Gone Medieval - Britain After Rome

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

What really happened in Britain after the fall of Rome? How did people adapt to their new lives? How were new identities formed, and eventually kingdoms? And how and when did people convert to Christianity?In today’s Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman poses these questions to Professor Robin Fleming, who has been extensively researching the period.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited by Thomas Ntinas and produced by Rob Weinberg.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to gone medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. A huge question in early medieval history and archaeology is what actually happened in Britain after the fall of Rome. The traditional narrative told to us by people like the Venerable Beed is that Germanic invaders Angles Saxons and Jutes invaded and took over. But what really happen in those next few centuries? How did people adapt to their new lives?

How are new identities forms and eventually kingdoms? And how and when did people adapt Christianity? So my guest on the podcast today is historian Professor Robin Fleming from the History Department at Boston College. Welcome to Gone Medieval and thanks for joining me today, Robin. Thanks very much for having me. So you are the author of a number of books on the early medieval period, including your most recent book called The Material Fall of Roman Britain, and

what's going to be the topic of today's conversation, which is a book called Britain After Rome, the fall and rise of the Middle Ages. So I think I'm going to focus on the first few centuries of that period today. And there's a key theme in your books, which is very much on the evidence that we can get from material culture in this period. So objects and artefacts the people leave behind. Why do you think that's so important, and especially in this particular time period? I think it's important for a couple of reasons. One is because people who are interested in the early Middle Ages the way I am, if they're historians, generally only have access to the lives of elites. So all of our written material was provided to us by elite males, mostly. I mean, we have a few

elite women who are right as well. But most of the stuff that we have is from an elite view. point, and it's filtered through a monastic lens because almost everything we have is written by professional religious. So if you're interested in the bottom 95%, the way I am, you actually have to use material culture. But I also think there are other reasons for using material culture. I'm a historian, which means that I'm as interested in my present moment and how my present moment impacts the way I write history as I am in the past itself. And we're living in a period where we're hyper aware of how much the things in our lives actually make us us and how the things in our lives actually do things to us that sometimes we have no control over. So, for example,

I don't know about you, but I am completely bossed around by my cell phone. And it makes me do things. I don't want to do it. It calls for my attention all the time. And I don't have any control over that. And then there's petroleum, right? It's damaging the climate. It's changing the way we're living. I put it in my car and yet it has this kind of afterlife. And so living in this period that we live in where we're hyper aware that the things in our lives make us do things we don't necessarily want to do, I think it's interesting to look at the past as well and see how past things made people live the way they did. That's an excellent answer. I hadn't really quite thought of it in the same way, but that's fantastic. And of course, when we look at these first few

centuries after the end of Roman Britain as well, traditionally, the written narratives have been given a centre stage of attention. And I think for a long time, there's been a tendency to take those as gospel and take those as the truth. And I'm thinking especially now on the narratives on Anglo-Saxon arrivals or the invasions, which still are being taught in school certainly in England as very uncritically. And I wanted to talk a little bit about that and about what the material culture is saying about that same situation.

But I wonder, could you sort of recap for our listeners? What are those narratives that we've heard about with coming up the Anglo-Saxons? I think the chief story is that Rome collapses in Britain and then groups, particularly of men, high-status men, come over and they conquer bits and pieces of territories. So this is an idea of a kind of political takeover of the former Roman province. And this is used to be supported by examinations of material culture because we read the Anglo-Sah, Saxon Chronicle and the venerable Bede who tell us of these events. And then we looked at a new style material culture that is developing in lowland Britain in the fifth, six, and seven centuries

and say, oh, that must be from these conquering people from the continent. But if you think about what happened to Britain before Rome collapsed, what you can see is that people living in Rome were highly dependent on material culture that was made in particular ways, and they could be made because of the ways Roman society and the Roman economy were set up. When Rome collapses, many of the things that allowed for the production of things like pottery collapses well. And so there was no pottery to be had that was Roman style, so people have to start making new pottery. So some of that new pottery is made by people who are coming over from the continent, but some of that new pottery is being made by people whose families had lived there all along.

And so we use the kind of narratives that we find in written sources or we used to to explain the archaeology, which is a very bad idea. So I think that we have to think very hard about what it means to live through a period of material collapse and then think about all that material, the new material that's coming, and decide whether it's really ethnic or it's just the kind of thing that people in the fifth century made who are living in the particular. world they were. One of the points you made in your book that I quite liked is that you mentioned that you have some people living in this point in between. So they've seen, they've been part of, or maybe their parents or their grandparents have been part of that having all the access to that. And then suddenly they are in this new, new period. I guess that's exactly what you're talking about here, isn't it, that you have these people who have experienced that past and now they need to sort of continue. And is that what we're seeing an initial reaction to you,

do you think? That's, I think, exactly what we're seeing. And I think, we're seeing a combination of a lot of people are moving. Of course, a lot of people moved in the Roman period as well, but a lot of people are moving around, both internally within Britain and from the continent. So you have newcomers sort of making things for themselves, and you have people that they're all along making for themselves, and they're learning for one another. But if you think about the kind of things that they have to do to accommodate not having their old things and having to make new things, if you think about Roman pottery, one of the things that Roman pottery is very good at is it's very good at heat shock because it's kiln-fired

and the temperatures that it can withstand are really high. And so people in the late Roman period, for example, ate a lot of stew. You could put your pot on the hearth and it could cook stew for you very well. But the new style pottery that's handmade and that's not kiln-fired isn't heat-resisted in the same way. So both newcomers and the people who've been there all along have to develop new kinds of cooking habits, new food ways because of this change in material culture. So, I mean, you think about those generations in between who could remember or have family memories of what it was like in the Roman period. And it must have been quite different, even if you were living down on the farm.

Yeah, and I think that's such a good point that it has an impact on other things as well. There's that knock-on effect. Like, you know, when we were in the pandemic and we went lockdown, we sort of had to start doing things in different ways and that had knock-on effect on our jobs. and so many things, didn't it? So I guess it's the same. That's exactly right, yeah. So it's not just about, oh, they've got new pots or they've got new broaches,

but it's a whole cascade of things. Yeah, exactly. And the other thing that's quite clear that you also write about is the regionality, because we can't really treat this whole part of Britain in the same way. And there are some clear regionalities happening as well, aren't they, in terms of the material culture and the artifacts. Well, and especially in this very early period. So by the time the late 6th, early 7th century rolls around, elites are beginning to have a kind of shared material culture.

They're sharing language. They're obviously sharing kind of lifeways and practices of the way they live in their houses and what kind of houses they live in. But in the early period, every community is just making it up as they go along. And each place must have been very different as they kind of all work things out. What they do depends on what skills are left within their community and what, old Roman material culture they have as well. So if you happen to be in a place where a lot of Roman pottery was made, maybe a few people still know how to make pots in old-fashioned ways, or you can go to waster heaps and you can pick through and you can find usable pots so you can

recycle those pots. But if you're living in a place where pottery wasn't made, maybe you have to go over to wooden trenches and leather and that sort of thing. And so each community is kind of working it out for themselves for 50, 60, 70 years until it kind of shakes out. And in terms of the contact, you already mentioned people do travel and people move around a lot, which I think is something that we tend to forget. We tend to think that people stayed put in the past a lot more than they really did. How much contact do we actually see across the North Sea? Can we actually tell how much the trading and how much people are moving in and out in this earliest period?

Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, it depends on how early you go. So as you know, I'm sure, there's not much material culture from the 5th century, or it's very hard to date that material culture. And so we don't have very much of it, and we have more as time goes along. And it's clear that in the Roman period, Britain was attached in all sorts of ways to Gaul, and then to Spain,

and then to this Mediterranean world. And a lot of their ideas and material cultures, and a lot of people were coming up through the kind of Roman networks of travel and sea travel and road travel and coming into Britain. And so Britain is joined in a large, culture zone that is the Roman Empire. When Rome collapses and Britain falls out of the Roman Empire

and places along the North Sea are also falling out of the Roman Empire at the same time, a new kind of zone develops between Britain and sort of more northerly parts. So the Netherlands, Flanders, the kind of lowland areas, and then up into Scandinavia. And so we do know that more and more people and more and more ideas are coming from those places in the fifth, six, and seven centuries than they had been in the Roman period. But it's hard to see how intense the movement was. And I think we won't know until we have a lot more data on ancient DNA. And with the work on ancient DNA,

I think gradually we'll get an idea of whether there are few people in some places and a lot of people and others, or if there were a lot of people everywhere or not very many people. But we won't really know that, I think, for another 10 years or so. That's been quite a controversial debate, hasn't it? that you've had different sides of that where some have said there's a complete population replacement and others have said no no absolutely hardly any people came across and is that still the case now or is there more agreement? I think so I've always think there's going to be disagreement

for a long time and I think it really has to shake itself out but I think that initially when people were using modern DNA and comparing it with the ancient DNA they were finding quite different things than people who are just looking at ancient DNA and comparing it with other populations of ancient DNA. But a conference that I was just at, I mean, people are of quite different minds of how much movement there was going on and how much migration there isn't. But what I would say is that it's very important for historians and archaeologists to be in on the conversations and designs of the future ADNA projects, because the scientists are very, very good at what they do, but they don't know anything about history. And they often tend to take their findings and sort of pace them on to

1930s ideas about the ways in which ethnicity is somehow genetic, which is not because it's socially constructed. And so we're going to fight about it for a long time, I think. Yes, I think that's a very, very good point, absolutely. So one of the interesting things, I think, you've already mentioned that we start to get these local identities, out of necessity and, you know, practicality and all of that. But then at some point, these start to form bigger regional identities. How does that process come about? Well, it seems to me that the kinds of identities that begin to form in England are the kinds of identities that are encouraged once you get elites.

And I think that, I mean, it's something that the historian called Peter Sawyer said about 40 years ago, but people don't make kings, kings make people. You know, I think that you get this, when you get elites saying, we're special, we're different, we're all in this together. I think you begin to get this formation of these kind of local kingdoms and local kingdom identities. So I think it is a top-down thing, not a bottom-up thing. And so this is, of course, the time where we start to see some of the big, very rich burial, so things like Sutton Who.

So is burial a particular way that you would go about expressing these identities and things and the stratification? Yeah, I mean, I think burial is a really interesting to trace the way burial changes over time. time. So in the late fifth and early six centuries, lots of people have grave goods. Women tend to have more grave goods than men. But as we move forward in time, fewer people get grave goods and a few people get more grave goods. And finally, by the time you're in the seventh century, there are some very, very, very fancy graves. And many fewer people have grave goods. Yeah, so it sort of goes a little bit hand in hand, but I think we haven't really quite worked out why or how, or the full significance. of that, have we? Well, and I think we have to think, I mean, what we have left is the burial,

which is underground and you can't, I mean, you can put a burial mound over it or whatever, but you can't see it for very long. But the funerals that were behind these things must have been very important in making both elite identity and making sure that the old man's heirs get to be the new big guy. And so that part is very, very hard to see, but it probably was more important than what actually went into the burial. So we're just seeing shadows of what's important, I think. Yeah, I think that's such a good point because we'll never know exactly what we don't. We can sort of reconstruct that. But I think those points in time where you go from one leader to the next is always a time of a lot of tension and possibly fear. And there's all the tensions

between those families, but also in the local community, you know, what's going to happen? Are they going to be safe? Are they going to be, we're just changing prime ministers in England at the moment? Oh, I thought you didn't quite have one right now. You never know what the next one is going to be like. I guess it's that situation of tension as well, isn't it? And so those moments in time were probably quite significant for so many different reasons. Right. And I mean, when you move forward in time, when there's a period in which primogenitor is practiced in England

and the eldest son gets everything, even then there was a lot of tension and uncertainty about who gets to inherit. But in this period, there's no prime janitor at all. So all the kind of aphelines are there, and the neighboring kings are there, all kind of jockeying for a position. And so it's quite, people are lucky if they have very long-lived kings who manage to keep it together, because that seems to be one of the keys to success of these early medieval kingdoms. How much of a tyrant really was Julius Caesar?

Would we have ever stood a chance against the first dinosaurs? And did Helen of Troy really have the power to love? launch a thousand ships. Well, you can expect all of this and more from the ancients on history hit. Join us twice a week every week as we explore some of the greatest moments of our ancient past. Subscribe to the ancients wherever you get your podcasts. And the next thing I wanted to talk about in this period of course is conversion to Christianity. So these serials and these people we're talking about up to now are presumably pagan. But was Christianity, did it persist at all at the end of the Roman period or did it sort of go with

the Romans? Depends on where you are. So the West of Britain never has to be converted to Christianity because they get their Christianity from the Roman period. It's hard to know how Christian people were in the 4th century when Rome was still a force in Britain. It becomes important for elites to be Christians in that period. And yet there's massive evidence for the continuation of animal sacrifice for the continuation of temple complexes. And so we just don't know how Christian people were in the 4th century, especially down on the farm. But the fact that Britain maintains a level of Christianity and everybody in the countryside

Christianizes suggests to me that it becomes an important identity marker for Western communities in the way that it's not in eastern communities in the 5th and early 6th century. So I think it does depend on where you are. And there are hints in Bede that Bede find some people in Kent who have a little shrine to a local saint, but they don't really know who he is and what he did. And the Pope says, shut it down. It's not good.

And better they be pagans than they be heretics. So, yeah. And then do we have a good sense of how the conversion process takes place in the rest of the country? Or is it quite a gradual thing? I mean, it's interesting. We have a very good idea of the fundamentals of, conversion in aristocratic households. And we know how that works, and we know how it works among

the big people. It's very, very hard to see how it works lower down the social scale. And, you know, there are these hints in, so Theodore of Tarsus, who's a Greek who comes over and he becomes the Archbishop of Canterbury. He got his Christianity, the old-fashioned way, which is he was born within Roman territory. And so he's a good old-fashioned Roman Empire Christian. And he talks a lot in his writings about how you have to be nice to people who are making little sacrifices. Don't punish them too much. It's not really such a terrible thing. And so there's these hints that people really are doing a lot of kind of old-fashioned practices that would not be considered kosher in Christian communities in the Roman Empire. But a lot of it is tolerated, although some of it isn't. So they're

very against horse eating and horse sacrifice. So that must have been something that they found problematic and maybe too public. But they're also very against women being ritual specialists. And so, Theodore, for example, says if women are putting their daughters in ovens to cure fevers, you've got to shut it down. So there are some practices they're able to tolerate in rural communities and some practices they're not. And then later on, we start to get the rise of the monastic communities. And at what point does that happen? And when does that really become a huge part of society? Well, I mean, they're quite different kinds of monastic communities in the earlier period, so say in 7th and 8th centuries, and then in the later periods, say the 10th century.

The later monasteries are these kind of big benedictine, well-organized communities with lots of land. The earlier communities have lots of land as well. Their holdings tend not to be as spread out. They tend to be more kind of associated with local kingdoms. And they're more locally focused. then later communities. But if you're living near a monastic community or if you're a farm family farming on monastic land, you must have lots and lots to do with the monastic community and they must really affect the way you understand Christianity

and you practice Christianity. If you're a long ways from one of those places, they don't have any impact at all. Yeah. So it's literally how your local connection, I suppose, to any of those is what matters the most. Right. And there's no parishes.

So pastoral care is being administrated a lot by these early monastic communities, but they have big, baggy territories, and their monasteries aren't everywhere, and so there's lots of people who fall through the cracks. And so, I mean, something that's part of that as well, I suppose, is the fact that we are talking about a very rural country. People are not living in big cities.

In fact, that's one of the big changes. Well, I think even in the Roman period, it's only technically quite a small proportion, isn't there, of people who are actually living in cities, even though there were a few of them. But then we have those. city's disappearing more or less completely. Completely, yeah. So nobody's really living in towns until the sort of, I guess, seventh century almost. Is that when we start to see the first

towns appearing again? Yeah, we get these informal trading communities that are seasonal, and then some of them become more permanent, and some of them, I mean, some of them go away in the troubles of the eight centuries. And then there are a bunch of towns that are purposely founded many of them in places where Roman walls are still standing. So those places also become urban. But you see the first kind of hints of these places where people are making at least an important part of their living through trade in the 7th century. And then some of these become what's then later known as Wix or Emporia,

if you want to use that terminology. And they're part of a bigger network in a way that goes across the North Sea. Can you say a little bit about those? found this such a fascinating part of this history. Yeah, there's clearly these networks of traders that run all the way from Norway down through Scandinavia and, you know, the Baltic along the kind of lowlands. And lowland Britain is part of this. And even into, I have a graduate student working on trading communities in Ireland as well, these early trading communities. So Ireland is part of this as well. And it's quite informal. I mean, these trading spaces are regulated in some

ways by kings, which is one of the ways that kings become wealthy and get power. So there are places where people are quite protected in their trade and they're not going to be robbed. But otherwise, they're pretty informal. And a lot of them don't have the kinds of infrastructure that you would need for a year-round communities. So they're quick and dirty places, but people come year after year to make things and trade things.

And they're coming from all over this kind of North Sea, Bridge Isles and Ireland world. and they're quite, they must have been polyglot and, you know, multicultural. They must have been quite interesting places, but they're tiny. And do we know, I mean, you sort of mentioned that we have these kings and these local rulers, but they're not really founding them. Are they controlling them? Are they taxing people coming in and out? Do we know anything about that?

So it used to be thought that kings were responsible for everything. And so it was thought that kings actually, these communities were set up by kings, so they could get their hands on luxury goods and they could have a kind of monopoly on it, and then they could give these luxury goods out, and then people would be loyal to them. And we now think that the kings come in, or at least I think the kings come in later and take things over when the system is up and running. And there's lots and lots of evidence that pretty local people who had the wherewithal to get a boat together would row across the channel and get a bunch of trade goods, and they would row back and go to these communities. You don't

have to be a big gun to participate in this system. And there's lots of evidence from this period for logboats in England, for example, lots of them have been found. So clearly people were sort of rowing themselves to these trading communities to trade things that they had. And there are lots of people in Kent that are being buried with boat strikes. So bits and pieces of boats go into their grave because that's an important part of their identity or the identity of the people burying them. And that again suggests to me that you don't have to be a king to be involved in this trade. You could be a local guy with a boat. And that's maybe the way that many people in Kent, who look very rich in this period,

are getting the wherewithal to have these fancy grave goods that we find in cemeteries in Kent. And what about money and payment systems in this period? Do we have coins on a large scale? Or is that something that comes in a bit later? There are coins. I mean, there are these little, these chattas, these little, ugly little plugs of metal that, I mean, they're small, so they must be useful in exchange, but they're so small that people lose them a lot, so we find them a lot. So they don't seem to be the best way to keep your wealth together. And we don't find the kind of standard English currency of the penny until later.

And this is a case, I think, where we can see that coins, they're useful for trade, but what they're really useful for is for tax. And so kings, once we hit, you know, off of Mercia and Alfred the Great, they're very interested in getting coins into the hands of people so that when taxes are due, they can take some of those coins out of the hands of people. So I think the coinage comes in a little bit with trade, but I think it's really a kind of mechanism to tax. And so the big monetized economy happens a little later. So it goes then to that point, say, 8th century onwards, that's when we start to get. at these really large kingdoms that we recognize, Mercia and Wessex and all of these, what do you think has changed? What sort of changes for those to form on such a big scale, do you think? Well, I think money is one thing that's very, very important. And this idea that

kings have the right to act. So, for example, it looks like off of Mercy is making a lot of money from the salt trade in London. That's a good way to make money and it doesn't require any bloodshed, right? It doesn't require the risk of warfare. And so I think that kind of ability to tax is really important. But by that time, they've fully embraced the churchmen in their ear saying, you need to write things down, you need to have written administration, you need to keep records. And once you have a kind of written administration, you can grow larger and you can keep track of things better. And so I think both the money economy and I think sort of writing as a tool of government are really critical. And do you think, if you think about, so you talked about at the beginning

about these 95% of the people that we've not, the people like you and me, people that aren't written down, written about and not the Kings and the Rulies, do you think that there was a big difference in their lives if you were living in the 9th century or in the 5th century? It was everyday life for most people in Britain. Was it considerably different, do you think? Well, I do think it was considerably different. So I think that there's this kind of kind of idea of thinking about the Roman period for a minute. There's this idea that when Rome falls, the only people who notice are elites, but everybody else just goes on with their lives. But I think when Rome falls, local peasants don't have to pay taxes anymore. And I think that's a

kind of noticeable difference in their lives. And so I think in the fifth century and in the sixth century, you have a fairly flat hierarchy. So you have a ranked society where some people in your community have more and some have less. But you don't have this very steep. hierarchy the way you get as you move forward in time. By the 10th century, if you're a peasant, I think you have less than the kind of farm families had control of in their lives in the 5th century. You have to pay taxes. You have to offer so much farming service to your landlords, which you might not have had to do in the 5th and 6th century. So I do think there are differences in the lives of the bottom 95%. And plus the material culture has changed. So once again, they're living different

lives because their things are making them do different things than the things in the fifth century did. Absolutely. As we were saying earlier on, that's going to have an impact on all those things we can't see like cooking methods and other sort of social things, things in people lives that aren't necessarily leaving a trace, I suppose. Right. No, that's right. So you've talked a little bit earlier, just to round up because I think there's a really nice overlook. I could quite easily talk to you about this next half of your book as well, but that's going to have to be an entirely different episode. But just sort of up to this point, I suppose, when we start getting their bike. have come in and we start to get sort of quite a different setting. But I did want to ask you,

you mentioned earlier that things like ancient DNA is going to hopefully come in much more and give us some new answers. But do you think that now in 2022, do we have quite a different understanding of this time period than we did 30, 40 years ago? Or are we still more or less in the same place? Oh, I think we have a much different view. So when I was an undergraduate, I spent a year at the University of London, and all I did was read Beat in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Anglo-Saxon charters. And that kind of world that I learned about is now quite transformed. And I think that there are many more people in the histories that are being written today. I think that there's much more interest in really interrogating those written sources and saying, why were they written

the way they are, and who was behind that particular viewpoint and how might we kind of read against the grain. And so I think it's changed a lot. And I think that it's been a particularly important time for archaeology because of all the development that's happened in Britain and because of the portable antiquities scheme, which is extremely, extremely important. And I think it's given us a much different view of all sorts of things than we had 30 or 40 years ago.

Fantastic. Well, I would absolutely recommend our listeners to pick up one of Robin's books. So the one we were talking about today, really, the context of that, the early part of the Britain, after Rome, the fall and rise of the Middle Ages, or her most recent book, The Material Fall of Roman Britain. Very readable, very understandable, very sort of sensible and engaging accounts of this particular time period. But Robin, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast and sharing all that knowledge with our listeners today. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.

So this brings us to the end of this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Do please remember to subscribe if you haven't or. ready and you can also subscribe to our medieval monday's newsletter just look in the episode notes for how to do that and i hope you will join us again our next episode with my co-host matt louis is on saturday and i will be back again next tuesday thank you for listening