Ben Marshall, "What Happened to the Britons? The impact of the search for ethnicity on our understanding of the period 410AD to 597AD".
Paper presented at the New Socialist Approaches to History seminar, Institute of Historical Research, March 3rd 2003
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In 410 AD Britain was a country in free fall. The archaeological evidence for the period from about 350 AD shows that towns were becoming deserted, villas abandoned, mass production of pottery was ending and coins ceased to enter the country much later than the first decade of the 400s AD, and ceased to be used in any sense the Romans would have recognised. This, of course, coincided with the abandonment of Britain by the Romans: the end of Britain's participation in the Empire. The ending of Roman Britain is almost always described as just that: the end. By the late sixth century, lowland Britain (England, roughly south and east of a line drawn between Exeter in the west and Hull in the north east) is generally described as emerging to become Anglo-Saxon England. The period of approximately two hundred years, from, by convention, 410 AD until Augustine's mission to the Saxons in 597 is treated by most historians as either a virtually lost period, or as a period of transition, during which the country changed, leaving the Roman Empire and becoming Saxon. This is perhaps no surprise as it is an astonishingly difficult period to study. There are almost no written sources. Those that do exist are exceptionally difficult to interpret. The archaeology of the period is equally ephemeral and difficult to spot let alone interpret. Much of the archaeology of the period may well have been destroyed in the desire in the past to discover the remains of Rome just beneath it.
We look at this period in a way dominated by the written sources, despite their inadequacy. The archaeology is 'read' against these sources, often even by those who acknowledge their problems. The written sources continue to provide the basic narrative framework. This framework can be looked upon as, in a way, a product of very modern thinking, dominated by modern notions of the nation state and ethnicity. Hence the notion of the emergence of new 'nations' of originally Germanic Saxons, to replace the ethnically indigenous British. This is traditionally seen as a period of migration and movement of peoples; the British people moved, or were in some way displaced, whilst Germanic peoples from the north-western fringes of the Roman Empire immigrated and eventually took control of lowland Britain. How likely is that to have actually happened? Is it really what the evidence suggests? Or are we reading the evidence, such as it is, in terms we understand in today's social and political climate, against modern notions of ethnicity? Are notions of migration and nation state building, as applied to this period, perhaps modern notions that could lead us to come to potentially false conclusions? It is essential to appreciate that this picture of the history of the period is, in terms of its analysis, very much more modern than the period itself. Would the people of the time have seen things within the same analytical framework, or are we applying our values and notions to their experience in ways that they would not recognise?
410 AD is treated as the 'end' of something: specifically, of course, the end of Roman Britain. It was the end, so it is fair enough to describe it in those terms. People would not, however, necessarily have seen it purely in those terms at the time. In fact, it is quite hard to think of circumstances in our own lifetimes where the end of a period is not also seen as also the beginning of something; perhaps something new and different but certainly not merely an end. I would not claim that the end of the British Raj is wholly comparable to the end of the Roman period in Britain. I would, however, claim that, for the vast majority of Indians, it was the end of one phase in their country's history and, very much more importantly, the beginning of a new one.
There is real value in looking at this difficult period in a different way. We should examine it from the perspective of the Britains in Britain at that time. We should continue to assess the evidence of migrations in terms that seek, so to speak, to quantify the size and political significance of the migration of Germanic settlers. We should also, however, look for evidence of their relationship with the indigenous British. That is rarely done, largely because the written sources effectively say their was no relationship to speak of, beyond an essentially warlike or, at the very least, distant one. We should also think about the motivation of the immigrants. Why would they want to come to a country in apparent social, economic and political free-fall? We should also seek specifically archaeological, not only historical, evidence of political organisation and of the impact of both the collapse of Roman Britain and of immigration on the politics of the time. These questions may well be largely unanswerable, given the current state of the evidence. They are, however, well worth posing if they force us to re-assess the evidence in new ways. This period is so difficult because there is so little evidence we can rely on and it seems unlikely either that there will in future be any great increase in the quantity or quality of evidence. That leaves us resorting to conjecture and hypothesis. That is a perfectly respectable way to seek to advance our understanding of the period and in order to do so, it is essential to look at the evidence in new ways by posing some new questions.
Specifically, we should ask, what happened to the Britons? Did they effectively either die out in the east and south of Britain or move west (or even, in significant numbers, to Brittany)? Who were the Saxons? Were they in fact all immigrants or did the indigenous British population become 'Saxon'? In other words, did Britons and Saxons mix to create a new grouping? How can we tell from the evidence which ethnic group or groups we are dealing with? Does it even make sense to ask such questions? Does the attempt to answer questions about ethnicity cloud our view of the evidence? Would we do better to pose entirely different questions, such as, what sort of society are we dealing with? It is that question, fundamentally, that I am going to try to answer - by seeking to put questions of ethnicity to one side for the time being. That is not to say that such questions should never be addressed, and we will return to them. In the first instance, it makes sense to try to describe the country at the close of the Roman period.
(The rest of this paper can be read by downloading the PDF version).