The Ruin of Roman Britain

In 1989, Simon Esmonde Cleary published his Ending of Roman Britain, widely acknowledged at the time as the authoritative study of the current understanding of the transition from late Roman Britain to the early medieval world of the Anglo-Saxons and other kingdoms in the British Isles. His study drew extensively on archaeological evidence while largely eschewing the historical sources for the period, which, it was increasingly being realised, were so unreliable. James Gerrard’s study seeks to cover largely the same ground as this earlier volume, but the huge gulf in the content and intellectual framing of his study demonstrates all too clearly just how far study of this difficult period has progressed in the intervening quarter of a century. In the 1980s, the debate around the end of Roman Britain largely crystallised around whether or not one accepted the model of a total collapse of Roman Britain in, or even before, AD 410, and the apparent gap which saw the traditional date of the Anglo-Saxon adventus in AD 450. Esmonde Cleary’s study ( The Ending of Roman Britain [1989]), drawn largely from the archaeological data known at the time, inclined to the view that, effectively, the incoming Germanic-speaking settlers were stepping into a vacuum caused by the collapse of Roman power well before they even crossed the North Sea. There could be no Roman continuity because there was nothing left to continue. The mechanism that caused the collapse of Roman power in Britain was identified largely with the inability of the state to extract the tax revenues to support its economic, military and social systems. This model was widely accepted academically and has certainly been the key text framing the debate about the end of Roman Britain in the intervening period. Yet there were dissenting voices (such as those of Kenneth Dark and the present reviewer), mostly coming from those studying the archaeology of western Britain, where the conventional model of Anglo-Saxon conquest does not apply and where the echoes of Roman life appeared to continue well after AD 410

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