The Ancients - The Fall of Roman Britain

Episode Date: September 15, 2024

In the early 5th century AD, after almost four centuries of iron-fisted Roman rule, the empire in Britain was beginning to fade. Franks, Saxons and Roman usurpers were running rampant. Britannia was on its last legs and in 410 AD, the Britons were told to ‘look to their own defences’.However the story of the fall of Roman Britain is far more complex than the traditional tale of swift Roman withdrawal. In today's episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Rob Collins and Dr James Gerrard to journey from Londinium to Hadrians Wall and unpick the ultimate fate of Roman Britannia.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight, the senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘ANCIENTS’. https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It was the early 5th century AD and, after almost four centuries of rule, the Roman presence in Britain was fading. Roman usurpers had drained the island of field troops, Franks and Saxons were raiding the province, Britannia was on its last legs. The famous date given is 410 AD, when the Roman Emperor Honorius, preoccupied with the Gothic invasion

of Italy and many other woes, he sent word to the Britons that they should look to their own defences. The Romans would not be coming to their rescue. Britain was on its own. That is the tale often given. But the truth about the fall of Roman Britain, well, it is much more complicated. The story of the fall is incredibly complex. Different areas of Roman Britain were affected differently by the end of Roman rule. A soldier stationed up along Hadrian's Wall had a very different experience than someone based on the south coast of what is today England. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we are untangling the complex story that

is the fall of Roman Britain. My guests are two esteemed late Roman Britain experts, Dr Rob Collins and Dr James Gerrard from the University of Newcastle. Now this was a really fun chat. James and Rob, they bounced off each other with ease and we chatted for well over an hour as we explored many different parts of the story of the end of Roman Britain. I really do hope you enjoy. James, Rob, it is wonderful to have you both on the podcast today. It's great to be here with you and Rob Tristan. Yeah, thanks Tristan. I'm really looking forward to this. Me too. And what a topic as well, the fall of Roman Britain. And I think it's fair to say it's not clear cut. It seems to this huge event exists over a large period of time and also

seems to affect different areas of Britain very differently. Rob, would you agree with that analysis first of all? Absolutely. One of the things, I think James and I are both on the same page here, is that there's no single story to the end of Roman Britain. It's a tale of not just two cities, but of many different cities, many different sites and locations. And that's what makes it fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. And I have heard you say this analogy before, and I'm going to ask you to say it again,

because I think it's such a great way of kind of explaining the different geographical effects of this end of antiquity almost in roman britain and which is your snowfall analogy would you be able to talk us through this very quickly yeah i'm i'm waiting for james to object to this as i cast dispersions on the south of roman britain and southern england let's hear it rob i often perceive and think of the end of Roman Britain as a winter BBC weather report, in which, if we use the metaphor of there's been two inches of snow that have fallen across all of England, the BBC covers it. What we see is the M25 has shut down, the Air Force and the Army are deployed for helicopter evacuations of people who are trapped in this epic two inches of snow.

Meanwhile, in the North, people have just got on. It's not a big deal. It's only two inches. What is everyone complaining about? So, it's oversimplified, but I think it also kind of captures in some cases, some of the different regional responses to the same event. But also, I suppose, within the metaphor, there's the different links and relations to the central empire and who's in charge and what's the basis of their power and authority. So, it's simplifying and it does kind of play on tropes of soft southerners and hardy northerners. But of course, those are true, aren't they? Well, that's a discussion for another podcast, isn't it, Rob? But I guess I quite like the

snowfall analogy, actually. The end of Roman Britain, the fall of Roman Britain, it plays out differently in different places. And we privilege particular bits of information. So if you read the books about this, it's the same sites that come up time and time again. And that's obscuring the great tapestry almost of complexity that is the whole of the late Roman diocese province. Different things happen in different places. The south is clearly the most important bit of Roman Britain. It's where the wealth is. It's where the population is. Objection, Your Honour. Objections. The north is a wall with a few squaddies sat on it watching the Picts. The South is where the action happens.

Well, that was a great way to introduce this, I must admit, because I think it makes it very clear who is taking the North of Roman Britain and who is taking the South. James, first of all, I'd like to ask you about the source material. I mean, for this topic, let's say from the late 4th century all the way up to the end of the, well, 500 AD and that kind of time. What types of source material do archaeologists like yourself have available to try and learn more about this enigmatic period at the end of Roman Britain? That's a good question. The obvious place to start is with the texts. These are largely, for the late Roman period, a diverse range of both histories, but sometimes administrative documents, sometimes

court poetry. These are quite difficult to use, so they're often not concerned primarily with Britain. Britain only features when something happens in Britain that impacts the wider empire. Those texts are quite complex in their own way. And then for the later period, for the 5th and 6th centuries, we have a very small number of contemporary texts that are written on the continent in Europe that refer in passing to Britain. We have almost nothing from Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries. We've got a difficult text by British or Welsh, if you like, a Western British ecclesiastic called Gildas, which is basically a very long rant, the kind of letter you might write to a tabloid newspaper in green pen.

There's St. Patrick's letters, again, very specific. And that's basically it. We have lots of later texts, starting with Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which claim to talk about the 5th and 6th centuries. But do they really? Or are they casting the 5th and 6th centuries in the light of later events? So that's where most people start with the text. And the archaeology, of course, archaeological evidence has increased massively, right? A hundred years ago, we had very little archaeological evidence. Roman Britain is one of the best excavated Roman provinces in the empire. Huge amounts of money go into archaeology via the planning process. And we have some of the best data anywhere from the Roman empire about

Britain. Huge numbers of sites, vast quantities of material, tens of thousands of coins, brooches, hundreds of mosaics. We know a huge amount. Then the scientific stuff, the animal bones, what were the animals they were eating, the charred seeds, what was the diet, the DNA in those bones, the isotopes. All of that is evidence that we could use not only for the Roman period, but for the 5th and 6th centuries. It gets more difficult in the 5th and 6th centuries because what's archaeologically obvious, so the mosaics, the pots, the coins, disappear. We've got a more problematic, more challenging archaeological record to engage with. But that archaeological evidence from the 5th and 6th centuries is just as important, and again, revolutionising

our understanding of this period. I think that goes for both the South and the North, Rob. Would you agree? Absolutely agree. I think something to highlight with the archaeological evidence, this is something James and I have spent our entire careers talking about, is the challenge of interpretation. What archaeology is really good at is detecting change in the archaeological record. And so, it's those kind of moments or areas of change and transition that we focus our efforts on to understand the dating and when does that happen. But when we look at the 5th century, that's really challenging because on the one hand,

we don't see change. What we see is kind of a continuation of late Roman material culture. We see the same late Roman pots that are being used for eating and drinking, glass, metal objects, even houses and structures. So there's not necessarily always an obvious change. On the other hand, we then do see some changes because there are clearly some migrants coming from the continent that, you know, the people we typically call the Anglo-Saxons, though they're not all Anglian or Saxon in that case. But that doesn't happen at the same time

that the kind of official end of Roman Britain occurs, the kind of the date of 410 that we assign to it. There's a lag time there. There is change, but our ability to detect that can sometimes be difficult. And then when we do detect it, actually, we have to be really careful about our own biases. Do we come to the end of Roman Britain expecting decline and fall? Or is it at the opposite end of the spectrum? Do we come to the end of Roman Britain looking entirely for continuity and life carried on as normal? There was no fall. And these are some challenges that we're constantly trying to face, wouldn't you say?

Absolutely. There's an old joke in archaeology. You dig a late Roman villa and you find a post hole cut through a mosaic. And that's either squatters living in terrible conditions, trying to eke out a living in the ruins of this classical grandeur, or it's the continuity of the Roman Empire into the post-Roman period. And it's how you interpret the evidence. The other thing I'd bring in here, and this is really fundamental, I think, is Rob and I are both specialists, right?

We've dedicated our careers to understanding how you get from 300 to 500. I understand, but you know. For a lot of archaeologists, they studied the Roman period or the early Middle Ages, and they look at 250 and 600 and go, these periods are fundamentally different. And if you take that view, if you say there is a Roman period, which is about 250, and there is an early medieval period, which is about 600, then they are poles apart. But if you look at that sort of 300, 500 period, and you specialise in that, you can see actually the threads that join those periods together. So both of those views are true, right? 250 and 600, they are fundamentally different. But if you look at from 300 to 500,

and you study the intricacies of that period, you can see those threads that link the late Roman and the early medieval together. I totally agree, James. And I think one of the things that's important to remember is the way we are taught to understand the world is often through kind of boxes. So, when we learn about history, different parts of history are put in different boxes. The Roman period is a different box from the early medieval period or the Anglo-Saxon period. And so, what James was just saying is that challenge of not seeing them as unrelated boxes, that actually, you know, there's a part of the same phenomenon, and that you can, if you focus on a particular area, a particular period of transition,

you can see that it's not a stark division, but there are things that influence how society progresses. So, a lot of our job professionally is trying to kind of tear down those walls that keep things separate and understand how they're interconnected and how they influence each other. That was very nice background to explain the whole state of play almost and what you guys have available to try and learn more about this very complicated topic. I want to kind of set the scene a little bit more and let's say kind of go to Britain Britain around 400 AD. Now, Rob, this is very different to the beginning of Roman Britannia, to expansion and Adrian and names like that, even Constantine the Great. What do we know about how Roman Britain is run at this time as we get to the beginning of the 5th century? It's quite divided up into different units, I'm guessing.

I think one of the fascinating things about this period and something that a lot of people don't realize is that by the late Roman period, Britain, Britannia, iss, each with their own offices. Taxation is done. It's a little bit like some of the mayoral de-evolutions we're talking about now in terms of breaking Britain up into kind of smaller regions. And so, while they're all neighboring, they are their own provinces. So, that means what happens in the southern provinces doesn't necessarily have to happen in the northern provinces because you have different governors. But the other thing which is really important at this period is that civilian authority, a governor, does not have control of military resource because there are military army generals, duches and comes, dukes and counts, that are in an entirely separate chain of command. And so, military power is separated from legal civilian power. And this is partly the paranoia of the late Roman Empire to avoid usurpers and the emperor getting kicked off their throne and

thrown in an early grave, and also a way to try and monitor and avoid corruption, or at least manage corruption. And so, this is a very different environment from the early Roman period, when you had one governor who controlled everything and only reported to the emperor. Now, there's a series of generals, there's a series of governors who report to different ministers who then report to the emperor. So, the bureaucracy is more complicated. Arguably, the tax situation and financing is slightly more complicated. And so, we have to think of it that way. It's very different. It would be like, we don't want to assume that if the Roman invasion of Britain happened under Elizabeth I, and the end of Roman Britain was today, we would not compare circumstances of modern Britain to the original conquest under Elizabeth, for example. A lot happens over the course of 350

years. Let's go through these different areas. Let's start with lowland Britain, first of all, which James, you're covering. First of all, we're going to have a two-part question here. Where do we mean when we're saying lowland Britain? How should we imagine the landscape looking and where people live in this area of Roman Britain at that time in, let's say, roughly 400 AD? Okay, a big question. Let's start by responding to Rob and his provinces. So there are the four or five provinces which make up the diocese. So the vicarius is the official who runs the four provinces and the governors respond to the vicarius.

The boundaries of those provinces that we draw on maps, we have no idea about. Anybody who tells you differently is bluntly a liar. We don't know where those provinces lay. We know roughly, but we don't actually know their boundaries. So when we're talking about understanding the geography of late Roman Britain, we might want to think about topography. So the uplands, the mountainous bits, and the lowlands, the flatter bits. So in that sense, we could think about a line from maybe Gloucester, the Roman Glebeum, running up to Cataractonium, Cataric. Everything south and east of there has more stuff.

Towns, villas, pottery, brooches, coins. That's the lowland heart of the province. That is a landscape of roads and towns, small towns, roadside settlements, farms, villas, and forts along the southeast coast, the so-called Saxon shore. That region is divided administratively into what we call civetates. And these are territories based on the cities. And we don't really know the boundaries of those kivetates either, although people will claim that they can reconstruct them. But for most people, if you were a villa owner or a peasant,

a difficult term, but let's say peasant, an agricultural producer in lowland Britain, the provinces probably meant diddly to you. The important thing was whose estate you lived on and probably what kivitas you were in. They were important for identity. It sounds like it's a deeply unequal society at that time, James, between the rich and those working the land. But if we go away from the civilian life, as you painted that picture of the further south, roughly between Kasseratterick and gloucester south and east of there sometimes

we see these arguments i know they're quite old arguments put forward that either there's a massive military collapse of the south at this time and it's very insecure there's a lot of military instability at that time i mean how secure would you argue that this area of Britain is at this time, if this is where all the money is almost, this is where the prosperity is? So I think we have to make a distinction between Britain in maybe 350 and Britain in 450. To me, the south of Britain in 350 does not look insecure. Towns are walled, but then to be a town, you have to have a wall, towns are walled, but then to be a town, you have to have a wall, right? It's part of your civic identity. And those town walls are built in the second century, a lot of them, and changed and augmented into the third and fourth centuries. But the villas and the farmsteads, these are

spread across agricultural landscapes, dispersed. There are roadside settlements, maybe a dozen, two dozen houses strung along a road. These are not people living in fear. These are not people surrounding themselves with defences. This is not a rural population, to my mind, that looks in fear of external threat. Now, in 450, that's a different question. We can discuss the evidence for conflict in the 5th century, but that is a more complex question. I would see in the late Roman period, Lowland Britain being quite peaceful. One other question on this quickly before we go back to you, Rob, and what Northern Britain looks like at that time. I've got in my notes also this idea of paideia. James, what is this and why is this quite important for many of the people who lived in the South at that time?

So paideia is a Greek term. It survives in encyclopedia. It means cultured learning, basically. And it's a civilian ideology. It's an elite ideology. So if you were a member of the Romano-British elite, you would have had a similar sort of education to a member of the provincial elite in late Roman Greece. You would have read the same classical texts. You'd have known the same myths, you'd have studied the same poets, and you live a life in which that paideia, your learning, your education, your high society, is written into everything you do. It's in the clothes you wear, the jewellery you adorn yourself or your partner with, the decorations in your high-status villas, the mosaics on the floor, the things you eat. And they distance you as a member of the civilian elite, the wealthy elite, from, first of all, your clients, the peasants working the fields

around your villa, but also those dirty those dirty rough nasty soldiers who mostly are almost barbarians anyway aren't they fiery talk incendiary incendiary well go on rob i mean in contrast what what does the north of roman britain this more militarized zone what does it look like at that time at around 400 a.d is it quite stark different? I think it's fair to say it is different. Certainly the wealth of southern Britannia is a real phenomenon. You do get some of that extending into the northern province or provinces in Kivetates, but not as evenly. So the kind of the greater Yorkshire area and Teesside area is known to have villas that are Yorkshire area, in Teesside area, is known to have villas that are quite wealthy. Maybe not quite the mega wealthy villas that you'd get in some places in southern England, but there's not a huge number of those anyway in Britain compared to, say, Gaul or Italy. So, there are varying

degrees of wealth across the empire. But certainly, it's true to say that the northern region of Britannia did not have as thorough or consistent a kind of wealth development as the south did. And so, you know, the incorporation, the advent and development of villas is slower in the south than it is in the north as well. And I think that's important to acknowledge that it takes sometimes 50 to 100 years before some of those more successful long-lived villas start appearing in the northern Cavitates. But I think another factor is that, and this is a bit of an unknown for us, we don't, as James has said, we don't have ancient maps of Roman Britain with boundaries drawn on them.

But what we do know is that the Roman army had its own estate. Sometimes it was land owned by the emperor that was gifted or loaned to the army for its use, but the army was also sustaining itself off the land. I suspect that has an economic impact and that, you know, the army is collecting rents, it's collecting food, wood, maybe quarrying stone, digging for coal as we get up north. We know there's Roman use of coal. So, they're extracting those resources to make the army run. And I think that has economic development implications. And so, it's not so much that I would say that the north is poorer, but the way that that kind of resource is extracted and developed is focused much more on the presence of the army and sustaining that. And so, you don't get perhaps as much

opportunity for the civilian elite to participate in the Paideia culture. However, what I think you do get is for the civilian elite to participate in the army. Because that's another theater, I guess you could say, another environment in which you can, as a member of the elite, display your superiority and your status. Because you can become an officer in the Roman army that has many perks. It puts you into a networking connection. And you still exercise some of those same things like patronage. You know, you will have clients that just happen to be the more uncouth, rough, barbarous soldiers that James was just referring to. So, they're kind of parallel, but very similar networks. And if you're a local elite serving in the army, you know, you might only be a commanding officer of a local unit

for four or five years. You've done your service and then you're out. But when we look at other parts of the Roman Empire, we can see these kind of, there's civilian elite dynasties and there's military elite dynasties. And so, you know, the local commands might shift amongst a whole network of local families, as it were. And, it might be a father and son, but it might be uncles, nephews, cousins that all take turns being in charge. So the South and the North are slightly working in parallel, but not always quite intersecting, if that makes sense. And that's actually one of the really interesting things about the end of the Roman period. Because in the earlier period, there was much more connection between the South and the

North. So there was pottery and probably other kinds of commodities being extracted from the South and sent North. So we have pottery made in Dorset or in the Thames Estuary that turns up on Hadrian's Wall in the second and third centuries. That changes in the fourth century and the connections to Hadrian's Wall become much more localised. So that's an interesting thing. Rob, I suppose the other thing that's exciting about this is we've already talked about boxes, and we've introduced a new set of boxes. So we've introduced the civilian elite in the south, the military elites in the north. But of course, people can move between those. So you can be an army officer on Hadrian's Wall, but also transform yourself chameleon-like into a member of the civilian elite as well. You can run the garrison at South Shields and ride to your villa

in B-Dale in North Yorkshire, change clothes and be a member of the civilian elite in Yorkshire and serve on the town council. So there's that complexity as well. Yeah, absolutely. The thing to bear in mind that really underscores both James and I's interpretation of the end of Roman Britain, the fall of Roman Britain, are those super structural changes in the Roman Empire. It was extremely expensive to run the late Roman Empire. The emperor and his ministers were constantly thinking, how do we make this work financially? And so one of the ways they did that is partly by creating those separate boxes, by trying to make smaller provinces. They're partly creating smaller, slightly more economically self-sufficient areas so

that tax doesn't have to move as far. That reduces transport costs. And so actually what that does is potentially creates a little bit more regional sustainability, or if not outright self-sufficiency. And so that sets the conditions really for when the fall happens, that actually what you get are a series of different stories depending on particular provinces, particular areas. What I find just so interesting about that, as a Joe Bloggs looking in, is that sometimes you envisage, and it may well be a myth of this idea of, you know, raiders from the north, they're crossing Hadrian's Wall, they're able to get past the wall, the frontier, and then

there's a lot of instability in the north. But it sounds like also at this time, if there's this kind of permeable boundary between civilian life and military life, even in the north as you mentioned like that person going down to become go on the town council or something like that that even at this later stage in the that first decade of the fifth century does it feel that a northern border is quite secure that they've got contacts with you know people's further north in what they would do as barbaric and but things are with the soldiers that they've got left things are pretty secure and the economy all across the province whether they they're North or the South, seems to be pretty

strong at that time. I think this is maybe one of the areas where James and I have a disagreement in terms of how we interpret the sources and events. So an interesting fact, a starting point where we'll both agree, is if you look at the history of Roman Britain, the fourth century is the one century where you have the most recorded instances of conflict and violence, whether internal civil unrest or external from barbarian incursions and invasions. I think where James and I differ is how much we believe those things to have actually happened or to have been significant. Is that a fair statement, James? happened or to have been significant. Is that a fair statement, James?

Absolutely. I get worried about some of those events because they seem to be, I'm not saying they didn't happen, but sometimes they seem to have been embellished to burnish people's reputations. Such things never happen for politicians, James. I don't know what you're talking about. And just to highlight, these events are like, I'm guessing that, I remember there's like a great barbarian conspiracy or things like that when you get the peoples, either Irish raiders or from the Caledonians, the Picts, descending on Roman Britain. You get campaigns of Romans beyond the Wall, Stilicho and people like that, isn't it? And saying that all these Romans have to go to Britain and sort things out all the time because it's always in trouble. That's what you guys have kind of got differing views upon, I guess, the veracity of it.

Yeah, where to begin with this? differing views upon i guess the veracity of it yeah where to where to begin with this so so the the great conspiracy so-called the barbarian conspiracy takes place in 367 for a long time it's considered to be a fundamental horizon in our understanding of roman britain right every every fourth century bonfire was saxon raiders. It's known purely from some lines in a very good late Roman historian, a chap called Ammianus Marcellinus. And he is writing about how this chaotic situation in Britain in which the... I'll see if I can remember this rightly, Rob, you've set me right. But it's the Dux is besieged, isn't he? And the Count of the Saxon Shore killed, or is it the other way around? Yeah, the Count of the Saxon

Shore is killed in the Dux Britanniarum. The Dux, he says, not the Dux Britanniarum. The Dux, yeah. Is circumvented, I think. Circumvented, right. So this looks like a big deal. The man sent to sort this out is a chap called the Count Theodosius, who just so happens to be the dad of Theodosius the Great, who is the emperor when Ammianus is writing. I. And Valentinian I is so ill when this event is taking place. He's in North Gaul. He's so ill that the imperial court thinks he's going to die. And his son is very young. And it's clearly a really difficult point in court politics. And a series of generals get shipped off to Britain. And Theodosius is the last of those. And if you take a general from the imperial court and you put them in Britain, which is an island on the far side of the ocean, they're out of the way. And I wonder if actually

in 367, some of this was about getting ambitious generals out of the way in case the emperor dies, right? Because that could lead to civil war. And then Ammianus later on is embellishing that event to make the emperor's dad a great hero. That's complex. But if you read the texts and think about the context of those events, that might make more sense, actually, than this kind of great conspiracy. How do the Scots in Ireland, the Picts, and the Saxons get together and put their heads together and go, let's all raid at the same time? And how does the Count Theodosius restore this province-wide with perhaps at most 2,000 men? Okay, so that's where I come in with my objection and alternative interpretation.

So I totally accept James' political reading of the events, and I think it's very savvy and very accurate. But I would say there's a collision here, or entanglement, perhaps, between imperial politics and worrying about the emperor dying and civil war, but also a reality of not invasion, some very substantial incursions and raids, which are at least of a scale to be destabilizing. Now, let's start with the whole notion of conspiracy. Because James says, you know, how many of these Pictish, Irish, Saxon, Frankish, Jewish chiefs are getting together to have a council of war saying, on this day, we'll all launch together. That almost certainly isn't happening. There are contacts, however,

we know across the Irish Sea, across the North Sea, so that these different barbarian groups are not acting in isolation or ignorance of each other. So, I'm not saying that they have formed this perfect plan to attack Britain, but they don't just attack Britain. Northern Gaul is also cited as having suffered from piracy attacks. And what's important is that Ammianus Marcellinus, the writer, never actually says that it's a conspiracy that was plotted out or planned. And so, I think another reading of this would be that it's a conspiracy of fate, as it were, that just fate kind of happened to create this conspiracy in which all these things happened round about the same time. The other element here is that we're so used to thinking about barbarian invasion as really

large events, but something which, thankfully, because of the relatively peaceful times in which we live, we often forget the long-term impact of regular raiding and incursions. And if you think year after year, decade after decade, you know, you're going to lose some of your cattle to raiders. Someone is likely to be kidnapped. Your house is likely to be burnt. And whatever goods you have at that time are taken. That has a massive economic impact over the long term.

So even if it doesn't destabilize, it certainly limits growth and prosperity and all the good things we think about economically. And so you can see a situation where if you just have one bad summer from the Roman Britain perspective of, you know, the Picts have been particularly active and are raiding a lot the Scotty, which is what we called the Irish back then. Yeah, the Irish raiders are coming across the Irish Sea and hitting Western England, Northwest England, Wales and the Southwest. You know, Saxons and Franks and Jutes and Angles are raiding along the North Sea coasts, you know, Southeast England and Northern Gaul.

If it's just a particularly bad summer with a lot of raids, where the defense forces are stretched too thin, they can't respond fast enough. That can look like, when zoomed out from, or, you know, with the retrospective of history, that could look like a conspiracy. It could look like an invasion. And so, I think it doesn't make the barbarian conspiracy necessarily any less real or actually any less problematic. But it's this difficulty between, you know, understanding the realities of warfare and how that affects people on the ground, and our writers who are almost always focused

on imperial politics and the movers and shakers in the empire. You know, they're not telling us the perspective of the average farmer or the average town dweller. And so, while I very much agree with James's political reading of it from my kind of military archaeology take is that actually we consistently downplay how devastating raiding can be at a personal level and how you only need 10 out of 20 households, as it were, to really significantly impact any given locality. I don't think we're so far apart, actually, Rob. One of the other things to think about with raiding

is who's being raided and who's screaming the loudest. So if you're not used to it, you might make more noise when it happens to you. So small-scale raids in an area that hasn't been raided might be much more noisy in terms of response. We're back to our BBC weather report for the end of Roman brief. We are. It's interesting, isn't it? How do we interpret this? On the actual evidence for destruction, there aren't many buildings that are burnt down. And when they are burnt down, is that because of enemy raiding or is it because somebody kicked the lamp over

and this largely timber building caught fire? But also, would raiders really burn things down? Yeah. And just give away their position, right? So the archaeological evidence for raiding is really difficult. Yeah, extremely difficult. But I think this kind of leads me on nicely

to a key source of material that seems to really kind of explode at this time which is the amount of coin hordes that there are surviving and i know there are various different theories about them what do you think the likelihood is that maybe there is a bit of like could raiding could that explain and part justify why you get this increase in coin hordes at that time? Do you have different theories around that? I mean, what is your thinking around the coin hordes and kind of explaining them? The coin hordes are really exciting. I like a good coin horde.

So does Rob. Yeah, good stuff. Late Roman Empire has got a tri-metallic coinage, copper, silver, gold. In Britain, we largely get silver hards with a little bit of gold, quite a lot of copper hoards, but let's concentrate on the precious metals. So largely silver. A lot of those hoards terminate with coins of 402. They're pretty much the latest silver coins we get.

There are a few that are later. And thus, all of those coin hoards have been sucked into the first decade of the 5th century. There is some evidence, actually, that that pattern of hoarding stretches over many decades. So the TPQ, the Terminus Postquem, the date after which of 402, is just saying that those hoards were deposited at some point after 402. Some of those hoards could have been deposited in 410, 420, 430, 440, 450, 460 even. So that big spike of coiled hordes might be flattened. And then why are they deposited? Who knows? We can see from other situations, the English Civil War, that people do bury coithoards in times of

insecurity. The Second World War even, there was a Jewish refugee from Germany, I think fled to Cardiff and put all of his wealth into American gold dollars and buried them in his garden. And then they were dug up in the 1990s and his relatives were traced and they were returned to him right and he buried them in cardiff because he was worried the germans were going to invade so so clearly there is something there about coin hoarding and insecurity i wouldn't deny that but i think there are other things at play so burying valuables in the ground is part of a very long-standing social cultural practice in Britain. It starts way back in prehistory. And the other thing is what the great archaeologist Richard Rees once described as hearts and hedgehogs.

So the hearts we've dealt with, the Saxons sail up the river, they kill the Villa Roda, they rip his heart from his still beating chest and that's why he doesn't recover his silver hoard. The hedgehogs thing is our Villa Roda buries his silver coins, he's got a pet hedgehog, his friend Kovdob has a pet hedgehog, they drink a jar of potent mead and they bet on how far the hedgehogs can run the next morning the villarona gets up and he's mixed up the number of steps his hedgehog has run from the number of steps from the big oak tree

that he buried his coid hoard so when he goes to dig up his coid hoard he doesn't walk the right number of steps digs his hole in the wrong place, doesn't find his coin hoard. Archaeologists and metal detectors find it. Now that's a silly story that Richard invented, right? And he invented that to make students and people like me think really critically about our interpretations. But we don't know why those hoards were deposited.

We don't know why they werenordes were deposited. We don't know why they weren't collected. They weren't recovered. That's a major problem, major interpretive problem for us. earlier we were talking about how it's kind of an uneven a very uneven society right and at this time in roman britain there might be quite there might be economic stability further south the border there might be military issues further north it's a bit unclear surely those elites, and if they're going between the military and they have opportunities between the military and civilian life, there must be a high degree of corruption going on in Roman Britain, let's say between 400 and 410 in that early 5th century. I agree, there is corruption. But we also need to be aware that what we consider corruption by modern standards would be very different from what the Romans would consider corruption compared to just the natural order of things.

So, Roman law very clearly enshrines more privileges and freedoms for the powerful and wealthy. It's just a fact of life. You know, we live in a time where there have been more laws put in place to try and make things more equitable for people, even if we are still working on improving that. You know, for the Romans, that would have been ridiculous. You know, the nobility are superior. That's very clearly encoded in law. And so, when you take an office, it's fully expected that you will use the authorities and privileges of that office to enhance your own standing in Roman society.

So, the Roman expectation, and whether this is throughout the entire empire's history, the Roman expectation is that you will engage with what we, as a modern audience, would call corruption. That you will use your position to make extra wealth, to skim profits off the top, to redirect resource or government contracts to your friends. And that's not corruption. That's just the way it worked. And it was acceptable as long as the emperor got his due. And it was only then, if you were challenging the emperor's authority or taking away what the emperor should justly receive, that you were in trouble. Corruption, as Robert said, it was bread and butter. The idea of giving people envelopes stuffed with cash, bags stuffed with gold coins or silver coins to progress your

court case or whatever, that was just the way the world worked. It would be obscene in the Roman Empire to think of anything different, right? Of course, if you were wealthy, you could accelerate your court case through the courts by giving the judge a load of money. I mean, this was a society where confessions didn't work. They weren't admissible in a court unless torture had been used. So entirely contradicting our modern sense of human rights and injustice. There are virtually no human rights. I am a Roman citizen. That gave you some rights in the early period. In the late period, are you an honest man or a humble man? And the way you get treated

depends on which of those social statuses you have. If you're a humble man, corporal punishment, sometimes even death, honest men, they pay fines. Or get exiled if it's pretty severe. Or get exiled. Often to Britain, to be honest. So I think this is the other context here is that Britain in the late Roman Empire is not a happening cool place to be. It is, frankly, the back end of empire where exiles and undesirables could be sent absolutely britain is that bit of the harbor where the polystyrene cups and the rubbish collect yeah it's where everybody gets exiled it's just it's grim it's wet and misty

and it's beyond the ocean moving on i know it's much more complicated than just a simple chronology going through like 410 and then on from there but it's quite nice complicated than just a simple chronology going through 410 and then on from there, but it's quite nice for us to kind of work it this way. I mean, Rob, could you kind of explain, having done that backdrop of how Britain's not a very exciting place to be for Romans at that time, what are these big events that seem to grip Britain between like 407 and 410 that always seem very central to the story of the end of Roman Britain. Yeah. So, there's always this series of historical events that get brought up in any story of the end of Roman Britain. But I think actually my take on this is that this is

where we are not accepting the regionality of Roman Britain to full effect. And so, you know, this is something that historians quibble about. The exact date of the barbarian invasions across the Rhine, is it New Year's Eve of 406 or is it in 407? But in, let's say, 407, you have a substantial barbarian incursion across the Rhine that starts working its way through Gaul. And we're talking about many thousands of our barbarians. They're not there necessarily to conquer land and take over things. What they want is to be part of the empire and have a chunk of the sweet nectar that is imperial gold in good living. Okay?

So, you know, you can cast it as kind of more invasive refugees, if you like, in that sense. That sends Britain into a panic because Britain feels cut off from the imperial center. And in the Roman world, you need to be connected to the imperial court. And so, it raises three different usurpers, as it were. It declares its own local emperor, which is meant to fix the situation and make Britain part of the great Roman Empire again. And the first two of these do not succeed on the level expected by their supporters, who tear them down quite quickly. That's Marcus and Gratian. The third one, who happens to be named Constantine, is seen as a good omen because about a hundred years previously,

a chap named Constantine was made emperor in Britain and did pretty good. So, this new Constantine, who's called Constantine III, that has absolutely no relationship at all, familial to Constantine I or his son, Constantine II, is the one who succeeds. He takes an army with him to the continent, does some deals with the barbarians that he encounters in northern Gaul, and proceeds to make his case to be recognized as a legitimate emperor in the west. As these things often happen, it doesn't go well. He quite literally loses his head. There are internal betrayals from his own generals, as well as political maneuverings from the court of Honorius, the legitimate Roman emperor, who is maybe not all there in the head, if we're to be honest.

And so, you know, once Constantine III is dealt with on the continent, at that point, the Roman Empire is just a little bit busy dealing with the other barbarians. Britain's never kind of brought back into the imperial fold. In the words of Fleetwood Mac, it goes its own way. But that's political. And so, the challenge we have is while the political reality of that is the end of Roman Britain in 410, 411, the question then becomes, well, culture doesn't change overnight. So, how long does it take for the culture to change as Britain drifts further and further from imperial authorities? I suppose the other thing we have to throw into the mix here is the so-called

Honorian rescript. This is when Honorius allegedly writes to the cities of Britain and tells them to look to their own defence. Now, if that really is to Britain and not Bruttium... A region in Italy. A region in Italy, which doesn't look very different in the Greek that this text is written in. What Honorius was saying was not, oh, you're now independent, look after yourselves. What he was saying was, you've kicked out Constantine III's administration, look after yourselves until I get there, or my men get there. That letter has been fundamentally misunderstood, I think, in that context. Yeah, I'd agree. And I think the importance of that usurpation of

Constantine III, though, is that, and this is where I think that notion of the collapse, the fall of Roman Britain comes in. Constantine III is absolutely taking an army to the continent with him. But where are those soldiers coming from is the question. And so, traditionally, the interpretations that Constantine III takes all the soldiers from all across Britain to the continent. I don't think he does, because I'm not sure his authority is accepted across the entire island of, or at least the entire Roman diocese of Britain. We're going to get into nerdy bits here. We're going to, I'm going to point- Oh, please do.

This is the podcast to do it. Point to coins is the evidence here. So Constantine III is any good usurper and legitimate emperor does. As soon as you can, you make coins with your name on them. Constantine III issues coins in his own name. What's interesting is we only see those coins, we only really find those coins in Britain

in the south of Britain. They do not make it to the north of Britain. And I think those coins are the kind of kickback to his supporters. How nerdy do you want to go? Well, I'll just finish my point here and then we can nerd out. But I think the point that we don't see coins of Constantine III in northern Britain, in northern Britannia, I would see as kind of evidence, albeit negative evidence, that the Northern General, the Dux Britanniarum,

said, oh, F off to Constantine III. I'm not giving you any of my soldiers. Because we're not seeing any kickbacks and payments in Northern Britannia. We see them in Southern Britannia. And so, I think whatever army he takes is probably drawn from say the saxon shore and not from the duke's britanniarum's army in the north and hadrian's wall and so i think that creates very different circumstances for what happens after and just go to the saxon shore these are these military installations all across the coastline of england and the south and east of england yeah brancaster richborough and all yeah, yeah. So Rob sketched you a beautiful historical story, okay? The challenge really is that Dux Britanniarum in the north,

he might not have any coins of Constantine III, but he doesn't have any hen's teeth either, right? And that's how rare coins of Constantine III are, okay? So Constantine doesn't strike coins immediately. So he strikes no coinage in Britain. And that's different to an earlier usurper, Magnus Maximus, who does. He only strikes coins when he gets to Gaul. And his earliest coins don't turn up in Britain.

His slightly later coins, a tiny number do. And what's interesting about Constantine III is he goes to Trier in Germany. Great city. Highly recommend you visit. Great city. Lovely place. Excellent wine. Excellent wine.

Some nice Roman bits as well. Constantine goes to Trier because that is the old imperial capital in the West. And one of the problems is that the people in the northwestern provinces feel abandoned by Honorius and his court in Italy, in Ravenna, and Stilicho, his generalissimo. But that also feeds in, is the idea of having a local emperor who's going to look after the northwestern provinces. Interestingly, Constantine III features not one bit in insular histories.

So, Gildas doesn't talk about him. Nobody talks about him in Britain. He's completely ignored by people in Britain who write about this period later on in the early Middle Ages. It's very interesting to hear all that. James, keeping on you then a bit longer, because sometimes we hear about this idea that there's like a massive exodus of Romans and Roman elites from Britain following 410. The villas are completely abandoned. And we kind of touched on that earlier. I mean, but if it is actually a bit more obscure and if it's actually like maybe, is there an expectancy actually that the Romans will return. So should we not envisage that the higher upper levels of society, for instance in the South, just decide to leave en masse to the continent and great urban centres like Londinium

are completely abandoned? I mean, what do we think the reality is then behind that? Urbanism has probably been failing for 50 or 60 years. So the urban centres don't have the population in the early 5th century that they did. And I'm pretty convinced that urban life collapses at the end of the 4th century. It doesn't mean that life in towns, so activity in towns stops, but the idea that these are cities, they are abandoned. That's a fundamental change. The idea of elites leaving takes us back to later medieval Welsh texts. So they talk about migration to Brittany. That's an interesting origin myth for the foundations of Brittany.

Again, that could be another podcast. Let's not go there today. But we know that people in Britain expected the Romans to come back. Gildas, he tells us that people in Britain wrote to Aetius, consul for the third time, probably in the middle of the 5th century after 446. Aetius was a Roman general campaigning in northern Gaul and asked him to help them. And we also know, again, some of our difficult texts from the 5th century include things like the life of Saint Alban and Saint Germanus of Uxair's visits to Britain. But Saint Germanus of Uxair

visits Saint Alban's, right, to visit the shrine of the saint. And we only get that from a religious viewpoint, but he's doing that at the same time as Aetius is active in northern Gaul. So there are actually hints that the Roman state, through the Roman church, is trying to pull Britain back into its orbit in the early 5th century. If we had one line in a text that said Aetius had sent troops to Britain, we would have a completely different view of this period. We don't have that. So we can't say that that happened. But the 5th century is a very complex period. We think Britain's gone its own way in 410. I doubt many people in southern Britain thought that. I thought they were expecting the emperor to turn up. Well, not the emperor, but the emperor's generals to turn up and

reincorporate them back into the empire. Actually, James and I agree here. And I think this is kind of the crucial point really in the 5th century. And it won't be any one point because it's going to be something that's very individualistic down to individuals. But I think the real fall of Roman Britain or the real breakup of Roman Britain is when people begin to realize they're not going to become part of the Roman Empire again. And, you know, I think there's a stark difference here between, say, the North and the South. In the North, the benefits of empire is that if you have a particularly bad season of raiding or some serious incursions, you can write to, you know, the defense, you know, the Ministry of Defense in Gaul, meeting in Gaul, usually, and say, I need some reinforcements. I either need,

I need extra pay for my soldiers. It's been a bad year, we need extra food supplies. Can you send me 2,000 more soldiers, as it were, just for a year to kind of do some tidying up and securing the ground? That's lost in 410. And so, the question is, how long is it lost for? And at what point do those people who still hold the power, who would have been traditional Roman authorities, military officers, villa owners, town councillors, at what point do they start to realize, actually, you know what? We've got an opportunity here. You know, there is no emperor to knock us down or hold us in check. And I think it's that shift in the power dynamics that marks the real change for the end of Roman

Britain. But when does that happen? Does it happen all at the same time? Do you get one, you know, a few bold enterprising individuals who are like, yep, the emperor is not going to slap us on the wrist. I'm carving out my own kingdom, you know, and they get away with it, which encourages other people to do it. Or, you know, how does this play out?

And that's kind of, I think, the big question in the fifth century is when is it realized that the empire won't come back well let's have a look at that let's kind of explore that archaeology in in depth later now and i'll keep with you rob first and in the north of britain what do you think the archaeology is showing about i mean this realization starts to kick home for those soldiers who've been let's say manning hadrian's wall in the forts along it and just south of it as well. What does the archaeology show from this realisation hitting home and a need for transformation? There's a real clear archaeology for change in the Roman army. And I think that probably the clearest signal of this is that one of the buildings that you

find in every Roman fort is the granary, right? And the granary has been part of Roman military practice for hundreds of years. This is a building which is intended to hold supplies that, in theory, will feed the soldiers in that fort for a year. And whether that's one large building or two slightly middle-sized buildings, however they cut it, by the late 4th century, maybe around 400, maybe a little bit before, maybe a little bit after, there's this very clear change in that those granary buildings are repurposed. They don't remain in use as a granary, as a storehouse for food. So, the very way in which food is collected and stored is shifted. It's not about mass bulk supply and storage. They're using some other

method, you know. And so, actually, that's really intriguing. That's a really significant change. And this seems to be happening, I think, a bit before we see the end of Roman Britain, you know, because it's occurring alongside good levels, good quantities of the latest Roman pottery and, you know, there's still coins circulating. So we're still within that kind of Roman culture, Roman military culture. So that's a rather fundamental shift. That might actually be the final indication that finally, regional and local supply is working the way it should.

And so they don't need these bulk supply buildings. But it also suggests there might be a change in the way those garrisons have to operate. buildings. But it also suggests there might be a change in the way those garrisons have to operate because at Bert Oswald, for example, that granary transformation coincides with changing the use from storage to it being what we call a mead hall or a feasting hall, but effectively a space of social gathering. And in the first phase of one of these new halls built over a granary, there's a hearth in which a gold earring was found by the hearth, you know, suggesting that you have some of the more wealthy people in the site sitting around a fire chatting.

And so, I would say that at least in some of these changes at the forts are suggesting a change in style or the way a leader has to behave. Whereas a secure leader with Roman paideia behind them is only really having feasts with their broadly social equals or maybe as a favor to a client. If you're changing to a feasting situation in which you're the leader and you're hosting feasts, and it's probably not all your equals, you know, it's the soldiers, you're having to change the basis of your authority, right? You're feasting with the people you're ruling. You're building up more local support for your authority. And so, I think, you know, this is one of the things that's happening.

I think there's a realization that the late Roman army commanders can't necessarily rely on reinforcements from the emperor, that they're going to have to be more self-sufficient. And I think they're taking steps to reinforce their local stability, as it were. So it's almost as if these forces along the place like Hadrian's will become independent, maybe the wrong word, but nodes, chieftain in power. And it's always like they have a warband surrounding them kind of thing. So they're kind of basically trying to cement their own area of authority in this kind of disintegrating administrative world.

I mean, we can definitely read it as them going their own way and forming local warbands that are independent of imperial authority. But I think that's an ultimate destination they get to. This is partly a practice of how does the commander keep his garrison going in a situation in a time when resources might be scarce or are, you know, neighboring commanders at neighboring forts might be competing for the same resource. If you want to be optimistic about it, you can say they're trying to do their job. They're trying to hold to their duty of kind of security measures and concerns. If you want to be

a bit more pessimistic about it, you can read personal gain and growth and power into that. a bit more pessimistic about it. You can read personal gain and growth and power into that. But they're doing that, I suspect, because there's some sort of impetus to do so. It's just, what is the impetus? So I see the South actually as following a similar sort of trajectory. So you've got these civilian elites whose position is reinforced by the Roman state, either its law courts or ultimately the army. Now, in those circumstances, it's fine to say, me and my family live in this beautiful villa and we look down on all of you horrible, dirty people out in the countryside. In the 5th century, of course, life gets much more difficult. And we tend to see this as catastrophe. But I wonder, actually, if it's about the change in that ideology that the elite is using. So if you look down on your clients, the people working

your land, right, some of whom might actually be enslaved, you know, slaves. Some of them might be unfree, not quite the same as being a slave, but tied to the land. These are oppressed sections of society. In the 5th century, when those people realised that the Roman army isn't there, they might start getting a bit uppity right and we see this across the western empire there are groups called bagaudai and bagaudai almost seems to be synonymous with bandit nobody really knows what the bagaudai want they're low status they like burn people's houses and are horrible and the army has to chastise the Baghdadi in northern Gaul. They seem to be a sort of peasant jacquerie, right? They're just upset at having landowners

and paying rent, and they don't have any aims beyond not being oppressed and paying rent or tax or whatever. And I wonder if something similar is going on in Britain, right? So you've got problems with your clients. You've got problems with the peasants. You're also a landowner. So you live in a villa, but you might own many villas with many blocks of land. And of course, you are linked by marriage to other landowners. Okay. So you could imagine a situation where a villa owner in the early fifth century bands together with his brother or his sister-in-law and they block their

territory and they use their retainers and the people they you know the bailiffs the people that must always always have used to keep their clients in line and they use their skills from hunting and other activities and what they do is they say okay we're not gonna emphasize our distance from all these people what we're going to do emphasise our distance from all these people. What we're going to do is we're going to bring the people we need, the metalsmiths, the people with martial skills, the people who can look after horses, all of the things we need, we're going to bring them in and we're going to live in a much, it will look like a much more egalitarian way. And we're going to live in a much, it will look like a much more egalitarian way.

And we're going to bring, rather than have critical technologies dispersed across our landscapes, we're going to bring those to the villa. So what you see in villas at the end is something we call squatter occupation. And these are ovens, metalsmithing hearths these sorts of things it's scruffier occupation and everybody goes oh the villa owner's cleared off and this is like horrible people living here but actually it's repurposing that elite building and it's probably if you took those skills the metalsmith the people who look after the horses the miller yeah all those kinds of skills if you take those and you put them on top of a hill fort at the end of the fifth century right and stick a welsh prince with them you would have a princely

court so you could imagine a situation where that ideology of Paideia dissipates and is replaced by that kind of martial ideology associated with lordship. And of course, some of those villa owners will hire people who are able to enforce their power. Some of those people might be Saxon barbarians, right? Some of those villa owners won't do any of those things and will probably meet a sticky end, right? It's not every villa, it's not every villa owner, but you can see a situation where some of those villa owners, their grandchildren could emerge in the 6th century in Somerset, hanging out in a timber hall on top of Cadbury Castle, drinking mead, listening to bards, and also genuinely sitting

there, surrounded by their warriors, with their priest by their side, saying, I'm a Roman and I'm a magistrate. Because they I have that memory, right? We'll look at them and think you're an early medieval warlord, but they will say I'm a Christian, I'm a Roman, I'm a magistrate. My great-grandfather was a magistrate. My great-great-grandfather saw Constantine ride to war, right? I'm a Roman. And we'll look at that and think this is early medieval barbarism. And we can see that in Wales in the early Middle Ages, where you have these class one inscribed stones that have the Latin names, the Latin titles. It's quite difficult to understand really how that happens in what we

would think of as the least Romanised and inverted commas part of the province. But that's one of the ways, right? You cling on to those bits of romanitas into the early Middle Ages. And that's not so different from Rob and his warlords on Hadrian's Wall. But it is just really interesting, isn't it, how for those elites it's almost adapt or die. If you don't

adapt, the lower people who have been working under you, they're not going to be under you for any longer and they'll revolt and they'll they'll get rid of you and your your whole family and memory is all gone or you adapt and then you become almost it almost feels like the rise of militarism again across the whole of roman britain as you say not just hadrian's wall and it's interesting to say about in hillfort further west you have the revival of hillforts in the end this iron age symbol comes back as a center of power for those further west so it is extraordinary how overall you do see over

those decades following the beginning of the fifth century the whole militarization of the whole of that form of provinces one of the things we learn but we still have to struggle to remember is not to project backwards hindsight is 2020 is 20-20. So, we can see the full story unfolding. But when you interpret, you have to try and interpret from that time moving forward. And you kind of have to think, what choices do individuals have to make? What are their options? And we can think of this actually in present-day circumstances. You know, we are all now currently living, geographically residing in a failed empire. I don't think the average modern Brit thinks about living in a failed empire, but we're a century after the kind of collapse of the British

empire. For us in modern Britain, it's relatively comfortable, but we're at the center of the empire. The failure of the British empire in Pakistan or India had very different implications. And so I think that's the other thing, you know, where you are relative to the centers of power, to security, to stability, as much as empires can be a very bad thing, very hierarchical, very exploitative, there are also other benefits. There often is more economic centralization, job specialization, where you've got more specialized crafts. In the 5th century, some of those choices, some of those options may have been removed. And so, people are making decisions based on what was available to them at the time. generations previously, a villa owner may have said, you know what, I'm going to build a new wing on my villa with some new mosaics. In the 5th century, they may have had to take that wealth they had and think, you know what, I'm going to increase the size of my armed retinue, you know,

my bodyguards, who will help protect what I have of my estate. And so, it's partly about choices with the resource available. and we should think about the common person in this as well, right? The average agricultural producer probably led a pretty miserable life in Roman Britain. They worked hard, they ate well, and they had some material goods, state of material wealth that people in Britain probably wouldn't see in many cases for another thousand years. They had lots of stuff, but they worked hard and they were at the bottom of the social hierarchy, subject to arbitrary violence from their lord, from the courts. Some of them probably were enslaved, some of them probably were unfree, tied to the land with very few choices. And what they did was they grew grain. They grew grain to feed the towns, to make money for their lord, to feed the

army. Now, in the early medieval period, a lot of that goes away. You don't need tax anymore because you haven't got an army. You might be able to get rid of your lord, or you might be able to give your lord less stuff, and he only turns up once every other year because he's got to ride round and collect the stuff himself from you. So there is some evidence that for the average person, the end of the Roman Empire might have been quite good, right? There's some evidence that people in the early Middle Ages are a little bit taller, and that's a proxy for diet in childhood. So you're not paying tax, you're not subject to the arbitrary whims of your landlord or the Roman state. You might be subject to being enslaved by an Irish raider or a Saxon raider or a Pictish raider or the guy who's calling himself king in the valley next door.

That might be a problem. But of course, you could also band together with your mates and stab those people if they come and give you any trouble. So we see the end of the Roman Empire as a catastrophe, the end of a civilization, the fall of a civilization, don't we? But who for? It might have been for some people. Some of those villa owners, it might have been absolutely catastrophic. Some of those army officers,

absolutely catastrophic. Some of those peasants, yeah, they might have wound up being carted off into slavery like St. Patrick. Others might have found themselves rather better off and able in a few generations to do a bit of trade, have a chat with those newcomers who speak in a funny language, who live beyond the woods. And then you wake up in 600 and everybody's speaking old English, Believe that they all travelled across the North Sea in the 5th century. And that's one of the ways cultural transformation could take place. So you have Germanic migration, you have the introduction of that new language,

those new architectures, new material culture, and how that then feeds into some elements of society that might have turned their back pretty much on all that roman stuff and they're just leading their lives james that's a great point and that kind of leads me into the last kind of question before completely wrapping up i mean talking about the kind of these germanic migrations and the whole nature of them that's i mean that's a topic for another podcast in its own right. But something interesting you highlighted there.

So several decades after the Romans supposedly leave from like around 410, and that has dawned on them that the Romans aren't coming back. And actually for many people, it may well have been a good outcome. Because of that, I mean, how much Roman industry, Roman practices, I mean, how much of that really does endure? My mind instantly thinks of Christianity, but in regards to other things, whether it be pottery or Latin in everyday secular activities, does any of that endure at all or is it all kind of subsided by these new cultural influences that come to Britain in that century? That's a really good question. How am I going to answer that? I think I'll start by saying

language. What were people speaking in lowland Britain in the late Roman period? Were they speaking a form of Celtic or were they speaking a late Roman dialect? Were they speaking both? late romance dialect? Were they speaking both? So what of that is submerged? We don't have many Celtic loanwords into Old English. That might be because the population is largely speaking a late romance language. So we see all of that disappear. We see a fairly fundamental linguistic shift. That takes a long time. You get into the 7th, 8th centuries, the Anglo-Saxon law codes talk about Welsh speakers. Religion stays, right?

If you study the religious side of this, Christianity in the 5th century, Britain is right at the forefront, actually. There's quite a lot of interesting things going on around Pelagianism and Gildas' response to that and all the rest of it. We tend not to think about that because it's not rulers and battles and all the rest of it. As for the industry, yeah, there are fundamental changes. You can see that in the Greenland ice caps. You can see the fall of the Roman Empire and the atmospheric pollution falling out. You can see that the amount of heavy metals in the air declines in the late

Roman, early medieval periods. So clearly there are fundamental changes in the things people are using. Pottery production probably goes on a bit longer than people think, but pretty much ceases, except for new, handmade, domestic Anglo-Saxon styles. Metalwork? Well, early medieval England is full of metalwork. All of those Anglo-Saxon brooches are Roman objects that have been melted down and turned into something new. Now that might be, you know, Germanic settlers picking bits of scrap up off of abandoned Roman sites, or it might be you taking granny's bag of trinkets to the metalsmith and saying, I need something more fashionable. Some of the other things carry on probably without much upset. Iron smithing.

We don't have a lot of iron work from the early medieval West, but it's clear that people continue to iron smith, probably not on the same scale. So Cadbury Castle, we've already talked about, the early medieval rampart there has no nails in it, right? But people can still make metal objects. They can still make iron weapons and tools, woodworking, leather objects, textiles, all of that kind of stuff is still going on. This was not a dull, grey period. This was a period in which people's homes were probably carved and painted and adorned. It wasn't quite as unpleasant sometimes as our idea of medievalism is.

I think alongside that, though, we also have to remember all the intangible, non-material aspects of a culture. Often, those are the things that tend to survive. They're the family traditions. They're superstitions and religious practices. There's a very, very substantial book, you could use it as a doorstop, but a very, very interesting book, The Early Middle Ages, written by Chris Wickham. And he tried to take a very zoomed out view of how we went from the Western Roman Empire to the Early Middle Ages. And one of the interesting things that I took from it, at least, is how actually all across the former Western Empire, there were certain bits that were retained culturally. And so, for example,

within Spanish culture, they retained a lot of the pomp and ritual of the Roman Empire. Now, it got incorporated into the Spanish church and into the Visigothic royal courts, but it was still very much the same ritual and kind of emphasis on ritual, but adapted for these new circumstances. And so, what you see is different parts of the Roman Empire retaining certain elements of its culture, but making choices. Certain things have greater resonance than others. And so, things like the bards that we hear about in the royal Welsh courts in the early Middle Ages, you know, we know that Roman elite retained poets and musicians as part of their local court, their entertainment. You know, that's not necessarily

an early medieval Celtic West thing. That's very much a Roman thing, just with a new language. So, there are all sorts of things that maybe don't come out in the archaeological record, but that are intangible cultural traditions and inheritances that get adapted as well. And so, in some ways, you know, we can say we never really lose the past, we never cut off from it. It's just it evolves and changes and morphs in ways that we don't recognise. But, you know, we can draw a direct line, perhaps. Can I talk about small pigs, Rob?

Of course. I feel like this is a good topic to start, yeah, as we wrap up to talk about small pigs, if we go on full circle. So, small pigs are really interesting. Years ago, I wrote a very obscure article, which was called Rethinking the Small Pig Horizon at York Minster. Clearly not a bestseller. But under the cathedral in York is the headquarters building of the Legionary Fortress. In that building, Constantine the Great was probably elevated to the imperial throne in 306.

This was one of the hearts of the Roman province. throne in 306. This was one of the hearts of the Roman province. And in the early Middle Ages, people went to that building and episodically did metalsmithing, but also ate lamb and juvenile pigs, piglets. Suckling pig. Suckling pig. Very delicious. And elite Roman foodstuff. So you can imagine a situation this is the remembered thing right where in the fifth century in yorkshire you're doing whatever it is you're doing raising your sheep growing your crops raiding your neighbors right waving your spear and generally being early medieval and then maybe you and all your mates i don't know at high summer or at christmas or at the Equinox

or whenever, you all go into the crumbling ruins of the Roman fortress, into this building at the centre, this huge monumental building, and you walk into this echoing abandoned building and you spend a day or two eating small pig, suckling pig. You cook small pig, people do a bit of metalsmithing, you listen to stories, and you pretend that you are a Roman. And that is the early Middle Ages. Somebody once said to me, the early Middle Ages is nothing but people LARPing as Roman emperors,

live-action role-playing as Roman emperors. And that's, you know, when you get to Sutton Hoo, you can see that as well. The guy buried there, a little bit of that burial is all about pretending to be a Roman emperor. I'm really grateful for all of your time. We've covered so much and we could cover still so much more, but I think we should wrap it up there because this is a mammoth episode in its own right. Do either of you have any last words you would like to mention about the end of Roman Britain that you would really like to get across or kind of restate as being really important when we approach this topic?

I would summarise with, say, three key points. One is the end of Roman Britain is not a single event. It's a whole series of kind of local events that accumulatively add up to the end of Roman Britain. The other thing, and I suppose this is my Hadrian's Wall frontier northern military bias coming through, but don't just assume the army is wandering off. That's the reason why everything falls apart. You know, it's all about personal choice at the end of the day, what you're doing. And then third and final is that it was the end of one time, as it were, but the beginning of another. And actually, the things that happen in that in-between times are really fascinating, really incredible stories that emerge at a villa site, at a hill fort, at a Roman fort, at a small farm. Any given site tells a truly interesting tale.

I would say, leave your preconceptions at the door. If you want to study this period, all of the things that you've grown up with, all of the things that you've grown up with, all of the stories that you've grown up with, you're going to have to try and put aside and look at the evidence in different ways. And that allows us to tell different stories about the early Middle Ages. And that's where the fascination is.

Absolutely, it's so exciting. Well, both, you've been brilliant together like a tennis match it's been fascinating to kind of oversee as the umpire for it as we've tackled this great topic for the last hour and a half or so it just goes to me to say thank you both for taking the time to come on the podcast today it's been a real pleasure thank you very much it's been great it's been a pleasure well there you go there was dr. Rob Collins and Dr. James Gerrard explaining all things The Fall of Roman Britain. It was such a joy to listen to both of them

respond to each other as they address this very complex topic. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Last thing from me, wherever you are listening to The Ancients, make sure that you are subscribed, that you are following the podcast so that you don't miss out when we release new episodes twice every week. That is enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.