Why Empires Fall by Rapley John & John Rapley

Author:Rapley, John & John Rapley [Heather, Peter & Rapley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2023-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

6

Barbarian Invasions

The one part of the former Western Empire which saw the complete collapse of Roman civilization was Britain. Latin, villas, education, written law, Christianity: all the characteristic trappings of classical culture disappeared north of the Channel, along with every sign of complex economic exchange. In the 1980s there was hope that new, more sophisticated archaeological methods might bring to light some substantial post-Roman urbanism which had previously been missed. Forty years on, all that has emerged is one renovated water pipe in St Albans in Hertfordshire and a few slightly unconvincing postholes at Wroxeter in Shropshire. Some ninth-century Anglo-Saxon pottery found under the tiles of the collapsed roof of the Roman legionary headquarters in York subsequently proved to be the handiwork of burrowing rabbits, not a sign that its Praetorium was still standing in AD 800. Along with the vanishing of towns proper in the few decades after 400 went craft and manufacture – specialist pottery industries were replaced with localized handmade production – and coins fell completely out of use. Things became so desperate there was even a market in reworked broken glass.

From the mid-nineteenth century, academics concentrated on one primary explanation for all the destruction: the arrival of primitive Anglo-Saxon immigrants. It had long been realized that English, despite Latinate add-ons mostly transmitted by the Normans, was fundamentally a Germanic language. But in this period Victorian philologists also worked out that pretty much every English place name, down to the smallest stream or bump in the landscape, had Anglo-Saxon, not Celtic or Latin, roots. When the first flowering of scientific archaeology in the latter part of that century correctly identified the arrival north of the Channel of a new material culture, broadly dated to the fifth century, whose roots evidently lay in non-Roman northern Europe, the conclusion seemed obvious. Roman civilization in Britain had been undone by the arrival of a mass of Anglo-Saxons from across the North Sea, who drove those of the Romanized Celts they hadn’t killed into Wales, Cornwall and Brittany.

Post-Roman Britain was the worst-case scenario, but by the end of the fifth century an apparently similar script was unfolding across the vast majority of the former Western Empire. Everywhere, imperial Roman rule was being replaced by immigrant royal dynasties, inaugurating a period infamous for supposed cultural and economic decline on a vast scale: the so-called ‘Dark Ages’.

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