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.