Just Finished Reading: Britain After Rome – The Fall and Rise 400 to 1070 by Robin Fleming (FP: 2010) [366pp] 

It was a long time coming but it was still a shock when the last legions left Britain around AD410. Trouble within the Empire with enemies both foreign and domestic meant that more and more often units were withdrawn from the edges of the known world never to return. Britainnia was on its own. Her problem was less enemies on the borders but trade across the narrow sea to Gaul and beyond. With the legions gone trade fell off a cliff. With trans-imperial trade now practically non-existent local industries and manufactures struggled without a local economy to support them. Before long internal trade collapsed and with it any urban areas designed primarily around trade and administration. Towns became strange ruins to future generations, mined for stone or other resources and, generally, shunned by all but the most curious. Life continued much as it had done before the Occupation and slowly, very slowly, micro-kingdoms sprang into being often headed by old families who harked back to the glory of Rome or those who could organise the local population for building or defence. 

In the centuries that followed, some micro-kingdoms grew absorbing the less able or unlucky neighbours and eventually became powers covering significant parts of England. Adaptive to change, coping with foreign immigrants, traders, raiders and invasions they finally faced their greatest threat in the Vikings. Initially losing whole swathes of the country to the Norsemen, the centuries long struggle saw first an accommodation and then an assimilation under a single English monarch. The economy, at first struggling under numerous assaults, became one of the strongest in Europe and a magnet for anyone willing to chance his arm (and often his head) on taking control of such a rich prize. Eventually a foreign invader succeeded and the rest, as they say, is history. 

Obviously, there’s no way that I’m going to sketch 600+ years of history in a few paragraphs so I’m not even going to try. Despite the dearth of documents during the early part of ex-Roman British history there’s still a lot we can tell about the conditions people lived in. Once Christianity is re-established and written records start showing up in relative abundance we can tell a lot more. Ironically this was the least interesting part of the narrative as I honestly don’t have any significant interest in early ecclesiastical history. To be honest I did skim a bit of the chapters discussing it.  

This was, quite deliberately, a history focused on the people digging in the dirt rather than the people wearing silk and eating eels – or as much as it can be considering that dirt diggers tend to leave rather less to study than the castle dwellers. But there are graves, always graves. Often the most interesting bits (for me anyway) were discussions of burials and grave goods – and most especially (in the last chapter most of all) the analysis of the people’s health conditions determined by skeletal evidence. I was quite astounded to read of areas were around 25% of children never made it to their 2nd birthday and in others where 40% of women were dead by their 25th year. It must have been a strange, sad, place with so many motherless children and so many parents still grieving (no doubt) over lost sons and daughters. Such grim statistics hardly changed – at least at the shallow end of the social economy until the 19th century. How lucky we are to live in the age of anti-biotics and enough food to eat. 

Despite being a rather slow read at times (more me than the author I think!) this was an interesting look into a period of Britain’s history I know very little about. I shall, no doubt, be returning to this era to see how much I can flesh out my pre-1066 knowledge further. Recommended.