< Main Page

Prelude

Introduction

This account was written to combine archaeological information with the historical framework and other evidence of the post-Roman period. Most of the important archaeological information is relevant to the earlier part of this period and concerns the people who were struggling to build a viable economy and put together a new form of government. Once that was achieved the archaeology is a less significant ingredient in the story and serves, together with other material, to add dimension to the bald historical narrative.

Bede, a monk of Jarrow monastery, the author of A History of the English Church and People written in AD731, is the most influential of the early historical sources and most historians seem to have less difficulty with him than do archaeologists.  Certainly he has produced a narrative that contains contemporary material that he was able to access from reliable authorities like Albinus, abbot of St Augustine’s Monastery in Canterbury, Northhelm, the priest who acted as the intermediary between Canterbury and Jarrow and Daniel, bishop of the West Saxons but when writing his earlier passages he relied on written sources like Orosius’s annals of ancient times, Gildas’ De Excidio at Conquestu Britanniae  (produced as a vituperative religious tract before 548) and Constantius, none of whom could be described as very reliable. The problem with these annalists. apart from their poor sense of chronology, is their credulity. They may relate some events that are perfectly rational but they also describe incredible things that they are ready to believe simply because they fit in with their pre-conceived religious notions or beliefs.

To give an example from Bede, who inherited these defects, in which he is describing an incident where St Germanus breaks his leg (Chapter 19):  ‘While they were returning from this place, the ever-watchful devil contrived that Germanus should fall and break a leg, not knowing that, like blessed Job, his merits would be enhanced by bodily affliction. While he was thus detained by illness, fire broke out in a cottage near his lodging and after destroying the adjoining buildings which were thatched with reeds, it was carried by the wind to the cottage where he lay. The people ran to pick up the bishop and carry him to a place of safety, but, full of trust in God, he reproved them and would not allow them to do so. In despair, the people ran off to fight the fire, but to afford clearer evidence of God’s power, whatever the crowd endeavoured to save was destroyed. Meanwhile the flames leaped over the house where the saint lay disabled and helpless, but although they raged all round it, the place that sheltered him stood untouched amid a sea of fire. The crowd was overjoyed at the miracle, and praised God for this proof of his power, while innumerable poor people kept vigil outside his cottage day and night hoping for healing of soul or body.

It is impossible to relate all that Christ effected through his servant and what wonders the sick saint performed. And while he refused any treatment for his own illness, he saw beside him one night a being in shining robes, who seemed to reach out his hand and raise him up, ordering him to stand on his feet. From that moment his pain ceased, his former health was restored, and when dawn came, he continued on his way undaunted.’ 

Bede is being perfectly serious here but does not seem to realise that Germanus is  shown up as an unpleasant and self-indulgent individual  nor that the Almighty does not come out too well, nor the Devil either, for that matter. For a serious writer of history to believe and solemnly set down this farrago of nonsense as an actual event undermines whatever trust one might have in much of the rest of his narrative.

In these circumstances one feels safer and perfectly justified in picking one’s own way through the information available for the earlier period, choosing those bits that seem to make sense as Bede did, but hopefully making a better job of it by abandoning the religious embroidery and using  a variety of other sources not available to him. If, in the course of this account, historians are infuriated by casual or too sweeping assumptions then it can only be said in mitigation that an archaeologist stands on slightly different ground although, hopefully, the aims of both practitioners are the same in the end.

Archaeologists in the main have tailored the interpretations of their material to fit the accepted historical narrative of the early period based largely on Bede so that the players in their enactments are Saxons and Angles and appear as hordes of migrants and/or invaders while the British  are relegated to ‘walk on’ or more often,’walk off’ parts. This notion that the curtain could fall after the end of the Roman period and rise again on an entirely new cast with old players swept almost entirely out of sight is frankly unbelievable as is the idea that thousands of newcomers could be transported across the North Sea from various directions in the small and unstable vessels of the time in order to make a number of concerted entries onto the stage.

A popular erroneous impression of the period is drawn from the poem ‘Boewulf’ which is Danish in origin and describes a society which was in a more primitive state of development than in contemporary Britain. A conflation of the picture it presents of a heroic life-style with that in post-Roman Britain gives the wrong impression of British life which had, however much diluted, a pedigree of law and bureaucracy. The story is likely to have been brought to Britain by Danish aristocrats some time in the Viking period, perhaps around 900 and written down in the form which we have it today around 1100 by a monk fascinated by its exotic character.    

During the late-Roman period, British society was a successful one; in its upper echelons wealthy and based on around a 200-villa production system which, in the end in the early fifth century, was undermined by the loss of its major customer, the Roman army. The towns, foreign imports grafted onto the British  body mainly as an administrative convenience, swiftly withered  but the agricultural land was still there in good heart, made so by several hundred years of commercial cultivation, and its potential for profitable use  remained. It is no surprise that urban British society, almost in its entirety, had to turn to the land, abandoning the towns without much regret together with many of the commercial crafts, and joining forces with those whose life-style had not much changed with the advent of the Romans. Their entrepreneurial instincts, nurtured by the Romano-British experience, survived and demand in Europe and the Mediterranean for British products - woollen cloth, slaves perhaps, and to a lesser extent, metals – allowed some commercial farming/industry and commercial metal extraction to continue.

Those whose life-styles had been changed less by the Roman occupation were in the west and parts of the north and in those areas we see that the withdrawal of Roman forces had a less traumatic effect and the life-style was hardly affected. Further east, especially in the villa region of south, eastern and midland Britain, the change in life-style was more marked, particularly to many students who explain it by reference to    foreign incursions without much question or without making attempts to find a more reasonable explanation. This results in the unsatisfactory scenario of having two nations inhabiting the same small island south of the Humber at the same time. Such a division seemed reasonable to Roman churchmen like Bede who were accustomed to seeing the west and north as the domain of an alien and extrinsic Celtic belief.

How was the bulk of the population accommodated during the Roman period?  In the west and north we have British individual settlements but in the villa region of Britain it is assumed that many people were accommodated in the villa complexes as they might have been in a large courtyard villa complex like that at North Leigh, Oxon, With the decay of these establishments the reason for such accommodation would have disappeared and the appearance of settlements such as those described in Chapter One would be the natural consequence of people having to find their own homes elsewhere. ‘Elsewhere’ does not seem to have been in the vicinity of the headquarters of the villa they had just abandoned as sometimes happened on the continent but elsewhere on the estate in dwellings in some cases gathered around a ‘hall’ belonging to their patron, perhaps a descendant of the erstwhile villa owner, while others apparently, as far as excavation is in a position to suggest, were lacking a prominente, or, at least one without a recognisable dwelling.

The traditional explanation by Bede and other early historians that a revolt by immigrants heralded their expansion into more westerly parts of Britain derives from  the realm of myth as does the identification of these people as invaders and the idea that the early ‘kings’ in eastern England were all Germanic war-lords. These extreme beliefs about incomers were without an adequate basis of evidence and are analogous to the extravagant notions that people in the twenty-first century have about incomers from abroad.

Continuity and, to some extent, unity was provided by the Church. Perhaps only a  proportion of the Romano-British population became serious converts to Christianity during the Romano-British period despite the establishment of  Christianity as the state religion in 380 by the Emperor Theodosius, but bishops were appointed almost certainly from the curias (town councils) or, if not, certainly from the curial class and we have evidence of churches in the more prosperous part of Britain. Further west there was probably less organisation and fewer converts but it is probable that, as in the eastern Mediterranean area, ascetic Christians sought solitary and desert places here to commune with God so the remoter parts of Wales and the south-western peninsula stood duty for the wilderness. Such people would have formed the nuclei around which the monastic system that is referred to as the Celtic Church took shape. As educated Romano-Britons, for British Christians would have come more readily from the ruling elite, they preserved the Latin tongue and literacy of their class.

After the exit of Roman troops, the leading citizens took over the role of government in the provinces which, without any centralising authority, soon broke up into individual segments under local leaders who were now without any regular form of income from the produce on their estates, but still with income that they could receive in the form of rents paid to them by tenants. There was probably a good deal of variation in the types of tenure at first but these would be gradually standardized during the following centuries. In time regional leaders appeared with territories that metamorphosed into the minor kingdoms of the early part of the post-Roman period.

main page
Resettlement rather than Settlement