Gone Medieval - What the Romans Did for Us

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

Early Medieval Britain was more Roman than we think. The Roman Empire left vast infrastructural resources, not least roads, walls and bridges. Why have they survived so well? And what did the people who lived here immediately after the Romans think of them and do with them?In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman talks to Dr. Mateusz Fafinski about how the infrastructure the Romans left behind was used and adapted in the early Medieval 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 Mondays 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. And welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. If you drive across England today, you might come across a very straight road across the landscape. If you're not on a modern motorway, the chances are that you're driving on a Roman road. In other places, you might come across part of a Roman wall or even a bridge. You may wonder why these have survived so well

and what people in the period just after the Romans thought of them and did with them. In fact, as it happens, there was an awful lot of Roman infrastructure that was deliberately used and adapted in the early medieval period. Today, as I guest on the podcast I have with me, someone who's going to tell us all about that. Dr. Mateo Schafinski is a historian at the Free University of Berlin, and he has recently published a book called Roman infrastructure in early medieval Britain, the adaptations of the past in text and stone, which deals with the uses of the material past in early medieval Britain. Welcome to the podcast, Matthéor. Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here and to have a lovely chat. And I should also say that Matthéus also has a really brilliant

Twitter account and he does some really good and really informative and really amusing threads on both his own work and sort of relevant work. So definitely check that out. What's your Twitter handle? At Caltaelas. Fantastic. So just have a look for that. But let's go into you actually work now. So I really enjoyed reading this book because I love this idea of what happens to one period later on and especially in the early medieval period. You know, what's actually physically left behind and what do people do with it and how do they think about the past, which is fantastic. Just first of all, there's a few sort of basics I were hoping to cover. Actually, one of the things is infrastructure.

So when we think about that, and especially Roman infrastructure, we immediately think roads. And we're going to get to the roads a bit later on, because they're very interesting. But you talk about other things as well. What do you mean by infrastructure in this context? Yes, I think this is a crucial question for this research project and the book, as such. Infrastructure is actually a very broad term. And I think we historians and archaeologists tend to think about infrastructure

in very narrow terms. But there are other fields like sociology and urban studies that think about infrastructure very, very broadly. And I took this as a cue when I started writing this book. And infrastructure broadly understood is everything both material and symbolic that is being used by various structures, be states, polities, organizations or individuals to achieve their goals.

So this is a very broad definition of what, infrastructure is, but it's very, very helpful when we think about early medieval period and ancient period as well. So if we were looking for like a one short term definition of what infrastructure is, it's what underpins things. It's what's sort of like behind like a scaffolding. And there are material infrastructures, you've mentioned roads, but it's also buildings, walls, granaries, churches, churches, houses, but they're also symbolic infrastructures, which are things that sometimes have the connection with the material, but they are also very much in our heads. And we can also think about, especially in the medieval period, about objects like manuscripts or inscriptions or sculptures,

also as a form of infrastructure. They are the framework on which things like states, polities, expand, and they sort of support those things. institutions. That's a really great explanation of it. And I guess that also explains why things like that will linger for a long time. It's not really a physical right. It's a much bigger thing, much bigger parts of society and much bigger thing that everyone is part of, I suppose. Yes. And this idea of participation is extremely important here because infrastructures as such they cannot do anything. They're just there. And it's up to the people and the societies that those people participate in to do something with it. And I think this is one of the major themes of the book about looking at how

early medieval societies approached those infrastructures that were left from the Roman period. And to be honest, being amazed with their ingenuity what they were able to do with it. They did not have at their disposal the same resources as the Roman Empire had. So obviously, they had to be creative. And this leads us to sort of the second big pillar of the book, which is adaptation. They adapted themselves and they adapted those infrastructures to their needs. Now, I also wanted to ask you, but the sources, I'm always slightly obsessed with what sources people use. And in your work, you're particularly looking at charters and charter information.

Could you just tell us a little bit about what those charters are and how they can be useful in this sort of context? So charters have a bad rep. Charters are seen as very dry documents. Well, they are. Essentially, charters are records of transactions, let's call it that way. When something is being given from, for example, a king to a monastery or from a private person to a monastery and from a king to a private person, sometimes, not always, a document was produced. And a document records that gift. It did not have to be something physical. So we have charters that give pieces of land. We have charters that give buildings, but we have also charters that record giving

of privileges, for example, like exemptions from obligations or exemptions from tax. And they describe who is giving what to whom, when is it happening. And if an object is being given, if a piece of land is being given or a building, they very often describe that thing. And it's very interesting in terms of land because very often those descriptions of land are very precise, especially in charters from early England, where that piece of land would be described in detail as you would walk its borders. And that's very interesting because there's a lot of Roman remains in those descriptions. Well, things like Roman roads, Roman milestones, Roman bridges tend to stay in the landscape, so you use them to describe things. And sometimes when you read those descriptions,

they're kind of funny. They're like, okay, so we're giving this piece of of land. And to find it, you're going to walk from the big oak to the Roman bridge, and then you're going to walk along the Roman road for 200 paces, and then you're going to tell sharply right by Joan Stone, and we don't know what John Stone is, but they clearly did know, until you come back to the big oak. And whatever's inside of that is now yours, essentially. And sometimes those descriptions are not that precise, but generally they give us a lot of information about the landscape. And it is possible today to trace many of those, they're called boundary clauses, those descriptions of land, many of them in today's landscape in England. So you can

actually, with some of those charters in hand, you can walk in the landscape and see the piece of land that was granted. And that's an amazing experience because you can see something that's been written 1,200 or 1,000 years ago and see that piece of land with your own eyes. But chart, is one more thing about them is they are also full of people and they are full of people that we would otherwise not see in our documents because a charter normally would have to be witnessed. To be a valid document people would have to sign it to confirm that it was legally issued and that they in the future if they were asked can confirm that yes this piece of land or this building or this privilege was granted. And those witness lists at the end of a charter are a true mine for a historian because

you meet all kinds of people there. You meet aristocrats, you meet wealthy people, but you also meet peasants. There's a charter, for example, from Hailey England where a piece of forest is being given. And a forest was normally very important because that's where you would keep your pigs. Pigs would roam the forest and sort of fend for themselves and then you would have fresh pork. But because of various already existing relationships, a group of peasants that clearly had some rights of the common to that forest was asked to witness that charter. And suddenly we meet about dozen people who would never be recorded in a chronicle or a royal law. And there they are.

We have their names and we can meet them in those documents. I love that. You're not just getting those descriptions and then the sort of boring legal bits, but actually the personal experience of going into that field and those particular people. That's fantastic. But do we know, I always wonder at this, are they all genuine or are some of them forgeries as well? Can we trust them? So quite a lot of them are forgeries.

So we have genuine charters. If you go to the British Library, you can actually see a lot. Well, a lot is a relative term. But for early medieval period, you can actually hold in your hand genuine charters written on parchment, which is especially prepared animal skin, that 1,300 years old. But the thing is, as with every legal document that gives somebody something,

especially monasteries, we're very keen to forge quite a lot of them. So we have quite a lot of forgeries both from pre-Norman conquest, so pre-1066, and we also have a number of forgeries afterwards. Because, like with every form of written record, if you're very good at forging it, you can sort of either produce an actual copy of a charter, or you can just produce a record of that charter, which would, especially in high and late medieval period, put in a book which is called a carterary,

which is sort of like a collection of copies of charters in a book form. So we have quite a lot of them. But those forgeries are actually also fascinating for us, especially if we're looking for Roman remains. Because if you're forging a charter and you're forging your rights to a piece of land, It's very important for you that people would recognize that piece of land, so that what the Charter says looks genuine.

So you would normally not try to forge a charter with a description of land, for example, that does not correspond to that description of land. So if we're looking for remnants of Roman infrastructure, for example, and we're interested in what's happening with it quite late, let's say, in 10th or 11th centuries, and we see that in a forged charter, they still refer to a Roman road, or they see. still refer to a Roman bridge or they still refer to a Roman milestone. We can assume, we cannot be completely sure, but we can assume that they would still see those elements in the landscape.

So that gives us potentially a clue about the longevity of those elements in the landscape. So yes, forgeries are dangerous to work with, but they can also give us valuable information. In the fourth century, the Roman Empire is actually doing okay. It does have, especially in the second half of the fourth century, a series of problems with internal organization. There is some pressure, especially in the East, and there are constant small-scale and larger-scale civil wars. And that is quite important for what's going to happen very soon.

So things are going actually quite okay. There are major challenges like the Gothic invasion in the second half of the fourth century, But they do not really affect the situation in Britain as such. There is pressure on the borders of the empire, but the empire as such is doing quite okay. Britain as a province, as a Roman province, is actually doing very well. It's probably economically relatively stable. We have evidence archaeologically of things being renovated. We have evidence of ongoing cultivation.

Things are okay. And then when the fourth century comes to a close, there is an increasing pressure on the Roman state. And there is also an increasing pressure on Britain as a province as well. We hear in our sources about raids of pirates. We hear about the Roman soldiers being unhappy in Britain as well. And the situation on the continent is looking increasingly difficult. The first decade of the 5th century is a time where Roman state comes into an immense amount of pressure. There is some kind of invasion.

We know that it happens roughly in 406, where groups of people start pillaging in Gaul. In the old narratives, they were called the barbarians, but it's not so easy. Some of them might have actually been former Roman soldiers. There is wide-going devastation going in goal, we know that. And goal being the current France. And this causes obviously a lot of steering and a lot of problems in Britain in itself. But the thing is, and this is sort of, contrary to sort of the narrative we learn at school maybe, Britain actually has a lot of resources on its disposal and it produces a series of usurpers.

Xerpers, so people who want to become emperors are actually quite successful. The last of them, Constantine the third, manages to cross the channel onto the continent and control large swaths of Western Roman Empire. And he mince his own coins in Trier, in today's Germany, and he commands a large army. And he's actually quite successful in fighting with their invaders, whoever they might be. And he plays an important political role in the first decade of the 5th century. So contrary to what we might think, Britain actually really, really wants to stay in the Roman Empire. And it not only wants to stay in the Roman Empire, the soldiers in Britain backing a series of

usurpers that they want to take power in the whole of the Western Roman Empire. But ultimately they fail. And the traditional narrative, still we can find in all the books like Frank Stentons and history books that we have at school is that then comes 410 and the whole system in Britain crumbles. Constantine, the third slightly earlier in this traditional narrative, takes all the Roman soldiers with him to the continent and Rom essentially leaves Britain and there's nothing left. That's it. There are some lovely illustrations and sort of ladybird style books from the 50s and the 60s where Roman soldiers packed themselves on boats and sailed merrily back to the continent,

leaving cold Britain behind them. Nothing about this is true. So yes, Constantine III takes a substantial contingent of soldiers back to the continent. But those are most probably just elements of the Field Army, because most of the soldiers in Britain would be the circle Limitanei, which would be garrison soldiers, people who just sit on Hadrian's Wall and forts and manden, and they would stay. And we know that they stayed. We know from excavations of a Roman forts in Britain that they stayed after 410.

But then there is a period where things get tricky for archaeologists and historians. We are not exactly sure, and we have to admit that, we're not exactly sure what is happening. We know that the power of the Roman state weakens in Britain substantially. There is not to our knowledge document or no act in which Roman state withdraws from Britain.

And we know how Roman withdrawals look, because, for example, the Roman state did that in the third century with Dacca, current Romania. So we know how Roman state withdraws from a province, and they don't do it in Britain. But because of the numerous problems and the increasing entropy of the Western Roman Empire in the first half of the fifth century, The Roman state is less and less interested in what is actually happening in Britain.

But we know that the structures that underpinned the Roman province of Britain keep on existing. And there are significant changes in the economy. So for example, there's way less coinage. Pottery stops being so sophisticated. There is definitely some kind of change in imports, some kind of change in exchange between Britain and the continent. But it's not as catastrophic as we have fought. And another very important point, there's not that much evidence for violence. So this traditional narrative in which Britain gets ravaged and pillaged, there's very little

evidence of that. And recent archaeological discoveries have actually given us a lot of evidence that things are actually going on. And one of the most exciting ones is the Chedworth Roman Villa, which shows very clearly that in the first, second and third decade of the fifth century, new mosaics were laid, new elements of the building were built, and things are just simply going on. And interestingly, there are also very many coin finds from way later on. The site keeps being used, keeps being occupied. But what is happening? The adaptation processes are quickening.

So because of this weakening Roman state, Britain is sort of starting to go on its own trajectory. And here it's very important to stress this is not limited to Britain. All the other provinces of Western Roman Empire start going on its own trajectory in the first 50 years of the 5th century. And partly because of historiographical debate, what was happening in Britain has been treated very differently in the past 100 years than what's been happening in Gaul or Spain or the Gemanias, the provinces on the Rhine, that part of current Germany, which was actually part of the Roman Empire. But the thing is, the processes that underpin those adaptations were actually the same. And we have sources that confirm it to us.

We have the life of St. Gemanus of Auxer, who was Golic bishop, who goes to Britain in the four hundred twenties to fight with Pelagian heresy, which is a Christian heresy, which has very different views on salvation than the orthodox, scare quotes, Christian church at the time. And description that we get in this life, which was actually written decades after and probably references the state in the second half of the fifth century, is of a perfectly normal garden variety Roman province. There are cities, new churches are built. There is definitely some form of civil unrest. There's no question about this. There's even a more. battle happening there and stuff like that, but exactly the same stuff is happening in every

other province of the Western Roman Empire. So Britain experiences maybe short, but its own late antiquity. A period when things start changing rapidly, but they still change inside of the framework of the late Roman state. And I'm not going to get into the debate on Adventus Saxonum now, so the arrival of the Saxons. For that, you would have to invite James Harland, who is an expert on this, and has also recently written a book. But there is no question that the composition of this former Roman province of Britannia

changes in the second half of the 5th century. But it's very important for us not to forget that Roman Britain was also a very diverse society. So it's not like suddenly Britain becomes diverse. It was diverse already, and it's just the composition and the ways it functions. change. And also sometimes we mistake those changes for something dramatic, but they are actually reflections of local fashions and moods. And I will just give one small example, which is sort of like an archaeological record comes quite often. Quite a few of the burial goods that we find in graves

and have been a 19th century seen as Scarequards barbarian, were also worn by Scarecords normal Roman soldiers. It was just a fashion thing, more or less. And I'm of course just sketching the debate, but just that we know that a lot of the things that are happening in Britain in the 5th century, happening inside of the very same framework as the adaptations in other Roman provinces. And when the 6th century comes, we know a lot of things are happening, but we also, for example, know that the contacts with Eastern Mediterranean get a revival. And this is also where written sources and archaeology play very well together in recent years. We have found, especially in Western Britain, coins from Eastern Mediterranean, oxygen isotope analysis of burials have shown that

individuals from Eastern Mediterranean are present in Western Britain in the first half of the 6th century. And we have, again, had geographies, so lives of saints, like an early 7th century text from Eastern Mediterranean, the life of St. John the Almskiver, that describe those voyages. And the And for years and years, decades and decades, those texts were seen as fanciful fantasies, until archaeologists have shown us, well, yeah, those people actually are there. And this exchange is happening. And at the same time in Eastern Britain, the successes of the Roman state in Gaul, the Mervynens, a Frankish dynasty, they start to exert the influence in what is today Kent.

And there is very intense exchange with the continent, both economical and political and it influences very much the policies that exist in Britain. And the climate changes, we know that. The climate is getting cooler, so it forces adaptations in agriculture and economy. And there is, in all probability, pestilence, a pestilence that we know that has strained the Eastern Roman Empire in the mid-sixth century to the point of breaking. and we know it's also present in Britain. And on this scene, in the very last decade of the 6th century,

Pope Gregory the Great, who was actually for a long time an official in Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, decides to send a mission to Britain. And we have extant his letters, both to the members of the mission, to various individuals in the Mediterranean describing this mission and to people in Gaul. So we have this great treasure trove of information, which is not entirely reliable,

because of course he's trying to put himself in the best possible light. But reading them shows us that the situation that the mission encountered in Britain was also not so straightforward. So we know, for example, that there are quite many Christians. We know that there are Christian bishops. We know that there are quite sophisticated polities. And we also know that Merovingians were trying to do the same thing already earlier. So the King of Kent at that time is Ethelbert and his wife is Berta.

And Berta is a Merovingian princess and she's Christian and she's been there since 580s. And she worships together with her bishop, Uthardt, in a church just outside Campton. St. Martin's Church, which is a Roman building. And you can go there today and see it and you will see quite high Roman walls and we know that Bata worship there from 580s, almost two decades before Augustine came to Britain. And we also know that Gregory, and this is why this connection with the Roman Empire here is so important, he frames his mission and he frames this whole endeavor. very much an imperial undertaking. So when he writes to Ethelbert and when he writes to Bertha, because he writes to her as well, he very much frames it that what he's doing is being done

in the name of the emperor in the East. So in a sense, there's not only a religious aspect to this mission, but there's a very strong political aspect to this mission. And this makes Merovingsen's all very, very nervous because they are like, we have the monopoly on Kent and we are the ones who influence this world. And in 597, when Augustine lands in Britain, the Byzantines, the sort of how we start calling the Eastern Roman Empire at this point the Byzantine Empire, they're still in North Africa, they're still in very, very tiny parts of Spain, and there's still a major power in the Eastern Mediterranean,

and still play an important role in Italy. Gregory is formally, although not practically, a subject of the emperor. And this is the scene at which our written record then explodes and the chart disappear. And the story of the early medieval England starts. How much of a tyrant really was Julius Caesar? And it's very interesting to think about why it's Caesar in particular when there have been many political assassinations in the past millennia, why Caesar's has been the one that is brought up again and again.

Would we have ever stood a chance against the first dinosaurs? In the Jurassic, you see dinosaurs get bigger, and you see meat-eating dinosaurs grow into things like the size of buses. And did Helen of Troy really have the power to launch a thousand ships? She is always derided as this sort of terrible adulterish, but at least as old as Homer, at least the 8th century BC is a counter-tradition in which Helen doesn't go to Troy.

She's never Helen of Troy, she's Helen of Egypt. 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. That's fantastic summary. Well done for that. I think some really important points there, especially, one of those being that there isn't this abrupt stop. But actually there is, I know the word continuity can be a bit controversial, but there is, you know, do continue, and also that that we have this connection with other parts of Europe. I think those

are sort of really key points there. So in terms of what you've been looking at in Britain, so these infrastructures, these sort of frameworks and systems that we can pick up on later, let's sort of go onto that now. So I just wanted to pick up on something you said in your sort of bigger context there. And that is about the reuse of some of these cities and places and church is being placed in previous Roman urban spaces. And that is something that you go into in your book. Can you say a little bit about that? I mean, these cities, urban sites that appeared in the Roman period, were they just abandoned or is there this continuity? What happens? And what can these sources you've looked at tell us about that? That's also a very controversial

question in historiography. So Britain had as a Roman province a network of cities, but we should not forget that in Roman times it was also overwhelmingly a rural province. Those kinds of statistics are very difficult, but we can assume that not more than 10% of population of Roman Britain actually lived in cities. So we should not overstate the demographical impact. And we know that already, and this is important sort of to the way we look at those changes. Already in the fourth century, things are starting to change. There are investments in cities, but we know that some public buildings get converted

into what we call productive sites, so, for example, pottery is being produced, metal is being smelt. So things are changing. And undoubtedly, in the first half of the fifth century, the cities get at least partially depopulated. precise horizon when this happens is very difficult to establish. And it is not impossible that some forms of organized life continued in some of those cities for quite a while.

There is something which we can call the short-term horizon, so it's maybe somewhere around 450, 460, but this is just speculation. The one fixed point that we have is San Gemanis, whom I already mentioned. still see cities and that's the first half of the fifth century. We know there's agricultural activity in this city is happening, but we also know that they remain extremely important symbolically. They keep on getting referred to and they keep being fought over. And this is where we have to start sort of separating their actual use, physical use of them as cities, which stops at some point in the 5th century. There are no longer cities in the Roman sense.

From their importance of symbolic infrastructures, as places that are important to control, for example, if you're trying to run an early medieval polity in Britain, because they give you legitimation of your power, they give you control over the past, and they are still important linchpins of their administration and bureaucratic systems. So, territories are organized around them. There still exist in a sense of important points in the landscape. And this is something we need to sort of imagine also in our heads. Those were huge places for those people.

Yes, they had defensive walls, they had big remnants of public buildings, some of them still standing for centuries afterwards. And we see from very early on that early English kings try to control that space. And then an interesting thing happens when Augustine comes. So the Roman church tries very, very hard to get control of those spaces. And we know that from charters. We know that the church exerts pressure on those kings and those rulers to give them the space inside of those cities.

We have a great example from Rochester, we're over a span of almost 200 years through different charters, but the church essentially gets all of the space in the former Roman city. Augustine does interesting thing. So he, at the end of the 6th century and the beginning of the 7th, he really wants to get into Canterbury. He really wants to be able to build churches and control space inside the Roman urban space. And we have also other examples. There's the famous Battle of Durham, which was supposed to have happened in 577. We now know that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that mentions this probably forged, the author of that Cronigurly, forged that entry.

But it's interesting what happens just after the battle, yeah? So after the battle, the Chronicle tells us that then the invaders took control of three Roman cities. And still in the, it's probably forged somewhere at the beginning of the 9th century, still it was important to forge an entry that would say, oh yeah, and then they took control of three Roman cities, so they have the right to this now. So those urban spaces are extremely important for internal politics in Britain. And again, this is something that we also know from the continent. Augustine, for example, comes to Britain with a brief from the Pope that he should start a bishopric in every major Roman city in Britain.

And he lands there and the reality kicks in and, well, most of those cities have nothing in them. When he adjusts it, he still sticks to Roman cities. He does not start those bishoprics somewhere else. And the initial idea was to have them Archbishopric in London, but the centre of power shifted. So he starts with in Canterbury, but that's not his initial. And the second Archbishopric is slightly later funded in York, which was also an extremely important Roman city. To sum it up, we know that throughout that period from the beginning of the 5th century to the arrival of Augustine, former Roman urban spaces play an important internal role in Britain.

and we know that as soon as the mission arrives and we get a bit more sources, both charters and chronicles and our ecological records shows us as well, a lot of actors start fighting over it. And it's still very important for internal politics, for ecclesiastical politics, and for the organization of space to control those former Roman urban spaces. Okay, now this is such an interesting point in time, though, isn't it, where you have these massive new institutions coming in and taking control and using that past very deliberately.

But I wanted to get back to one of the things you mentioned about at the beginning. So the other parts of the infrastructure, there may be that sort of more well-known part. So let's talk about things like the road systems and bridges and all of those things. So obviously when this is being created in Roman Britain, that's on a very centralized scale. And it becomes a huge network. That's all controlled.

Presumably that's something that changes. So I wanted to ask you, at this sort of point in early, medieval Britain, that road network, we know it survives. You see it in the charters. We still see it in the landscape today. What do we know about how it's surviving and how it's being maintained? So some of those roads fall out of use. We should say that at the very beginning. But a lot of them survive. And we don't know exactly how they survive the fifth and early six centuries. But we can probably assume that a lot of the local community maintenance plays a role. Helena Hammerow has written about this about the use of those roads in Southern Britain,

for example, for transhumanity. So taking herds of cattle from one set of pastures to another. And we know now that it happened in Southern Britain roughly along the lines of Roman roads. The second thing that happens is that as various polities start to crystallize in Britain, They, for economic reasons, have now a stake in maintaining that infrastructure. And a very good example of this is production of salt. So in the Roman period, the Roman state had a monopoly on production of salt. And it was a very important part of Roman economy.

And Britain has produced quite a lot of salt. One of the places where it was produces Droitwich, and there's a Roman road with sort of links Droitwitch to London. And we know from charters, also very late charters, that from the 10th century, that this road network is still in use. And we know that people and local polities and the church are trying to maintain it. And we also know that with it, because this is where, sort of that physical infrastructure of roads, this is also something more. We know that with it also elements, not whole of it, but elements of the sort of Roman economic system survive. So tolls on salt, so forms of taxes on salt, the system of transporting it from this part of Britain to this part of Britain and all the economic elements that come with it also survive things to that infrastructure.

So it sort of carries on this possibility. And later on in the 9th century, in the 10th century, we start seeing in charters when information pops up about obligations to maintain roads and bridges. And this is very important that this is a formula of Roman law. So Roman law from the classical Roman period very often talked about these obligations to maintain roads and bridges and it gets picked up in Britain and here again the word continuity is tricky we cannot say with full confidence that it just simply survives

so that it gets reintroduced but we can assume and this is a valid explanation that in local communities strong across Britain this tradition of Roman law sort of changes into vulgar law that then switches into sort of a tradition of local maintenance of that infrastructure. And a road is not able to survive 500 years without some kind of maintenance. I mean, it will stay in the landscape, you will see its line, but it will stop being a useful

transport truck. It's even worse with bridges. So if we encounter them still in a functioning role in the 9th or the 10th centuries, it means somebody is putting some money and effort in keeping them in a working condition. maybe not as good a working condition as the Romans would have. We know that, but clearly somebody is very interested that they still play a role. I think that's fantastic and that's such a good way of looking at it. And are there other things as well that maybe we don't think about?

We've got the roads, we've got some of these sort of city walls you mentioned. It's anything else you've come across in your research that might be a bit more unexpected. Well, I think one of the important things is if I jump into unexpected is because we talked about charters. And charters are also a form of Roman infrastructure. A charter is essentially a Roman document in form. And there's a huge discussion whether it gets reintroduced to England. We know of early charters in Wales that are probably from the 6th century, although the dating is being contested now, that are very close to the Roman form.

So the fact that the charter is being used is also a survival of Roman infrastructure. And then the fact that charter is then being used to work with surviving physical. Roman infrastructure is in itself very interesting. But there's also an extremely interesting reuse of Roman building material to build new things, and to build those new things in a Roman manner, as we would say, and as the sources actually call it. So we have numerous examples of that in the 8th century, probably most interesting ones that we can still see till today is Hexham in Northern England and Rippen.

where the churches itself have been rebuilt, but we can still see the crypts built by Wilfrid, who was, some would say anti-hero and so would say a great hero of the 8th century. He's a very fascinating figure who travels wildly into Gaul and on the continent, and he's very much mixed into internal politics of Britain, and he's very, very keen on using the Roman past.

So he builds those churches with those crypts, and he uses for that blocks from Roman forts that are very close from Hadron's Wall. And he builds them into an imitation of the catacombs in Rome, those scripts. They're tiny, but if you go there actually, they are supposed to give in the visitor this feeling that they are as if they were walking in Rome

in the catacombs where the early Christians were buried. It's a theme park. It's a form of a theme park that he built for the use of people there. But there's a very conscious use of Roman past in there, in which the idea of Rome in his present is being evoked, but it's being evoked using stones from the Roman past to buttress his political interests and his ecclesiastical interest, where he's trying in this time to show everybody in Britain that he is the representative of

the true Roman church. And that's the theme that keeps on popping back in the story of early medieval England, where there is this fight, sometimes more visible, sometimes less, on who controls the Roman infrastructure, and through that, who has the right to the Roman past? Because being a successor of Rome is a very important element of politics in early medieval Britain. That's a really great way of summarising. I think all the arguments in your book, I think that sort of recreation and reuse of that Roman past. That's fantastic. Mateus, I think we'll leave it there. That's a fantastic summary.

So do have a look if you're interested in this topic for his book, which is called Roman infrastructure in early medieval Britain, the adaptations of the past in text and stone, and also follow him on Twitter for more information. But thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your knowledge. Thank you so much for having me. That brings us to the end of this episode of God Medieval from history hit. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. We'd also really appreciate it if you could possibly leave us a positive review because that means that's the way these algorithms and things work.

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