks, man. Where can people go to hear more of your brilliant scholarship and communication skills? week, narrative episodes covering everything from the Neo-Assyrian Empire to warring states, China, to the rise of Rome, the initial rise of Rome. I've just covered that, covered the Peloponnesian War. So I'm covering the first millennium BC right now. I'm covering the Iron Age and the emergence of the classical world. But I've got episodes on early modern, late medieval,

the long span of prehistory. I wrote a book called The Verge on the world around 1500. And I am in the process of finishing my second book right now entitled Lost Worlds about the world from the Ice Age to the Bronze Age. It's a big canvas. All right, Patrick, thanks so much for coming on the podcast, bud. Much appreciated. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you for listening to that episode. In fact, thank you for listening to our two-part series on Roman Britain.

If you want to listen to more podcasts about Roman Britain, we've got plenty. You've got a podcast we did back in July 2020 called The Roman Navy in Britain. And I've also visited some Romano-British sites in our Story of England series in May 2023. Just look up Story of England Stone Age to Roman Days. And don't forget to give my real King Arthur podcast a listen, in which I had a lot of fun talking about the fall of the Empire and what came next. You can also hear people like Mary Beard talking about the Roman Empire.

We did a podcast there in September 2023 called Roman Emperors with Mary Beard. So go and look that one up as well. Thank you for listening. you