Shedding a bit of light on Dark Age Britain

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For a long time, pretty much anyone who paid attention to these things agreed that after the Romans left Britain, Anglo-Saxon invaders flowed in, the economy collapsed, trade withered away, and ignorance twined its thorny tendrils around the land. Roman cities and villas were abandoned and everybody proceeded to live in misery. 

That period was once known as the Dark Ages, although the name’s gone out of fashion, and if I’m reading the tea leaves correctly, that image of collapse is headed toward the same fate. 

Irrelevant photo: field and fog in September

 

Challenging the orthodoxy

The first challenge I stumbled across was Susan Oosthuizen’s. As she reads the period, the withdrawal of the Romans also meant the end of taxes and goods being siphoned off to Rome. People were able to keep more of what they grew, made, and mined. It’s true that in places land that had grown crops was converted to pasture, and that’s often cited as a sign of collapse, but she sees it as a kind of luxury. People could afford to do that now.

As for the invaders, she looks at the way land was used and finds that people were farming much of the same divisions of land in the same ways. That doesn’t speak to invaders swooping in and changing things to suit their needs. It speaks to immigration and accommodation. 

She paints a picture of immigrants and native people integrating themselves into a shared culture. If you look at their burial grounds, the only way to tell Anglo-Saxons from Celts is to test what’s left of their skeletons, looking for both their DNA and indications of where they grew up–something that’s only been possible recently. They were buried the same way and their grave goods show that their social standing wasn’t defined by which group they came from. 

We might do better to think of we’ve called the Anglo-Saxons as a culture, not an ethnicity or set of tribes.

The tests also show that they weren’t living in isolated communities. They had connections from as far afield as Byzantium and West Africa. That speaks to trade.

Forgive me for referring you to myself as if I was a sober historian–I am sober but a historian, sadly, I’m not. Still, I can’t link to her entire book and I wrote a bit more about some of this here.

 

So what survived after the Romans left?

Well, take Isurium Brigantum, now called Aldborough, in Yorkshire. The area’s rich in silver, lead, and iron, which set Roman noses a-twitching, and they–that’s the Romans, not the noses–set up a regional capital there. 

To see how much mining went on before and after the Romans picked up their toys and went home, Martin Millet, an archeologist associated with the site, looked at pollutants in the mud beside the river Ure. What he found was that instead of mining either ending or dying back when the Romans left, lead levels–the pollutant mining left behind–rose for the next two centuries. 

For later centuries, the lead levels paint an unsurprising picture of mining rising and falling to match wars, plagues, and kingly politics. The one surprise was the absence of a post-Roman collapse.

Still, some things may have collapsed. Isurium Brigantum was a walled town, and it may or may not have continued to be used, but the Roman villas with their mosaics fell into ruin, and archeologists have found the predictable coins, jewelry, and broken glass and pottery nearby. Websites for the site talk, justifiably, about the sophisticated design and decoration.

You can see collapse in all that if you like, but mining–that measurable activity–continued, but it was integrated now into a different kind of economy, one where for a long time coins were fairly peripheral. 

As for art, the Anglo-Saxon taste in decoration was different, but they weren’t without skill.

 

Yeah, but those abandoned villas . . .

The abandoned villas get mentioned as a sign that culture took a nosedive and everything was mud and misery. Who, after all, would voluntarily abandon plumbing and under-floor heating to live in a hovel? 

Not the person who posed the question, but back away for a minute and remember that very few people in Roman Britain owned villas or had plumbing and underfloor heating. That was the elite, the some-very-small percent. True, some larger number of people lived in or around villas as servants and slaves, but most or all of them would’ve been servicing the plumbing, not enjoying it. Someone had to keep the fires stoked if those hypocausts were going to work.

So asking who would voluntarily abandon plumbing and underfloor heating is sort of like asking if we, the world’s current population, would voluntarily abandon our luxury superyachts. For 99.someverylargepercent, that wouldn’t be a hardship. We don’t own them and never will. It’s not impossible to imagine a reconfiguration of the world’s resources that would leave the superyachts and all associated possessions abandoned but everyone living better.

If you look at post-Roman society from a distance, you can notice the disappearance of cities and villas and see loss. If you look at it from some peasant’s doorway, though, the change just might look like an improvement.

24 thoughts on “Shedding a bit of light on Dark Age Britain”

  1. All of that makes sense and also shows how daft it is to say that things fell out of use because people no longer knew how to maintain them (which I was always taught and believed). It makes far more sense that they were the ones maintaining them and no longer had a use for them.

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    • Amazing the things we were taught and that most of us, at least, accepted, which once they get challenged make no sense at all. Of course the people at the bottom of the ladder were the people who maintained all that infrastructure. And were, no doubt, relieved to let it fall into ruin.

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  4. I’ve always believed that with the end of Rome you had more of a wealth redistribution and de-urbanization than abject poverty and massive population loss (where are the graves?). Some total wealth decline probably happened – you didn’t have an influx of capital from Rome to fund the spending of soldiers, bureaucrats, or the various businesses/services for camps and castra – but a lot of the wealth transferred from the very wealthy to those who had previously been less fortunate. Less evidence available – so far – for England than the continent but I don’t know why this overall pattern wouldn’t hold.

    Nice post.

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    • I think whether you call it decline depends on how you measure wealth. Measure it at the top and yes indeedy, folks, it’s decline. Measure it at the bottom or the middle and it’s going to look different. Measure the total wealth and I have no idea but you make a good argument about the influx of money to pay soldiers, administrators, and so forth. Still, if you balance that against the money and goods shipped out of the country to Rome– Well, we probably don’t have those figures, but I do have to wonder if you wouldn’t still find some gain from Rome’s withdrawal.

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      • The usual thing with empires, ancient or modern, collaboration, indifference or resistance, depending on how various groups were affected. Roman rule was no different and my guess is that a lot of the native population sighed with relief and got on with things in their own way once the occupation ended. There certainly was in my youth a tendency to view the end of the Roman empire as a light extinguished by the barbarian hordes, in spite of the Romans own nastier ways. I can’t find any reference to this but I have a vague recollection from the seventies or early eighties of the discovery of human faeces in the detritus on the floor of a room being excavated at Vindolanda. Shock horror, it must have been the filthy natives misusing the place, after the civilised Romans left. Maybe. Or maybe not. As I said, I can’t find any confirmation but I doubt I imagined it, it’s not something that would actually enter my thinking otherwise.
        Jeannie

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    • That was, I believe, the original idea of calling it the Dark Ages. I kind of like it for how evocative it is–and also because in junior high, when I first read the term, I asked our teacher what happened then (the textbook gave it one paragraph) and she said, “Nothing.” I’m still laughing over that, and it’s left me with a fondness for the era and the name, although I do understand why serious historians want to avoid it: people read all sorts of weird meanings into it.

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  7. And oh so gently you touch one of the central problems of the historical sciences, continuity, Kontinuität, Dauer.
    The humanists had ideas about this, the 19th century – when “die Romantik” invented not only the “Mittelalter”, but also the sciences (“Geschichtswissenschaft”, die Philologien) for this – the 19th century had the “Kontinuitätsprämisse” (Grimm), what a nice word, later the French had the longue duree (Braudel).
    Today “history” is again a means of politics, a tool for dictators, so “continuities” are constructed, invented or denied – it all depends on the “scientist’s” ideological point of view (think about the discussion about slavery in Trumpistan, think about “Memorial” in Russia, think of the official Chinese historiography).

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    • I can’t help thinking also about history as I was taught it in school in the 1950s, which in addition to being snoozeworthy was also basically propaganda. Not as bad as what Trumpian schools and museums would have kids learning, but still propaganda.

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      • I started a serious flirting with “history” in the 70s in Western Germany. We had interesting discussions with our teacher – and it all depends on the personality of the teacher in full. She allowed us a wide range, it was a very good training for the “Proseminar” at university. We were lucky.
        Nevertheless I left school with the impression that the centuries between “the end” of the Imperium Romanum and “the beginning” of the new, Christian age (800, Carolus Magnus) were a vast emptiness. They were not. I started to fill this void of knowledge only over the last few years. What e.g. played absolutely no role in our curriculum was Eastern Rome – but without an understanding of Byzanz / Constantinopel a lot of Western medieval history, especially in the later Italy, is hard to grasp.
        But still, Prague 1580 is much more interesting than any merowingian skull basher imho.

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  9. I was wondering 🤔 where would the Dark Ages appear on the Hex Color Code spectrum? I was thinking maybe #454545 or perhaps #3B3B3B – either light-black or on a sunny day, dark-grey? (“asking for a friend”)

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  11. I would also venture to say that what we would consider a hovel may have just been seen as “housing” back in the day. I think that sometimes we get so caught up in how awesome we think the Romans were that we lose track of how awesome other cultures were in different ways.

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