Max Adams, The First Kingdom (Apollo 2011)
We have very little to tell us about the lives of early British people after the Romans departed. Their houses and villages lie waiting for us, under mounds of earth on Salisbury Plain and elsewhere, but they are as yet unexcavated, archaeologists focussing on the juicier finds of fancy villas. These villas were not the norm. Most people lived as unfree serfs in small, unfortified villages. Literature leaves us the very rare Venerable Bede to tell us about it.
Claudius Caesar’s invading force in 43 CE recorded information in Latin about the local tribes—Trinovantes, Iceni, Brigantes, Belgae—and their leaders, but no tax records survive to give us the names in the local Brythonic. One list, the Tribal Hidage, gives the names of kingdoms and their wealth in hides, but the centuries between Caesar and Bede are relatively silent.
At Venta Begarum (Winchester) the civitas capital of the Belgae, women weavers wove byrri hooded capes and tapetia rugs for export to Gaul. There was a temple and town around the hot baths of Aquae Sulis. The Fosse Way connected Isca (Exeter) the civitas capital of the Dumnonii with a military veterans’ colonia at Lindum (Lincoln). A road from Aquae Sulis led to Londinium via Corinium Dobunnorum (Cirencester) the civitas capital of the Dobunni and Verulamium (St Albans).
Some of the only known voices of that past come from curses inscribed on lead sheets supplicating the goddess Sulis, and offerings of clothing, vessels and jewellery—even one mule—give a picture of the material culture. It seems they had the latest technology and access to European trade goods. An indigenous ruling class, like Boudicca and her husband, were thoroughly Romanised, spoke and signed documents in Latin and wore togas.
There was a gradual population decline, tree pollen counts indicate that agricultural land was less intensively farmed, and politico-economic power decentralised, but in no way was it the ‘Dark Age’ picture of catastrophic devastation painted by 6th C Gildas. In fact, ‘there seems to be a broad continuum in architecture, economy and social practice’ into the early Middle Ages.
Towns began to build walls in the 4th C, yet it may have simply been a statement of status; there is no archaeological evidence for attacks during this period, and no Romano-British town shows signs of widespread abandonment. Only one post-Roman pre-Viking battle site has been identified in Britain. No Roman coins have been found after this period.
Having said that, there were profound changes in the culture that, if violence was not the cause, need to be explained. 5th and 6th C Britons cremated their dead at public funeral feasts and buried them in pots that had previously been used for food storage along with valuables and sometime animals or food, customs linking them to Germany or Scandinavia. However, the change of burial customs seems to have occurred before Gildas’ dating of any mass migration. A switch to east-west alignment of the bodies is seen as evidence of Christianisation. They built German-style sunken grubenhäuser pit-houses that don’t seem to have been dwellings. They lived in clusters of households, each community producing food and goods for its own consumption or taxes, not market.
At West Heslerton ‘Anglian’ graves contained grave goods similar to ones found in Germany and Scandinavia. The West Heslerton bodies have been isotope-tested, showing that most of them were descended from people who had lived there since prehistoric times. A few individuals revealed a foreign origin.
The 452 Chronica Gallica states that Britain was now ruled by Saxons.
The story in Historia Brittonum of Saxon mercenaries under Hengest and Horsa in ‘three keels’, invited in to fight the Picts, who then stayed to become raiders themselves sounds credible. But where are these ‘big men’? Gildas’ ‘tyrants’? The Hengests, the Arthurs and the Cerdics? The monumental earthworks, dykes of this period needed some powerful authority to have organised their construction, but the archaeological landscape is empty of their graves or mead halls. Adams suggests they moved into refurbished buildings in Roman towns.
Adoption of new styles and customs and the growing predominance of Old English (Saxon) placenames seem to tally with Bede’s mass migrations of Angles, Saxons and Jutes. In the east and south of Britain Brythonic and Latin were completely replaced. Yet the archaeology suggests intermittent raiding or more of a gradual chain migration, a movement of people over several generations, rather than Gildas’ ‘foul hordes’. Anthropologists suggest a small peripatetic warrior elite able to exploit a weaker indigenous people. But ‘no single model seems to accommodate all the evidence.’
A new class of bucellari, military men who could shift their allegiance between lords (like Beowulf who offered his service to King Hrothgar), was handy when tax collecting time came around, and the right to collect taxes devolved to the comites (armed retinue). Bailiffs rose to become de facto lords; ‘the late Roman state had been privatized.’ These social changes took place before any incursion of foreigners. Towns became places where tax goods could be converted into more fungible goods or coin. Furthermore, 5th and 6th C towns show a peaceful co-existence between locals and incomers. By the 6th C there were few major towns.
Adams tells us the ‘under Roman rule, Britons were better off’, still stressing that this was only the case for some Britons. The classic answer to the question ‘what did the Romans ever do for us?’ is ‘aqueducts’. Yes, a marvelous engineering feat, but one which benefitted only the rich in their villas. Water from these aqueducts went straight to the fountains and baths of the rich. It was not used to irrigate crops or provide drinking water and was never of benefit to the general population.
Personally, I suspect the answer lies somewhere between the two. The Saxons clearly came, whether bellicosely or peacefully, en masse or intermittent. We will probably one day begin to unearth the battlesites, rígtechs (royal houses) and ‘princely burials’ presumably so missing from the British landscape.
Adams equates the 5th C Romano-British warlord Ambrosius Aurelianus mentioned by Gildas with ‘King Arthur’.
A well-written history and valuable contribution to understanding of an age only ‘dark’ because we know too little about it.
Susie Helme 
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