While it is very fair to note that the post-Romans were not as benighted as perhaps stereotype would have it, I believe it is also quite fair to hold that the period 500-1000 say a steep drop in what we might call urbane culture, as well as material sophistication.
The economy, of course long in decline, did indeed drop off a cliff in the Western Roman Empire region.
I disagree with you collunsbury, as by the late 9th century, you get Alfred the Great (and also his father) who was very cultured, having spent time in Rome and during this period was a patron of the arts and learning.
Also Coll your dates are waay too broad. As cited in an upcoming Stonehenge report to the SDMB I cite that the Romans left in the early part of the 5th century to go back to mainland and fight the now much stronger Barbarians.
English Heritage
BTW, I’ve been on digs in Wiltshire and seen helms, sherds and buckles radio-carbon dated to 300 A.D with roman symbols emblazoned on them. It is widely accepted in the scientific community that the Romans left rather abruptly to go back and defend interests closer to Rome.
Hedging, not like I have such references on my desk here. (Now on hedging…)
BTW again I believe it is correct to differentiate btw Roman forces leaving and Romans (who do we mean) in terms of a Latinized population leaving.
Super, however it doesn’t strike me as definsible to pretend that the collapse of Roman rule was a non-event or that economic and urbane material culture did not fall of a damned cliff.
Just compare production and economic activity in the Islamic world or Byzantium to the Western region. I understand full well the desire to counter exagerated stereotypes but it seems to me there is no small overcorrection in pretending the chaos that followed the disinteregration of Roman rule did not knee cap material culture.
Definsible…
My objection was that you said that culture in Britain was in decline between 500-1000 AD, when I would say that Alfred’s (the archetypal philospher-prince) court , which was heavily influenced by Roman ideals, showed that the recovery started alot earlier than 1000 AD.
Well late 9th century makes it ~850 AD which is 350 years after 500 and 150 years before 1000 so I’d say the “alot earlier” makes little sense.
Besides how transient was the “flowering” of Alfred’s court? Did it last past his reign?
Well, Alfred (who was bon in 849 and reigned from 871-899)didn’t get the title ‘the Great’ for nothing, he was responsible for the birth of England as a nation and most lists of kings and queens of England start with his name (Though it was Offa (757-796) of Offa’s dyke who first claimed the title King of the English, though at this time it was more of a symbolic title). His rule can certainly be seen as a golden age for the Anglo-Saxons but his acheivments had a long term effect on the country as he established schools and centres of learning(legend has it that he founded Oxford University) and he personally translated several books from Latin into Anglo-Saxon.
Fine, I am looking at things from an aggregate perspective. I do not see one King or even a recovery at the court as quite the equivalent of the broader socio-economic structure of the Roman period (abstracting away from variations and long term decline in 4th and esp 5th centuries)
While I defer to more precise knowledge, my point really devolves the observation that the collapse of the Roman system, which permitted -by virtue of security if nothing else- a sustained level of broader based urban and urbane culture, destroyed an ability to sustain the same on a broad basis.
One may very well point to the diamonds in the rough and all that, as well as point out that the “barbarians” cultures were not perhaps as grotesque as Roman snobbery might have had it, however to the point of what seemed to be ralph’s question, maintenance of that urbane culture, w/o the Empire, things fell apart and did not get up again to the same or similar level for a very long time.
from here we get a view of the decline.
and the monk Gildas goes on to say this of the 6th century Britain
“Nobody wants to be under the influence or domination of a foreign power and be forced to learn entirely new customs. The first thing a population is going to think of is to rid itself of the invaders.”
Hello…Operator…get me Bagdad on the line…Oh, I don’t care…anyone will do…
Tell that to the Anglo-Saxons living in the Danelaw ;). For all of Alfred’s achievements, it is a little too easy to overestimate his success. He was an outstanding ruler and there is an amazing wealth of material from his reign, compared to most other Anglo-Saxon monarchs. But really England in 899 was in much worse shape than it had been in 850. A lot of this was due to the Vikings, but some of it was probably internal to the struggle in England itself ( for example in the mid-9th century we see an increase in debased coinage in east, even before the Viking conquest ). And things didn’t exactly brighten substantially after his death. The period between 871 and 955 were ones of continual warfare with and gradual reconquest from the Vikings. There was a substantial re-blossoming under Edgar, then things went to crap again ( in a relative sense, anyway ) under Aethelred II.
Rather than a steady pace of decline and recovery, what we see is that both preceded in fits and starts. For example in the early 7th century we saw broader political control over the island by assorted bretwaldas ( admittedly transitory from individual to individual ), compared to the late 7th century.
I’d actually rank his political ( unification ) and administrative ( the *burh[/] ) achievements over the intellectual in terms of long term successes. Though the intellectual achievements of his court are certainly not to be poo-poo’ed.
But in a loose sense, overall, I roughly agree with Collounsbury, with the caveats ( not necessarily disagreements ) that:
a) the decline of the Western Roman Empire was a slow and protracted affair, rather than sudden and
b) the decline in the west was not only slower than is commonly thought, it probably was not as complete as the popular notion.
However by the same token, revivals by folks like Alfred and particularly Charlemagne are a bit overrated in the popular imagination IMHO. They did not lead to dramatic improvements, but incremental ones ( if that in the case of the Carolingians ) and regardless Western Europe was still pretty darn backwards relative to the East until at least the 12th or 13th centuries ( or later, depending on area and what measure bof comparison we use ).
Some argue that nothing happened to the Romans in Britain and that there was cultural continuity up to the time of Alfred.
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba68/feat1.shtml
I think it is undeniable that Roman material culture began to collapse once the last legions left. IIRC, Britain was a net drain on the Roman treasury. Roman material culture in Britain in the third and fourth centuries was largely made possible because of wealth chanelled from Rome. Once Rome was no longer pumping coinage into the province and helping to pay for its defense, the status quo became impossible to maintain. Hence, for example, the switch from building in stone to mostly building in wood that occurs at the beginning of the “Dark Ages.”
In a more macroscopic sense, the collapse of central Roman authrority also messed up many of the trade patterns that helped maintain Roman culture in many parts of Europe. There’s an argument to be made that the collapse of Rome triggered an economic collapse that many parts of Europe did not recover from for almost a thousand years.