Romans in Post Roman Britain-Could You Keep Your Lifestyle?

[coremelt]

@Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor

Details, details, mere details…cite?

Link?

Image link?

File:Casale Bikini.jpg

History of the bikini

from the Diocletan period (286 AD)

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

@coremelt

File:Casale Bikini.jpg - Wikipedia
History of the bikini - Wikipedia

from the Diocletan period (286 AD)

Truly, the Romans were civilized.

[SlowMindThinking]

@blindboyard

I’d only refer you to the standard histories, primarily the Oxford university series on the history of England, I merely interpret them differently to yourself. I’d say the collapse of the money economy isn’t a particularly bas thing, and in any case didn’t last long as the Anglo-Saxons had the greatest tradition of coinage in Dark Age Europe. The Mediterranean was always full of pirates, there’s even a defeat of the Roman navy by pirates in the pro-Roman history of Josephus, at the height of the Empire’s power. And that lasted right up to the days of the barbary pirates. Mathematical skills weren’t too good amongst any race using the system of Roman numerals. And I’d say a society with low numbers of slaves, folk moots, local laws and relatively distributed land ownership, such as early Anglo-Saxon nations of the misnamed heptarchy, are more democratic than the military imperial domination and tribal/city councils of landowners and slave owners favoured by the Romans. Of course Anglo-Saxon and contemporary Welsh dynasties weren’t very stable anyway, despite the assurances of the Chronicle.

And the Romans had water mills, but in hundreds of years the villa owners didn’t bother building them, while in the next few hundred years plenty of saxon thegns and gesiths did so.

I take issue with some of your claims. The Greeks had a very similar numerical system to the Romans, and Archimedes damn near invented calculus. The literacy rate in the Roman Empire at large was much more literate than that of Europe in the early Middle Ages, shortly after (and before) Rome fell. The Dark Ages can be considered dark because there is almost no written record from within them, and not much is darker within Western Europe than post Roman England. The re-establishment of Christianity within Anglo Saxon Britain was important because it at least established a literate veneer, and that helped Anglo Saxon Britain develop a more sophisticated civilization than their continental peers, but then their continental peers could be considered to have undergone one long, slow, sad decline interrupted only by the Carolingians, until the High Middle Ages.

That said, I agree, it was a good thing that the Roman Empire disappeared, for the reasons you state, and it also permitted the establishment the much more dynamic and freer civilization of the High and Late Middle Ages.

[NDP]

@SlowMindThinking

That said, I agree, it was a good thing that the Roman Empire disappeared, for the reasons you state, and it also permitted the establishment the much more dynamic and freer civilization of the High and Late Middle Ages.

Of course that took many years to arrive. In the period and just after the decline of the Western empire, the standard of living was pretty dire in Britain for a few hundred years.

[griffin1977]

The FT has this comparing the current recession to the end of Roman Britian. They describe it as effectively as 1600 year recession:

Under the Roman empire, the province had benefited from the use of a sophisticated coinage in three metals – gold, silver and copper – lubricating the economy with a guaranteed and abundant medium of exchange. In the first decade of the fifth century new coins ceased to reach Britain from the imperial mints on the continent, and while some attempts were made to produce local substitutes, these efforts were soon abandoned. For about 300 years, from around AD 420, Britain’s economy functioned without coin.

Core manufacturing declined in a similar way. There was some continuity of production of the high-class metalwork needed by a warrior aristocracy to mark its wealth and status; but at the level of purely functional products there was startling change, all of it for the worse. Roman Britain had enjoyed an abundance of simple iron goods, documented by the many hob-nail boots and coffin-nails found in Roman cemeteries. These, like the coinage, disappeared early in the fifth century, as too did the industries that had produced abundant attractive and functional wheel-turned pottery. From the early fifth century, and for about 250 years, the potter’s wheel – that most basic tool, which enables thin-walled and smoothly finished vessels to be made in bulk – disappeared altogether from Britain. The only pots remaining were shaped by hand, and fired, not in kilns as in Roman times, but in open ‘clamps’ (a smart word for a pile of pots in a bonfire).

[Mississippienne]

I decided to look at The Ending of Roman Britian (2000) by Dr. Simon Esmonde Cleary to get an idea of what life was like as Roman civilization in Britain crumbled.

Cleary cites evidence that villas, town houses, and baths were being abandoned, presumably as Romans and their cohorts fled during the later part of the 4th century. He also states that there’s evidence that similar declines took place around the same time in Gaul and the Rhineland. The situation had become dire during the early part of the 4th century; Alamanni, Vandals, and other Germans teamed up to attack Gaul in late 406, forcing Constantine III to go on the offensive. He was moderately successful for a few years until the Roman commander Constantius beseiged him at Arles, captured him, and had him executed. We know from literary evidence that the Britons and Gauls had also rebelled against their Roman masters in 409, driving out Roman officials. In 410 Britain was attacked by Saxons, and the emperor Honorius wrote to the poleis, or cities of Britain, telling them to arm themselves. The emperor seemed powerless to actually assist the Romans in the area.

We know from The Life of St. Severinus that the titular saint came to Noricum Ripense (now part of Austria) in 452 to find there were scarsely any *limitanei *(Roman frontier infantry) still guarding their garrison. The soldiers stated that their payment had stopped, and the soldiers sent to Italy to see about getting it reinstated that been murdered en route by barbarians. As a consequence, the garrison wittled away to almost nothing. Probably something similar happened to the *limitanei *in Britain.

By the mid-440s, Britain was under seige by the Saxons. In 446, the Britons appealed to Aetius, the last effective Roman commander in Gaul:

“To Aetius, thrice consul… The barbarians drive us to the sea and the sea drives us back to the barbarians. Between these two types of death we are either slaughtered or drowned.”