The Material Fall of Roman Britain, 300–525 CE, by Robin Fleming

Abstract

An arresting observation introduces Robin Fleming’s fascinating study of the ending of Roman Britain: ‘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’ (p. 6). Of course, the visible material and social differences between Roman and post-Roman Britain have attracted a lot of previous attention. What marks out this original study is its focus, not on the causes of the ending of Roman Britain, or why quotidian objects disappeared, but on how they were used and what implications the disappearances had. Indeed, the model for how Roman Britain worked, and why it ended, may be familiar. In line with influential structural analyses, the Roman tax state is seen as the key to economic, social and material complexity, and its unravelling. Chapter One—‘The World the Annona Made’—presents a stylish, up-to-date overview of how the tax system produced that complexity, developed directly from the evidence, and a summary of the idea of ‘systems collapse’ in the fourth and fifth centuries. What Robin Fleming does is take up where this model leaves off, identifying how the objects that disappeared were bound up with social relationships and practices, and confronting the challenges their disappearances posed.