The Ending of Roman Britain

The evidence of archaeology, circa 1987, is applied to the question of the passage from the Roman province of Brittania, to the beginnings of England, is the contents of this book. The written evidence is scrappy at best, being two saints' lives, the sermon of Gildas, one entry in an Easter table, some tiny scraps in Gregory of Tours, and then the Nennius compilation, and the vague reports from Zozimus a Byzantine in the late 490's and the Spaniard Orosius, Ammianus, reasonably covers the devastation of the Roman structure on the island in the 380s. So, there is not much written coverage after 390. The evidence of archaeology is Cleary's principal resource and he creates an interesting picture of Britain from 410 to 550.
The economy show more was devastated from the incursions in the 380's, and the Theodosiam expedition was only a restablishment of military control. Sadly, th e economic life of the province is not capable of recovery to the former prosperity by the military withdrawal of 410. The towns, except for three centres collapse within a generation and the economy of the island reverts to the pre-Roman Celtic condition. There is very little evidence of Saxon co-existence with a Roman civil structure , but the strong possiblity exists that the smalll number of Saxon, Jute and Northumbrian immigrants were involved in a large cultural shift to their way of doing things. This resulted in the conversion of the Eastern British to the Teutonic pattern of culture that lead to the erection of the Heptarchy of the 600's and 700's. He has a convincing picture of a gradual split of the Isand between the conservative Welsh and Cornish groups, and the converts to the Saxon way of life. It is a revision of the former paradign of the bloody invasion of the Saxons overturning a very Roman structure in the Britain of the 400 and 500s. This conversion seems to taken place in the period 440 to 550, and been a great deal less bloody than the traditional view pushed by Nennius and the eventual Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, assembled in the late 800's. Thus an interesting take on the state of the island. show less