WHY DID ROMAN BRITAIN END?
The
historical background of the end
The
archaeology of the end of Roman Britain
With the benefit of
hindsight Roman Britain’s end might seem inevitable. Rome’s cultural and
military hold on Britain was never total and in some areas no better than
tenuous. Part of the problem is the high archaeological visibility of Roman
culture. Towns, villas and the military all dominate what survives to such an
extent that anything affecting them is bound to have a dramatic effect on the
archaeological record. The late treasure hoards look very much like the work of
wealthy people desperate to hold onto their valuables. The running down of
public buildings is symbolic of the decline of the economic network on which
the whole of Roman Britain depended to function as a Roman province at all. But
the end of Roman Britain was no more inevitable than the conquest in the first
place. What brought it to a climax were particular events at a particular time
and the accidents of fate that meant the key players were the people they were
and accordingly made the decisions they did.
We have a distorted
impression of Roman Britain because building the province at all necessarily
involved a colossal amount of effort. Since Britain had none of the necessary
infrastructure of a Roman province in 43 it was necessary to create it. The
work took a long time and it was not until close on to the middle of the second
century that the administrative towns had the facilities they needed. It was
not until the same time that the northern frontier was anything like
consolidated, or that the legionary fortresses were substantially complete. The
effort was vast, the resources used enormous and the results astonishing.
Britain had been dragged from a world of rural farmsteads, tracks for roads,
and a society in which a very few could indulge themselves in manufactured
luxuries from the Roman world, into a completely new way of life. The
fundamental parameters and standards by which everyone lived their lives had
been changed out of recognition through the unique combination of Roman
patronage and the willingness of some Britons to measure their own status in
that new context.
For us the idea of a town
is so familiar that we give it no thought. The Britons, within a few
generations, had been exposed to urban institutions and facilities that would
have been unthinkable before the invasion. For rural people in parts of the
remote north their world had now become overrun with forts and roads that
carved up the landscape and transformed it into a part of an economic and
social system that stretched to Egypt, and even further beyond. Even Chinese
silk made it to Colchester. The most obscure locations had access to the Roman
economic system. In parts of the southwest, Scotland, Northumberland and
Cumbria there would be nothing like this again until the arrival of the
railways in the nineteenth century.
This is absolutely no
exaggeration. The Roman ‘achievement’ was unparalleled in the ancient world and
would have been remarkable by any historical standards until electricity and
mechanization arrived. Britain in many respects is where the results were most
dramatic, simply because there was so little to build on in the first place.
That most Britons seem, by and large, eventually to have accepted it is one of
the key points of this book. It was said on a news item after the Iraq war of
2003 that ‘the Iraqis care far more about their electricity supply than who
rules them’. A matter of opinion of course but the point hit on an important
truth. The Boudican Revolt offered only chaos and disorder. Not unnaturally the
bulk of the population found it easy enough to accept an alternative that
offered stability, security and economic well-being. Most people prefer
governments that protect them from violent deaths and which create a sense of
stability in an uncertain world. It is easy to say the Britons had no choice,
but this credits Rome with the ability to impose and sustain brutal oppression
without quarter. This is simply not true. The Roman army was not big enough to
do that, however large the garrison of Britain, and nor did the Roman
government consider this a desirable way to rule. Inclusion through patronage,
however insidious and cynical, was the way Rome maintained her power, not by
the sword.
The change in Britain was
so significant that it unavoidably creates a dramatic impression in the
archaeological record. London is the principal example. Scattered traces of
prehistoric settlement are well known in the London area but not in any great
abundance, and the same is true for after the Roman period. But Roman London in
the first and second century is the most prolific source of archaeological
material in the area until early modern times. Vast quantities of building
debris, pottery, coins, and innumerable other artifacts and features bear
witness to the sheer explosive impact of the arrival of Rome. Not surprisingly,
once much of this work had been achieved the evidence diminishes. As Britain
became more Romanized she ended up with towns and public buildings, and her own
pottery and other industries. Imports gave way to homegrown products. So of
course it is easy to gain the impression that Britain’s towns had started to
decline. There may well have been economic decline but the lack of new public buildings
is not necessarily evidence for it. After all, once a town has a basilica there
is no good reason to have a new one while the evidence for maintenance and
repair of the superstructure might not be very evident in the archaeological
record. But change in use, like the metalworking in Silchester’s basilica, is
perhaps just that: evidence for change, and not necessarily terminal decline.
When the theatre at St Albans fell out of use and became a rubbish dump in the
late fourth century, it did so probably because the outlawing of paganism made
it a redundant part of town life and not because town life had fallen apart.
While the towns had reached
some kind of plateau, rural Britain in the fourth century was booming. There is
no doubt that expenditure on some rural seats was enormous, and that some of
the wealth trickled back down into the economy by patronizing the industries
and labour that made the luxurious lives of people who lived at the
Woodchester, Littlecote and Chedworth villas (amongst many others) possible.
There was of course inequality, but the Roman world was not a revolutionary
egalitarian state and its whole social and economic system was founded on an
institutionalized hierarchy where land and wealth were qualifications of
status. In an economic sense Roman Britain certainly was more egalitarian than
what had gone before. That much is transparently obvious from the comparative
quantities, and distribution, of artifacts.
The villas of
fourth-century Britain reflected the success with which the Roman way of life
had been inducted into the mind-sets of the Romano-British. The ancient
traditions of a tribal warrior aristocracy had been converted into the
ostentatious luxury of rural villa culture, with all its self-conscious
emulation of older Italian traditions. But judging the villa culture is not
really the point. Enlarging a villa and improving it was an inherently
optimistic thing to do. No villa owner expected Roman Britain to come to an
end, and clearly none of them could have wanted it to come to an end. Given
this, how is it possible that when Roman control of Britain was given up, the
highly visible Roman culture dissipated at all?
THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
OF THE END
During the fourth century Britain
went through political turmoil but it would be a distortion to imply that
somehow she was especially badly off. A series of usurpations meant the
garrison was systematically denuded, and was used to support the imperial
ambitions of men like Magnentius (350-3) and Magnus Maximus (383-8). There is
little evidence that this disrupted normal life in Roman Britain. Indeed, the
problems were probably less than other parts of the Roman world suffered. The
various pretenders conducted their fighting in Gaul, and not in Britain. They
posed as restorers of Rome, not destroyers. Much of their support came from
people who wanted to see Roman values reinforced, not wiped away, even though
they did a great deal of damage to Britain’s defences. The barbarian incursions,
like that of 367, which wrought havoc in Britain are notorious events in the
historical record. However, these were far less damaging than the invasions
across the Rhine or in the East by barbarians, and the rebellions led by
usurpers. Theodosius I (379-95) had first to deal with a Gothic invasion in the
eastern provinces, followed by a war with the British usurper Magnus Maximus
and then another rebel called Eugenius. In 406 the Vandals led a barbarian
invasion across the Rhine to devastate Gaul. The complicated events and
loyalties of the rebellion of the British usurper Constantine III (407-11)
brought things to a head and left Honorius entirely unable to provide any more
resources to support Britain.
After 410 Britain was
formally on her own, but the population was still Romano-British and it would
be at least two or three generations before living memory of living in a Roman
province would disappear. The migrations of Anglo-Saxon peoples, which had
begun when mercenaries were absorbed into the garrison, were important but
involved very small numbers of people. Most of the population was
Romano-British, or at least partial Romano-British descent. Making sense of
what happened is complicated by the very limited archaeological evidence. In a
practical sense the separation made little difference in the immediate
short-term. All Honorius had said was that Britain must now defend herself. But
this meant no more money for troops and no more imperial taxes to pay for them.
It was this that made the critical difference because it totally disrupted the
complex economic cash-based cycle of wages, trade and taxation, and ended
patronage through office.
Pelagius was a Briton but
almost all the significant events of the heresy that he led took place on the
continent. He rejected the Augustine view that God had chosen his elect for
heaven and that no amount of good works could undo this. Pelagius preferred the
idea that men could choose to do good and thereby earn a place in heaven. His
views echoed paganism by suggesting that human beings could intervene in divine
judgment to decide their fate. The heresy caused a ruction in the church, and
was popular in Britain. The ecclesiastical hierarchy in Britain was unsettled
by the success of Pelagianism. In 429 Germanus and Lupus, bishops of Auxerre
and Troyes respectively, were sent by the church in Gaul to suppress the
heresy. This they did with a mixture of spin, miracles and bravado in battle
against the Saxons, and even presided over the healing of a tribune’s daughter.
The account of their visit is a conflation of history, allegory and moral
fable. The story reveals that an ecclesiastical organization was operating in
Britain and remained in contact with the continent, and that people still held
positions with Roman titles.
Christianity had become the
mechanism of order and the unifying factor in international society, and it did
so in a Roman idiom. While government links had been broken with Britain, it
was the links with the church in Gaul that led to the arrival of Germanus. Many
of the administrative terms and offices of the late Roman Empire, such as vicar
and diocese, were adopted by the Christian church and survive today. St
Patrick, who died somewhere between c. 450 and 493, was born near Bannavem
Taberniae, a place that has never been identified, but since he was
captured at the age of 16 and taken to Ireland it was probably in western or
northwestern Britain. His father, Calpornius, owned an estate and slaves, and
held positions as a decurion and a deacon. This is important because much of
what seems to have survived of Roman Britain did so in the west. It is in the
west that the Celtic names of rivers have more frequently survived, and in the
southwest where finds from the reoccupied hillforts show that some continental
contacts were maintained. It was in Wales where Latin words have survived from
antiquity and where the usurper Magnus Maximus (383-8) was remembered and
attributed with founding a line of Welsh kings.
The posts Calpornius held
suggest that, despite the physical degeneration of buildings and
infrastructure, society was still organized in a Romanized manner well into the
fifth century. They also remind us of the palpable psychological fear the
detachment from Rome provoked. This is hard for us to appreciate but in the
fourth and fifth centuries the prospect of Rome falling created a desperate
sense of apprehension, and compromised any sense of security and equanimity.
Constantine III had been elevated to power largely because of the historical symbolism
of his name a century after Constantine I had become emperor and done so much
to unify the Roman world under the Christian banner. Continuing to maintain
Roman administrative positions was a powerful way of sustaining a semblance not
just of normality but more importantly a sense that the forces of disorder
could be kept at bay.
So, although we have very
little historical information to go on, we can see that Britain was still
continuing to try and function as she had under Rome. It is evident from the
archaeology that things were very different, but the intent to remain Roman
still seems to have been intact. It was not until the 440s that there was a
dramatic turn of events. The contacts with Gaul this time were used to make a
series of direct appeals for help against barbarian attacks in 446. The next
fifty years changed Britain forever. Exactly what happened next is not entirely
clear but seems to have involved a British leader called Vortigern who in 449
called in a warrior force of Angles and Saxons led by Hengest and Horsa to
repel barbarians. It was a sort of military vaccination, using like to treat
like. Hengest and Horsa were successful but soon turned against the Britons and
defeated them in a series of battles. More Angles and Saxons arrived, with more
battles following that pushed the Britons back, for example Aelle who defeated
the Britons at Pevensey. The implication is that the Angles and Saxons
gradually gained control in eastern Britain. There is much to argue about
concerning the exact sequence of events, and a definitive chronology has never
been produced.
Eventually the Britons
began to reorganize themselves and, under the leadership of a man of Roman
origin called Ambrosius Aurelianus, defeated the Saxons at the battle of Mount
Badon in or around 493. The battle ushered in only a temporary period of
stability until the Saxons started up their wars of conquest again. Ambrosius
Aurelianus, who was probably a descendant of the Romanized aristocracy of
Britain, is the last truly Roman-type figure in Britain’s history and his
moment of triumph is a good point at which to leave the story. The chronicler
Gildas was born in Britain about the time of the battle. The training and style
so evident in Gildas’ work shows that educated Latin culture was maintained and
still available well into the sixth century, largely through the spread of
monasticism. Men like him maintained scholarly links with the surviving
classical world. Gildas may have been trained in Gaul, though a monastery in
western Britain or Ireland is equally likely. The Latinity exhibited by the
composers of fifth- and sixth-century tombstone epitaphs, especially in western
Britain, illustrates a significant level of cultural continuity from the Roman
period. Some surviving late Roman manuscripts now stored in the Vatican may
have originated in fourth- or fifth-century Britain, being preserved for a time
in Ireland. As far as Gildas was concerned Ambrosius Aurelianus symbolized the
end. He was right. After his time, in 577, the Saxons won a decisive battle at
Dyrham, north of Bath, and seized Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath. By then any
idea that any sort of semblance of Roman Britain could be maintained must have
gone forever.
THE
ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE END OF ROMAN BRITAIN
In the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries it was believed Roman Britain had disappeared with
unnerving suddenness. Pelagian Britain had tribunes, and St Patrick’s world had
deacons and decurions. Such positions invoke the idea of a Roman province
enjoying a thriving urban and villa economy. But such a world had ceased to be.
Roman Britain’s towns and villa countryside fell into disrepair and then total
ruin. The timescale is usually a matter for debate but the outcome is not.
Lullingstone is a perfect example. What had been a house where someone in the
late fourth century had been prepared to spend money on remodelling the
structure, installing mosaics and then the house church, had burnt down by the
early fifth century. Houses had always been susceptible to fire, but they were
usually rebuilt. Now here, as just about everywhere else, the house was
abandoned. Portable villa wealth either found its way into hoards like Hoxne,
or was spirited away. Some was appropriated by whatever remained of the
provincial government to buy off barbarians, or was simply stolen. The Traprain
Law (East Lothian) and the Coleraine (Ballinrees) hoards from Scotland and
Ireland respectively are ‘Hacksilber’ hoards, meaning that the treasure they
contained had been accumulated purely as bullion. Chopped up, crushed and
damaged silver plate seems to have been gathered by weight, with no interest or
concern for aesthetics unlike Hoxne, Mildenhall or Thetford where the pieces
were clearly individually treasured. Traprain and Coleraine, the latter datable
to post-410 by coins, represent either booty or bribes.
Meanwhile, coinage in
Britain ended with the reign of Constantine III (407-11). The coins bearing his
name in the Hoxne hoard were amongst the very last official supplies to arrive before
the end. No coins were manufactured in Britain to make good the shortfall. The
silver siliquae coins that remained available, including some of the
Hoxne coins, were often clipped. It was both a reflection of the breakdown in
law and order, and that bullion was hard to come by. The only Roman coins that
came in now did so in tiny quantities, probably with individuals. The Patching
(West Sussex) hoard was made up mostly of coins dating to between 337 and 411.
But the hoarder had also been able to get hold of later material. The latest
coin was of Libius Severus (461-5), showing that the hoard had not been buried
before then. But the hoard is so exceptional that it only emphasizes how the
everyday small-change cash economy had ceased to function. The Libius Severus
coin is one that would never have entered Britain by any normal route. Either
the hoarder was a trader passing through, or someone who had continental
contacts. All the base-metal coins that made casual day-to-day transactions had
disappeared.
Even pottery skills were
apparently lost within a few decades. The massive industries like the Alice
Holt potteries were simply abandoned, presumably because the collapse of a
broader town-based economy made them unsustainable. It is of course inconceivable
that people ceased to need bowls and dishes, but they either made use of what
was left or turned to making vessels out of wood, which of course does not
survive. There are exceptions. York’s calcite-gritted kitchenware industry
seems to have continued in operation until well into the fifth century though
the evidence is very limited. But this is unusual and therefore, far from
toppling the traditional picture of a general collapse of the Romano-British
way of life, the possible survival of part of York’s pottery industry only
emphasizes how much most of Britain had changed.
Every Roman settlement of
consequence saw its buildings deteriorating and eventually falling into ruin.
The villa at Frocester Court (Gloucs) remained in use but in reduced circumstances,
until it too fell down. The villa at Orton Hall Farm, near Peterborough, was
apparently abandoned, but Saxon-type timber buildings were erected in and
around the old villa buildings suggesting the estate itself continued in use. A
good case has been made for the survival of the villa estate boundaries at
Withington (Gloucs) into the seventh century. Here the present parish
boundaries preserve an estate granted to a convent in 690 by Aethelred, king of
Mercia (675-704), which quite possibly included the same land once farmed from
the villa. The headquarters building of the legionary fortress at York may have
survived until the ninth century when it collapsed, and buried evidence that it
had been used for agricultural purposes.
Wroxeter has become the
classic modern excavation where nearly thirty years of work on the
baths-basilica site recovered an accumulation of evidence for disintegration of
the main structure by the fifth century, but not its abandonment. Instead,
several timber buildings were erected within the ruins of the old baths
basilica and remained in use until some indeterminate time in the sixth
century. Then much of what remained of the old Roman building was cleared away
and a new series of timber buildings erected. This has been used to argue for
the maintenance of some sort of centralized authority, very probably
ecclesiastical. Since the church is the one organization we have evidence for
in the fifth century the case is a good one but is, as yet, unsubstantiated.
At Birdoswald the same
pattern of physical degeneration of masonry structures, followed by replacement
with two successive timber halls on the footings of one of the granaries, was
uncovered. Accurate dating is
impossible but occupation stretching into the sixth century is feasible. If so,
this may be evidence for continuity of occupation. However, strictly speaking
it is also possible that the timber buildings were actually built somewhat
later, following a hiatus. In a period when coinage and pottery effectively did
not exist, dating spectral traces of occupation and timber buildings is more
speculative than substantive. All that can be said for certain is that the
stone floor of the first timber hall sealed coins of the 380s beneath it.
However, if we assume that the Birdoswald timber halls do date to the fifth and
sixth centuries then the tradition the fort and its garrison had enjoyed for
centuries in the area is bound to have endowed whoever lived there with the
resources and prestige to control the region. The most likely context is the
survival of authority vested in those who held, or posed in, positions of power
with Roman titles and who commanded some sort of residual respect. Whether
these were warrior chiefs, whose antecedents had been officers in a frontier
fort, or bishops whose priestly duties were now blurred with those of old town
councils, we may never know.
Wroxeter and Birdoswald
have shown how occupation may have continued at some Roman sites. However, the
picture of dramatic change remains intact: no-one at Wroxeter was able, or
inclined, to repair or rebuild the baths basilica, or to replace it with
anything that matched it as an architectural work or its philosophy of
permanence and prestige. Those who lived at Birdoswald were unable or unwilling
to repair the fort structures, whether or not they erected timber halls in the
fifth century or much later. Villas with evidence of continued occupation
always show that the people living there were unable to maintain the buildings
properly or to care for mosaics, baths or anything else that required effort or
skills beyond that needed for subsistence. All the support crafts and the
labour needed to maintain towns with complex public buildings, or villa houses
and their attendant facilities had disappeared. We never have conclusive
evidence about who these later occupants were. They could just as easily have
been the descendants of wealthy fourth-century villa owners or people who had
simply moved into vacant premises and made of them what they could. Generally
described in excavation reports as ‘squatters’, these spectral figures lit
fires on mosaic floors, executed ham-fisted repairs where absolutely essential
and otherwise let the dilapidation continue unabated until the houses were
finally abandoned.
Everything that had made
forts, towns and villas possible in the visible forms they reached had
vanished. In one sense this is exactly what we might expect. Since all these
highly visible features were wholly interdependent, economically and socially,
it is not surprising that they all dwindled at the same time. Towns were part
of a burgeoning economy that went along with a developed road communications
system, a proliferation of artifacts, imported goods, coinage, specialized
industries and so on. Likewise, the villas evolved as part of that social and
economic system, both supplying and placing demands on the market. The army was
an important part of maintaining that system both through its manpower and
influence, and also through wages and purchasing. The effects trickled down
through the community so that even remote rural settlements had access to
modest quantities of manufactured or imported goods. When something changed for
the worse, these economic and social interrelationships made widespread
dramatic change inevitable.
The result was the
disappearance of much of what we define Roman Britain by. There was a
demonstrable change in the quantitative character of Roman Britain, and also
the qualitative expectations of its population. The reason for the vagueness
about dating the fifth and sixth-century phases is simply that the evidence is
vague. There are virtually no coins or datable pottery forms, no inscriptions,
or anything else that makes the phases of occupation visible to us as
historical periods in the way that the 367 years of Roman occupation are. Only
where Roman goods or other datable material turn up in a settlement are we on
firmer ground. In Canterbury mid-fifth-century Saxon pottery helps date
sunken-floored round huts while a Visigothic gold coin of c. 480 from
nearby, and a Byzantine gold coin of 474-91, provide us with some clues about
contacts and dates.
The very rarity of these
visible finds, and the places in which they turn up, only emphasize the impact
of being confronted by all those Roman towns, forts and villas, where such
material had declined both in quantity and quality. At York, the collapse of
the headquarter building showed that the structure had been used simply because
it was conveniently available. When it fell down, it was left in ruins. This is
not to say that the people of the post-Roman period did not respect the Roman
work because they did. St Cuthbert, touring Carlisle in 685, was proudly shown
a working Roman aqueduct. The Saxons admired the collapsed temple and baths at
Bath as the work of ‘giants’, but the admiration was partly born out of the
awe-struck general belief that such things were no longer possible.
Power had probably become
the preserve of local chiefs, who may have been warlords, bishops or a
combination of both. This is compatible with the idea that people with
ecclesiastical authority wielded some sort of secular executive power. The
positions Patrick’s father held also illustrate the problems of archaeological
and historical evidence. Caesar’s invasions have no manifestation in the
archaeological record and were not even recorded or alluded to on coinage
issued in his name. Patrick’s world of deacons and decurions may have been
vivid to him, but it is invisible in the surviving physical record. We might
speculate about chieftain-bishops and deacons at Wroxeter, for instance, but
they will probably remain speculation.
In pockets Romano-British
society continued, albeit in an archaeologically less visible form. The
fifth-century reoccupation of hillforts like Cadbury (Somerset), or the coastal
stronghold of Tintagel (Cornwall), was undertaken by people who had the
inclination to use, and the means to import, goods from the continent or even
further afield. Tintagel has structural remains associated with glass from
Spain, and ceramics from North Africa and the Near East, dating right into the
middle of the sixth century. These show that whoever controlled Tintagel not
only had the trading and possibly diplomatic contacts but also the aspirations
and taste to sustain a cosmopolitan Romanized existence. The recovery of tin
ingots off the Devon coast near Plymouth, and the discovery of nearby coastal
settlements with fifth- and sixth-century imported pottery suggests that the
tin trade helped sustain commercial links with Britain. Another possibility is
that the Eastern Roman Empire was deliberately fostering contacts with what
remained of Roman culture in Britain as part of its programme of patronage and
influence. In this respect Britain had reverted to some extent to the
relationship it had had with the Mediterranean world before the Roman conquest.
These instances also emphasise our dependence on visibility in the
archaeological record. The physical manifestations of long-distance contact
might be minimal in the fifth and sixth centuries but the psychological, social
and religious connections might have been very much greater than we can now
measure.
Making sense of the fate of
Roman Britain has taxed the minds of historians and archaeologists for decades.
Numerous books and articles have been written that try to unravel the
mesmerizing array of complicated, incomplete and contradictory historical
information in sources like Gildas, the Chronicle of 452, the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, Nennius and Bede. The result is bewildering to any reader and
sometimes impossibly arcane, especially when Latin phrases are meticulously
dismantled in the search for lucid chronologies and insights. The results are
usually inconclusive because all the sources have significant shortcomings and
in the end it comes down to a matter of opinion. But nothing really alters the
fact that the basic procession of events is fairly clear: Roman rule came to an
official end in Britain in 410 and that approximately coincides with a time
when almost everything in the archaeological record that characterizes Roman
Britain up till then starts to disappear. Of course existing coinage, pottery,
other artifacts, and some buildings continued in use – the point is that very
little new material arrived or was manufactured in the next few decades so as
they wore out they disappear from the record. As that happened Roman Britain
unravelled. The process was haphazard and in some places relatively protracted.
It remains to a large extent a mystery why the effect was so profound on Roman
material culture, but profound it was.
This does not mean the
experience was entirely a negative one. To some extent the change was as much
about an alteration in behaviour, rather than an explicit sequence of deterioration.
We tend to see it as a decline, or as the end of Roman Britain rather
than the beginning of something new. Nevertheless, the phenomenon that
was Roman culture in Britain was devastated by the withdrawal of Roman
administration and a fundamental change in the economy. It took generations for
Roman culture to dwindle away entirely, but much less time for the effects on
material culture to bite. It is always worth remembering that the most
conspicuous traces of Romanization in Britain to this day are associated with
the military – a force that can never have amounted to much more than 40,000
men at its climax, perhaps 1 per cent of the population. Even with their
dependants this was still a small proportion of the whole. In the fourth
century if we allocate forty people to every known villa, regardless of size,
we are still referring only to a villa population of around 40,000-50,000.
Changes in the administration and the economy would have had dramatic effects
on these key parts of Romano-British society, and the end of the system that
supported their way of life would have equally dramatic effects on the
archaeology and the visible Roman record.
Roman Britain was a
phenomenon driven by a system and when that system fell apart many of the
visible signs of what we know as Roman Britain went with it. In the beginning
some of Britain’s tribal leaders saw Rome as a means to enhancing their own
power and prestige. In the end some of Britain’s leaders continued to see Rome
as the source of prestige and authority by which they sought to control their
communities. But when Rome ceased either to be able to fulfil those
expectations or to show any interest in doing so then the nature of power in
Britain changed forever. Those who continued to maintain a semblance of
Romanized existence found that apart from the church, Rome had ceased to be a
source of support or patronage. Without these society in Britain fragmented,
creating the building blocks for a different way of life based on regional
kingdoms, and where patronage and power derived their strength from other
sources or concepts.