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Introduction
Down a Rabbit Hole?
But, when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.—Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
I am a historian, not an archaeologist, but almost two decades ago, as I settled into a new book project—I was writing the early medieval volume of the Penguin History of Britain—I began reading archaeology seriously for the first time in my career. Like most early medieval historians, until this point I had spent the bulk of my time wrestling with the shortcomings of texts written in the early Middle Ages. Almost all the sources describing Britain's first hundred years after Rome were written not in the fourth or fifth centuries, but rather in the eighth century and beyond. The authors of these retrospective texts framed the past in ways that would have made sense to contemporary audiences, especially their twin assumptions that Anglo-Saxon kings and their war bands were the period's only historical actors and that these men had rapidly taken power in lowland Britain after Rome's withdrawal. Three consecutive entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle will suffice to illustrate how this plays out in our sources:
In the year 495, two chieftains, Cerdic and his son Cynric, came with five ships to Britain at the place which is called Cerdicesora, and they fought against the Britons on the same day. In the year 501, Port and his two sons Bieda and Mægla came to Britain with two ships at the place which is called Portsmouth, and there they killed a British man of very high rank. In the year 508 Cerdic and Cynric killed a British king, whose name was Natanleod, and 5,000 men with him; and the land right up to Charford was called Netley after him.
Although the Chronicle's portrayal of the past doubtless rang true to the better sorts of people living at the time of its compilation, there are good reasons for thinking that we should be more skeptical. One of the things I learned, as I plowed through the stacks of excavation reports on my desk, is that the mass of contemporary evidence—which is material rather than textual—strongly argues that people in lowland Britain in the fifth century were much more concerned with subsistence agriculture than warfare, and that almost all of them lived in highly circumscribed worlds in ranked rather than steeply hierarchical communities. My reading also brought home the fact that most individuals and households during the first four or five generations after Rome's fall were closer to poor than rich, not something one gleans from a close reading of Bede or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This fundamental fact is missing from our interpretations of the period, not only because we historians often limit ourselves to the study of texts produced by and for elite men, but because most of us are not fully aware of the material prosperity found in Britain before Rome's fall.
I came to learn from my reading of archaeology that the people living in this period who were not weapon-bearing men engaged with the world and its problems in ways that would be fundamental in Britain's eventual transformation from Roman to early medieval, but that most of the important work they undertook never appears in annals, histories, or saints' lives. As I puzzled my way through the archaeology, I was surprised by how much evidence there was for those great crowds of people mostly missing from our texts—women, children, farm families, part-time craftspeople—in other words, the kinds of individuals who actually made up the overwhelming majority of all those living in lowland Britain. It was the collective actions of these people, that is, the ones who generally have no place in either our early medieval texts or our modern historical treatments of the period, that stood behind many of the period's most crucial transformations.
My reading of the material evidence also suggested that on the whole historians and archaeologists of Anglo-Saxon England have not thought hard enough about Britain's large, indigenous population once the "Anglo-Saxons" arrive on the scene. In most treatments, the indigenous population either rapidly exits stage left or is cast as the losers in an epic saga of one ethnic group's triumph over another. As a result, native British peoples' part in the story of the making of early medieval England has not been well served, in spite of the fact that several million of them lived through the generations of transition. The day these various realizations finally sank in marks the day that I threw myself headfirst into the archaeological literature and what I feared to be a great, gaping rabbit hole. What I learned, instead, was that it was not a rabbit hole at all, but rather an immensely complicated and revelatory space. Indeed, as I finished this book on the late Roman material culture regime in Britain at its end, it is clear that I am never going to claw my way back out of the evidentiary world into which I have fallen. Not only have I established permanent residence down here, but I hope that my book and I can lure other historians down the rabbit hole with us, so that we can show them the kinds of things one can see down here that one cannot see anywhere else.
Romanists and Medievalists/Historians and Archaeologists
Reading works in archaeology brought home the profound structural and conceptual divisions between scholars specializing in Roman Britain and those who study early medieval Britain. The two groups, for the most part, inhabit different intellectual worlds, each one with its own historiography, period-specific journals, and professional conferences, as well as separate bodies of evidence, burning questions, and enemy camps. Exacerbating this divide is the fact that most scholars working on Roman Britain concentrate their efforts on the earlier part of their period, while those studying Anglo-Saxon England labor, for the most part, in the latter half of theirs. And few specialists are sufficiently familiar with both the before and the after to think constructively across the two periods. Because 400 CE marks both the beginning and the end of a period, questions for scholars working on one side of the divide are rarely carried over by scholars laboring on the other side.
For example, many Roman-period archaeologists have participated in a productive, decades-long discussion of a constellation of issues that fall under the much-contested term "Romanization," that is, the impact of Roman material culture on Britain's native population in its four hundred years under empire. Questions revolving around ways Roman objects were made, distributed, and used, and how Roman-style material culture affected identity and lifeways in Britain sit at the heart of much of what has been written in the field. And yet the impact of the disappearance of Roman-style material culture in the later fourth and fifth centuries is virtually absent in the scholarship. Indeed, with the change of period comes a change of personnel. Early medieval archaeologists are much more interested in questions revolving around migration and ethnicity. Because of this, many of the material changes we see in the period are attributed to the arrival of new people with new ideas. On the other hand, questions related to the effects of what one might call "de-Romanization" are rarely asked.
That evidence actually dating from the long fifth century challenges the picture painted by our retrospective written sources will come as no surprise to historians. But if Roman and early medieval specialists inhabit different planets, historians and archaeologists live in different galaxies. With a few happy exceptions, most historians are not as familiar as they should be with the large amounts of evidence unearthed by archaeologists, especially that explicated in the more technical and scientific portions of site reports. And hardly any are aware of the riches buried in gray literature—the tens of thousands of unpublished reports that few historians know exist, much less read. So, although a few historians have made good use of the data unearthed and explicated by archaeologists, most have not, and the fifth century, with its few late and lapidary written sources, has yet to receive sufficient attention from historians. At the same time, many archaeologists have incorporated older historical paradigms or treatments of texts long abandoned by historians into their interpretations, and they have used them to build the interpretive scaffolding on which to hang the archaeological evidence.
This book attempts to bridge the intellectual and academic barriers just described. Histories of Britain with a date range of 300 CE-525 CE are rarely written. The years 300-400 are dealt with in histories of Roman Britain, and those falling after 400 are found in volumes on early medieval history, although most histories of the early medieval period, in actual fact, begin in 500 rather than 400. Historians of the period do not write books based on material culture. That is what archaeologists do. Finally, the bulk of scholars working on early medieval Britain in this period concentrate their efforts on either "Anglo-Saxons" or "Britons." I, however, am not particularly interested in either, because I do not think that there were large enough affinities of people knocking up against one another in this early period for ethnic identities to have been driving historical developments. Indeed, I believe that giving ethnic labels to people and things in the immediate generations after the Roman state's collapse in Britain is not only anachronistic and misleading, but also hinders our attempts to uncover what happened in the past. Both historians' and archaeologists' habitual use of the term "Anglo-Saxon" makes it difficult for us to think about the people of fifth-century Britain and their things as something other than "Anglo-Saxon," and the new forms of material culture developing at that time as something other than "intrusive." I want to see what the period looks like when we push discussions of ethnicity to the side, and when 400 CE stands in the middle of our period, rather than at its end or its beginning.
In spite of my turn toward archaeology and my firm belief that contemporary things surviving from the period should be given primacy over texts written long after the fact, I remain a historian. Nor am I the only historian who studies things and object worlds. Living in the particular moment we do, when some of the things in our lives—smart phones, plastic, carbon-based fuel, handguns, automobiles—have major impacts on our daily experience of the world, our culture, and our planet, it is hardly surprising that so many of us have gravitated toward a study of human entanglements with objects. Those of us working on material culture have come to understand how much the things in our lives make us us. If this is indeed the case, then it follows that losing whole categories of things in a relatively short period of time—which is what happened in Britain in the half century between c. 375 and c. 425—would have meant not only that the people living through this period experienced crippling economic and political dislocations, but that these losses would have had a profound impact on the people living through them, and would be foundational in the making of a brand-new early medieval world.
Although my interests have drifted away from texts, I also continue to write like an historian, and I still maintain, like most historians, that the past is best made legible through narratives. The genre constraints of the excavation report often leave their authors little room for thinking through the lived experience of the past. As a result, details often swamp analysis, making some reports intractable for the uninitiated and very tough going for scholars in other fields. I was reminded, a few years ago, of some of the archaeology I have read, when I viewed the Walid Raad exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. One of its installations was a series of photographs, taken during the Lebanese civil wars, of the engines of cars that had been used as car bombs. The point of the piece was to expose the futile study of these engines. It was always the case that the block of the car's engine was the only thing that had survived the blast. But the cars used in the bombings had always been stolen, so a maniacally thorough examination of them told investigators exactly nothing about the questions they most wanted answered. The piece serves as a fitting metaphor for how whole categories of archaeological remains often appear in print. We have a lot of partially blown-up car engines, and we have thousands of painstaking investigations of their remains. But they rarely tell us what we really want to know.
This is a long-winded way of saying that my work continues to lean heavily on narrative. Although I understand that a narrative is, in reality, a rhetorical device constituted by words on a page and that it is not human experience reconstituted, I have long appreciated its power because of its hardwired-into-the-form insistence that history is about flesh-and-blood people as well as abstract, impersonal forces. A well-constructed story, moreover, can have a kind of explanatory force, which simultaneously underscores both individuals' agency and the way their actions are constrained by the particular material circumstances in which they live.
Material Collapse
So why should we be interested in the late Roman material culture regime and its end? Although Britain in 300 CE had been as Roman as any province in the empire, in the generation on either side of 400, urban life, industrial-scale manufacturing of basic goods, the money economy, and the state collapsed. One of the consequences of these dislocations is that many of the most ubiquitous, quotidian, and fundamental categories of Roman-style material culture ceased to be manufactured and used in Britin. Skills related to iron and copper smelting, wooden board and plank making, stone quarrying, commercial butchery, horticulture, and tanning were disappearing, as was the knowledge standing behind the production of wheel-thrown, kiln-fired pottery and building in stone. The material losses that resulted were severe. No other period in Britain's prehistory or history witnessed the loss of so many classes of once-common objects, and these disappearances triggered fundamental changes in the structures of everyday life.
In the Roman period, ordinary people in most of lowland Britain had access to and were relatively heavy users of Roman-style objects. Given the ubiquity of things such as wheel-thrown, kiln-fired pottery, hobnailed shoes, and low-value coins, it is clear that these and other objects had been incorporated into the lifeways of large numbers of humble people by the fourth century. Still, it is clear that different communities in different parts of lowland Britain adopted and adapted different suites of objects and deployed Roman-style objects in different ways. Roman material culture also had important roles to play in western Britain and in Britain north of Hadrian's Wall. Nonetheless, it was in lowland Britain—essentially the lands that would come to constitute what we have come to think of as Anglo-Saxon England—where Roman-style material culture was omnipresent and where it shaped lifeways. And it was in this zone where the collapse of its production would have a profound impact on everyone living through the aftermath. Because of this, this book concentrates its efforts here, in order to tease out the impact of the dramatic restructuring of material culture on the ordinary and the everyday.
Each material dislocation that resulted from Britain's half-century-long material collapse would have required some new material go-round and would have given rise not just to new ways of making and doing, but to new ways of being in the world. The end of mass-produced, Roman-style pottery, for example, triggered radical dislocations in foodways and death rituals and reshaped patterns of domestic labor in very profound ways. The end of large-scale iron smelting required a rethinking of the ways one acquired metal, built, and farmed, and it would have forced households to establish quite different rhythms of work. And the collapse of masonry architecture would have led to the disappearance of what had been one of the primary ways in the Roman period of structuring and experiencing social difference.
Historians, though, rarely think about the material losses precipitated by the fall of Rome in Britain, because it not something the authors of our surviving texts considered worth writing about. As a result, the Big Story for Britain in this period is the story of the fall of the Roman Empire in an institutional sense and the rise of a new Britain of petty kingdoms and warlords, because that is what we can see in texts. If, however, one believes, as I do, that people and things are entangled in such a way that that people are dependent on things that are dependent on people who in turn are dependent on things, and if one holds, as I do, not just that people make things, but that things make people, and that material culture plays a profound role both in making the world seem to its inhabitants like the way the world ought to be and in its social reproduction, then it is certain that an investigation of the post-Roman material collapse is crucial for gauging and understanding the period's real Big Story, which, so it seems to me, is about the creation, over the course of a single century, of a startlingly different material Britain.
I hold that the transformations in lowland Britain's material culture over the course of the long fifth century can serve as proxies for the tectonic shifts taking place in the ways people lived their lives and in their perceptions of how the world ought to be. In thinking about the transition from Roman to not-Roman in Britain, I find that I want to know what people living through this period did when faced with such profound material dislocations.
How, materially, did lifeways, identity, burial, and status marking change in Britain as the Roman state and economy receded and as connections to the wider Roman world-of-things unraveled?
What did people in Britain do when confronted with the material losses that accompanied the rapid deskilling of the population? And more importantly, what can their responses tell us about transformations of society, culture, and identity in this particular time and place?
What happened when individuals whose parents' lives had been shaped by Roman material culture, and whose working lives were determined in important ways by the needs of the Roman state, no longer had access to the same kinds of objects and were no longer living within the constraints of the imperial political economy?
What lengths did people go to get hold of everyday Roman-style objects once they started to disappear? And when people found such objects, did they use them as they had always been used, or did they deploy them in novel ways?
Material dislocations were compounded by settlement collapse and the widespread abandonment of traditional cemeteries and ritual sites. What happened to ancient places, buildings, and landscapes during this period? And what did this mean for people abandoning old places and founding new ones?
What accounts for the new forms of material culture found in many places in Britain by the last quarter of the fifth century? Were these foreign objects brought to lowland Britain by "Anglo-Saxon" settlers—the standard explanation—or is the genesis of the new material culture package more complicated?
The people living through these changes—whoever they were and wherever they came from—were occupied, above all else, with building a startlingly new material reality, and they were doing it with their bare hands. Although there are few sword-wielding warriors in the pages that follow, the story I tell is no less heroic. Periods of radical material loss are hard on the people living through them, but in lowland Britain, both natives and newcomers did the best they could, and over the course of a few generations, they were able to piece together a brave new material world. It is this story that animates my book.
The book is organized as follows. The first chapter sets the scene and puts Britain's Roman-period material production in the context of its political economy. All the chapters that follow, save the last, explore particular kinds of things or sets of material practices. In each chapter we look at both the before and the after, tracing the fate of a class of objects or material practices across the divide of 400. In these chapters we examine the history of Roman plant and animal introductions under and after Rome. We will do the same for pottery, for vessels more broadly, for metal, and for masonry building material. We will then turn to the material practices that accompanied burial and think about infant burials before and after 400 and look at the kinds of things women chose to wear and place in graves. The final chapter will pick out the themes that have emerged from the proceeding chapters and use them to recast the history of fifth-century lowland Britain. A lengthy bibliography for the book, available at [URL], closes this work, not only to acknowledge its and my intellectual debts, but to provide those unfamiliar with the period's archaeology with an entrée into the literature.
A final note: The production of this book was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic. The manuscript was sent to the press in the summer of 2019. Thus, in spite of its 2021 publication date, nothing published after August 2019 is reflected in the notes and bibliography.
