An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 54 BC - AD 409 (The Penguin History of Britain) by David Mattingly

Author:David Mattingly [Mattingly, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2007-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

11

The Urban Failure?

The theme of the decline and failure of towns is central to debate about the fourth century in Roman Britain. One traditional view presents the history of towns as progressive and unilinear until the collapse of Roman authority in the early fifth century. Despite the fifth-century crisis, people have sought to demonstrate threads of continuity between Roman urbanism and the re-emergence of the town in the later Anglo-Saxon period. However, the accumulation of archaeological data threw this into doubt long ago, leading to suggestions that the Roman town, as traditionally understood, had effectively failed by the end of the third century. Life in towns, it has been argued, went on into the fourth century, but on a different basis, perhaps more related to individual power than civil authority. One recent study has attempted to chart decline systematically, using a wide range of parameters. The conclusion is strongly in favour of early decline, but dates the change to the second half of the fourth century. A more median line between the two extremes of vitality or decline has also had advocates, admitting quantitative and qualitative change in urban life, but maintaining the view that it was still vigorous until well into the fourth century.

The extent of the changes in urban society is clearest in the archaeological record. There are virtually no fourth-century inscriptions from British towns, no sculptural artworks, no tombstones. These are trends that were already present in the earlier centuries, but far less pronounced then. Pagan monuments in towns were particularly vulnerable to the changing religious politics of the empire, which moved from the persecution of Christians to the persecution of pagans within the course of the fourth century. Unsurprisingly, pagan cults became less flamboyant and less conspicuous in the urban centres as the fourth century progressed, but there is not the evidence one might expect to show Christianity dominating the townscapes and providing a new focus for civic munificence, as it did in some other provinces. On the other hand, large stone town houses continued to be built well into the fourth century, there was a flourishing of mosaic art focused on a number of towns, and the province has yielded a number of late Roman silver plate hoards, signifying unexpected levels of personal wealth for the topmost tier in society. While some people might point to the early collapse of Rome’s imperial project in Britain, others can write of the fourth century as a ‘golden age’. The evidence, at first sight contradictory, can perhaps be best understood as the emergence of new forms of identity in response to combined political, economic and social changes. Regional differences between towns in the east and west of England now also increased.

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