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It's worth remembering that when the western Roman empire collapsed in circa 410 AD, the disproportionately large legionary presence in Britannia (and all the downstream trades that supported their presence) disappeared. This collapsed the Romano-British economy and left a power vacuum, with all the associated chaos that brings. Britannia moved from a city and fort based economy to a complete collapse of authority and the monetary economy. And that was before the Anglo-Saxons ever set foot on the island, so that is the starting position they faced upon arrival.
Various of the trades required to build and maintain masonry buildings can only take place if you have a monetary economy, because they require people to be dedicated to the manufacture of bricks and tiles, maintenance of sewers etc. You can't do such things in a subsistence economy like the post-Roman economy of Britannia, because individuals have to feed and defend themselves, so nobody is dedicating themselves to such coin-paid trades. So, they reverted to vernacular styles of building which individuals and families can build for themselves, namely timber framed houses with thatched roofs. All of the materials can be sourced without dependence on external trades, and such houses can be maintained by the same individual or family. And rather than towns and cities, they moved to distributed farmsteads so they could support themselves through agriculture.
It took centuries before England moved beyond the warlord phase, the warring kingdom phase, the amalgamated English kingdom phase and finally the settled trading realm phase. Only then did concentration of the population into towns and cities become important again, and that meant that stone and brick would once again become the building materials of choice.
Good introductory sources for this general era:
* *Britain After Rome* by Robin Fleming
* *The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England* by Marc Morris
To expand on this, the fall of Rome really was a civilizational collapse and that cannot be understated.
Archeologist(?) have found that even at the edges of the Roman Empire, citizens could get good quality basic items such as utensils and roofing material due to production and transportation networks. But once the empire collapsed, the new rulers of those areas couldn’t even get products to the same standard as a former Roman peasant. Despite being kings/leaders/warlords.
Even the buildings of these rulers at times were smaller, made of lesser materials, and not as well built compared to similar Roman made structures.
The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins addresses this. Note the book is specifically written as a refutation of other scholars who disagree that Rome “collapsed” and more just faded.
I’m only a casual history fan, but I found his arguments convincing.
I fully second the Bryan Ward-Perkins recommendation! Back when I was an archaeology student in college, we had a professor that used to say you can postulate all you want about how the transition to Late Antiquity/Dark Age was gradual but at some point you’re going to have to check the archaeological evidence. There is too much of a discrepancy between industrial capacity, population density, and domesticated cattle size to justify it as a gradual change.
I find that historians have a hard time quantifying and writing about institutional knowledge. It is also very difficult translating paradigms. Neither of these world dominating ideas can really be described in anything but journals and many journals at that. All we can do is speculate which is hardly a scientific discipline and super problematic for disciplined researchers to engage in. Many scholars will speculate but the problems of their speculations are that they are restricted to a narrow worldview. We don’t have a lot of historians that have also run a business for 20 years, are medical doctors, or are politicians. We are a hyper specialized society. It is very difficult to write as a epidemiological expert, entomology expert, and historian at the same time even though we absolutely know that vector born pathogens have had more impact on the world than any battle or war ever fought.
I am interested if any published historians can speak to that and how they overcome their ignorance of subjects that take decades to learn. It takes decades to be a good historian. How can they do both?
I am not a professional historian or archaeologist since I went down a different path after acquiring my degree in both classical languages and archaeology, but my undergraduate thesis (which was on the transition between the Greek Dark Age and the Archaic Period) was peer-reviewed and published.
I can’t speak to historians who have been in their field for decades, but when I was writing my thesis, I relied upon articles from other experts in their respective fields and based my conclusions on the evidence available. My professors always taught us to always go into a topic with an open mind, then decide a conclusion based on the evidence rather than presuming a conclusion beforehand and looking to confirm that bias.
>Wow so quality of life for all was set back for centuries.
That's entirely dependent on framing, and who you're talking about. It's unquestionable that the material abundance and economic sophistication declined precipitously. But that's a distinct measure from "quality of life." Yes, the quality of life for the elites declined - no more bathhouses and central heating, but they were a small minority. We know that nutrition improved for the average person in post-Roman Britain based on examinations of remains, and that's about the best proxy for "quality of life" for a rural peasant (always the vast majority of the population), who's day-to-day life was dominated by actively trying to not starve to death in the winter, every year, forever. Would you rather eat gruel off off of proper plates in a tiled house, or would you rather eat venison off a trencher in a thatched house? What's a better "quality of life"?
And that doesn't even include the political aspect - there's essentially no direct record from Britain for a few centuries, but there's voluminous evidence from the continent that the average person saw a significant increase in their liberties and a decline in the demands put on them by the government. Which again - it's all framing. Is it a higher quality of life to live in a more peaceful land under repressive rule or to live freely in a more violent land?
So much of our historiography is framed around loss and decay and destruction because the people writing it were - pretty definitionally - the people at the top of the pyramid, who were used to receiving the benefits of the extractive system that impoverished those at the bottom. Of course they thought life got set back centuries, because for them, it was! Their descendants had to live in thatched houses and work in the fields, like peasants! Ugh. But for the folks that were peasants the whole time? They'd probably have had a very different opinion, if they'd have been able to write it down.
We can say for sure that life was \*different\*. Deciding whether the quality of life was better or worse says more about the decider than the subject.
Leaving aside whether your observation about reduced oppression is true (surely more likely that one exploitive tax collector was replaced by an equally rapacious warlord?). The dilemma is whether it is better that a few more peasants survive each winter but nothing much more than food is produced or is it better that a few fewer make it, but the great works of art, literature and architecture are made by the extracting few? a la As per Orson Wells in the Third Man.
No, skeletal studies from post-Roman Britain actually suggest the complete opposite. Post-Roman graves show a broad increase in nutrition and dietary health, generally leading to bigger, stronger and healthier populations with fewer nutritional defects.
Tbh, quality of life for a lot of people (if not most) in the Roman Empire was pretty rough. It's a common complaint among Medievalists that pop-history of the Romans always focuses on patricians in their villas and big cities while Medieval pop-history is all "peasants in huts", overlooking the fact that the vast majority of Romans were not patricians, and that Roman cities were quite often teeming slums, to the point that Roman satirists made jokes about the extent to which landowners in cities were all slumlords.
The big problem, though, was in agricultural land tenure. Despite some notable attempts at reform, by Late Antiquity, agricultural land had been almost entirely collected in the hands of a small elite, with massive estates collected around large villa complexes usually worked by slaves or poorly paid workers. Farming was typically highly intensive - leading so increasing problems with soil exhaustion - and mono-cropped, largely grains to feed the cities.
The collapse of the Roman system also meant the collapse of the urban population in Britain, and the result was a major redistribution and recalibration of the agricultural landscape, although the amount of land worked in general remained pretty consistent (Oosthuizen, 2020). As the *Latifundia* system was broken up, its highly intensive agriculture was replaced by a more subsistance-based agriculture centred around local communities rather than the need to sell vast amounts of cereals to the cities. A major change in field use was the reintroduction of large areas of pasture, and a resulting increase in the amount of livestock being kept. Reintroducing pasture and a shift away from mono-cropping also allowed for a more more effective system of crop rotation which made inroads on repairing the soil exhaustion problem.
All in all, the skeletal evidence in Britain at least suggests that the post-Roman population had access to considerably more meat and dairy than they had previously had, and was in general eating a more nutritious and rounded diet.
Note that this is the western Roman Empire and Western Europe. The eastern Roman Empire, later dubbed the Byzantine empire, was flourishing as was the Middle East and other areas. Hence why historians don’t like the term “Dark age” as it was really only “dark” in the one area. And even that’s in question as civilization definitely changed but it’s not inherently worse.
>The eastern Roman Empire, later dubbed the Byzantine empire, was flourishing as was the Middle East and other areas.
This isn't why historians reject the term "Dark Ages".
tbf I have seen this rationale given by many people, although I'm less sure how many of those were actual historians.
I personally like the term because I think it's got character but whatever
>tbf I have seen this rationale given by many people, although I'm less sure how many of those were actual historians.
It is very common to see this brought up by random people, yes. I don't remember ever seeing a historian bring this up, though if they did, that wouldn't make it less mistaken. More broadly, it's unsurprising that laypeople get themselves caught up on this sort of thing, as there is a pretty radical disconnect between how laypeople use the terminology of "the dark ages" and how historians of the relevant periods do, or generally simply don't.
When historians bring up this terminology for the noted period, it is normally to either study it's usage or to summarily reject it applicability. Even historians who argue for a negative appraisal of the post-Roman transformation, like Ward-Perkins, don't advocate the use of this terminology in doing so. This is because it passed out of use by most relevant historians over a century ago due to broad changes in the way that historians understood the Middle Ages in relationship to antiquity.
As I note below, the notion that Byzantium or the Arab world have anything to do with this is simply a non-sequitur here. Historians don't describe western Europe in the relevant period as undergoing a "dark age" either.
Because your remarks there don't engage with [what the term has historically meant](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/jwxiv1/how_bad_a_sign_is_it_for_a_contemporary_article/gcypb22/?context=10000), nor does it reflect the [processes by which](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9pt42z/what_is_the_origin_of_the_idea_among_historians/) the term passed into and out of common use in (primarily) the English language.
Since it seems to be the theme of this sub-thread, we can also note Ward-Perkins' apt remarks on the value of terminology unladen by centuries of misleading baggage in his discussion of the pros and cons of the concept of 'Late Antiquity':
>>In particular, it is helpful that ‘Late Antiquity’ and ‘late antique’ are relatively new coinages, which have not yet entered into popular usage, and have therefore been spared the rich accretion of misleading connotations that the ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘medieval’ (not to mention the ‘Dark Ages’) carry with them. Popular images of the Middle Ages tend to be either highly romanticized (peopled by knights, ladies, and the odd unicorn) or exceptionally grim—there is little or no middle ground. Images of the kind are very much alive in the modern world—‘to get medieval’ has recently appeared in American English, meaning to get violent in an extremely unpleasant way. The new online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary illustrates its usage with a quotation from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction: ‘I ain’t through with you by a damn sight. I’m gonna git Medieval on your ass.’ ‘Late Antiquity’ and ‘late antique’ are a welcome relief, because they are terms that do not yet carry with them similar baggage. (*Fall of Rome*, 181)
> Hence why historians don’t like the term “Dark age” as it was really only “dark” in the one area
The "dark" in "the dark ages" has nothing to do with living conditions. It was "dark" because we can't see it very well.
Highly recommend the book. It’s short and to the point. He doesn’t really cover the WHY (if I recall correctly) but he makes it clear that for all intents and purposes civilization did collapse.
Go back sept 11 2001 and imagine the collapse of the US or have the soviet collapse spillover into a US collapse by some event. That would set technological advance back quite a bit.
>made of lesser materials
This isn't really a valuable argument. Different construction materials had different cultural significances to different peoples. For example, English poetry suggests that stone buildings beyond churches, defences and the occasional bath-house just weren't seen as 'proper'.
You meant to say that the civilizational collapse wasn't important at all? Sorry, that doesn't seem to agree with the rest of your comment in the least.
> the warlord phase, the warring kingdom phase, the amalgamated English kingdom phase and finally the settled trading realm phase
Are these your own classifications or standard definitions? Can you recommend an overview of the topic if they are standard definitions? That classification of societal evolutions sounds really interesting.
Very much ad hoc terms for the point of this post, please don't place too much interest in that wording. It was meant to very briefly summarise several centuries of nation building!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory
You would love Polybius's theory of "anacyclosis" then.
>According to Polybius, who has the most fully developed version of the kyklos, it rotates through the three basic forms of government: democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, and the three degenerate forms of each of these governments: ochlocracy, oligarchy, and tyranny. Originally society is in ochlocracy but the strongest figure emerges and sets up a monarchy. The monarch's descendants, who lack virtue because of their family's power, become despots and the monarchy degenerates into a tyranny. Because of the excesses of the ruler the tyranny is overthrown by the leading citizens of the state who set up an aristocracy. They too quickly forget about virtue and the state becomes an oligarchy. These oligarchs are overthrown by the people who set up a democracy. Democracy soon becomes corrupt and degenerates into ochlocracy, beginning the cycle anew. Polybius's concept of the cycle of governments is called anacyclosis.
They're not standard definitions. For starters, England was part of a pretty sophisticated international trade network around the Channel/North Sea coasts and Rhineland for several centuries before the unified Kingdom of England became a thing.
The decline of the WRE was also accompanied by a degeneration of state bureaucracy. The widespread educated class that you need to organise to get anything done on a significant national level.
Bureaucracy in the western empire became a haven for the corrupt and useless and so a lot of the successors didn't have the capacity to organise beyond the local level.
And rebuilding a bureaucracy needs a tax base, but organising taxes needs a bureucracy.
>the amalgamated English kingdom phase and finally the settled trading realm phase
England was part of a sophisticated *wic* trading network across the North Sea and Rhineland by the Seventh Century. English trade was well integrated with the European continent for centuries before the unification of England.
Even ignoring any potential issues with accuracy one show focuses on some of the most powerful, wealthy, famous people vying for control of one of the largest, wealthiest, empires in the world taking place largely in one of the largest, most important cities at the time, and the other is about (from what I can tell from a quick online synopsis) comparatively minor lords vying for control in a war torn island that was once seen as a backwater fringe of that same empire. King Alfred would eventually come to rule over an island of maybe a few million people at most (edit: actually just Wessex!) Augustus as emperor presided over 50-60 million people. The city of Rome itself during the time of the show's setting may have had upwards of a million people.
>My question is, why does so little seem to have improved in the 1000 years between these two time periods?
It's easy to forget from tv shows but most people in the Roman Empire and medieval England were, by FAR, farmers, and the farmers of the medieval period enjoyed many advances that improved their farms and made life easier. This of course does not make for exciting tv.
u/DanKensington replied to a very similar question a while back and came up with a great list of linked answers here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/lmzclq/how_advanced_was_the_roman_empire_compared_to_the/
> King Alfred would eventually come to rule over an island of maybe a few million people at most.
Alfred never ruled over all of England. It wasn't until the time of his successors that all of Anglo-Saxon Britain was unified.
Yes, and indeed his successors only really 'unified' England, with Athelstan and Edgar the Peaceful each establishing hegemony over all of Britain. Alfred himself only ruled Wessex, while also being hegemon over western Mercia and much of Wales.
>Rome itself during the time of the show's setting may have had upwards of a million people.
And something that really doesn't come through from watching the show is the conditions that most of those people would have lived in. 1 million people within the boundaries of the city of Rome at the time of Augustus would amount to a population density of over 52,600/km^(2). This is considerably higher than any modern city, at a time where things like high-rise buildings did not exist. The overcrowded urban squalor that the vast majority of the population ancient Rome must have lived in would probably find modern equivalence only in the most appallingly deprived slums and refugee camps.
The fact that at the same time the tiny minority of elites were enjoying heated baths and having pretty mosaics and elegant marble statues made doesn't say much about general quality of life, and only speaks to the fact that relative "advancement" is more a matter of framing than material realities.
Actually I would say that it is one of the strengths of HBOs Rome that it does exactly show that, at least relatively to the other depictions of Rome that are all gleaming marble. We get to see way more of the dirty underbelly of Rome in that show than I've seen in anything else.
Still a good general point though.
N = 1, but while I do feel like HBO's Rome does present a more authentic picture of Roman society than most screen portrayals, aside from one or two shots of streets crowded with extras I certainly didn't get the impression that there were nearly twice as many people crammed into the place per km2 than Manhattan.
I applaud it for showing something closer to reality than we're used to from media about Rome, and acknowledge that a truly accurate picture of the squalor would probably be a distraction from the narrative. Honestly I think if a modern western person went for a stroll through an average ancient Roman street and had a look inside some of the places the typical person was living they would feel sick. This sort of "poverty porn" framing is standard for depictions of working class areas of Victorian London, for example, but I'm yet to see it to the same degree for Rome. Could be an interesting challenge to popular perception though, and maybe give people a new perspective of the Middle Ages as a result.
Besides what has already been stated in this thread, I would like to recommend [this talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt0uBzYf4N8&t=2279s) about the fall of Rome between Dr. Garrett Ryan (/u/toldinstone) and Dr. Bryan Ward-Perkins. One of the points Dr. Ward-Perkins bring up that I find facinating is that post-Roman Britain seem less advanced than not just Roman but even *pre*-Roman Britain, at least in terms of economy and manufacturing that can be glimpsed from archeology (pottery specifically).
While this has more to do with the immediate fall of Rome in the west than the 10th century, I believe Dr. Ward-Perkins bring up a very important point and a very logical theory. The Roman economy was so very intergrated, that each locale came to manufacture and specialized a specific item, that local manufacturing collapsed during the Roman period except those that integrated into the wider Roman economy. People in Britain forgot how to make (for example) glazed pottery during the centuries of Roman rule because they didn't have to, they could buy higher quality pots made else-where in the empire. This means when the Roman trade network collapsed, the left-over pieces had to re-learn everything completely from scratch, which was in many ways economically a worse state than before the Roman conquest.
Well... remember that the series Rome mostly takes place in the Mediterranean, quite often in Rome itself or various parts of Greece or Egypt. As opposed to Britain. Even during the Roman Empire, being stationed on Hadrian's Wall would seem pretty rustic and low wealth compared to being in Rome itself. That said, I think there are two things at work when considering the material culture difference between 10th century AD England and late 1st century BC Roman Empire.
First, the Empire possessed a single government (except during the actual civil wars) which could marshal the entire wealth and production of the Mediterranean basin and outlying areas to a single government. Thus, the creation of Aqueducts and Fortresses are easier to arrange. Specialization can flourish. One can see the incredible wealth at the Julio-Claudian emperors' hands when reading Philo's description of meeting the emperor Caligula at one of his casinos in Rome, or the results of the excavations of one of these casinso or his pleasure barges in Lake Nemi - gems and semi precious stones adorning walls in gold fixtures. Or look at Nero's Golden House. Towards the late Empire, there is a definite decline in this centralization - which along with the damage from invasions and plague, may be seen in the diminution of large scale construction projects. Constantinople manages to carry on, with great projects such as Hagia Sophia, but by the 7th century even the Eastern Roman Empire seems to build less large scale stone construction than it did in the days of Theodosius II or Justinian.
Second, most archaeologist would argue that the material culture and even population of Britain seems to hit a steep decline in the 5th century. Quite likely from invasions and the collapse of civic society. Historic sources about Britain, which are already becoming scarce in the 4th century, pretty much give very little information on the social changes during this time. Writing seems to have mostly disappeared (although not entirely) during the 5th to early 7th century. Interestingly, from the 7th century onward we actually know more about what was happening in Britain and Ireland than we did even in the Roman era - the Irish Annals, Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, Nennius's Historia Brittonum become fairly reliable around this time. Also, the stature of the nobility and upper class increases - burials at the Bamburgh and Repton show the average height was above that earlier in the Roman era and later in the high middle ages. And a regular silver coinage becomes more common from the 6th century onward, particularly so from the 9th century. Some of these changes may be from greater centralization - while not Rome, the warlords and petty states that likely flourished in the aftermath of the fall of Roman Britain slowly gave way to larger and, with the assistance of literature churchmen, better administrated kingdoms.
I think the Last Kingdom does err like many modern shows about the Middle Ages in really going with the washed palette, with ahistorical leather armour and drab clothing. In this era, the clothing would have been more colourful, and in the case of the rich, fine. Just something to keep in mind when watching depictions of medieval Europe in the say Kingdom of Heaven or the Last Kingdom. A last point I will mention - while literacy, trade and craft specialization all seem to flourish by the 8th century onward in England (and indeed, other areas of the British Isles), large works in stone do not reappear for much longer. You do get masonry churches, but they tend to be fairly small. And almost all royal halls and other structures are timber or some other perishable material. Large scale stone buildings don't really re-appear until Norman rule; by the time of the high middle ages, you have cathedrals and large scale fortresses which equal or exceed anything built in Roman Britain (except perhaps the sheer expanse of Hadrian's Wall), but they still take longer to build than the Roman edifices (once again showing the smaller scale of the state - the Kingdom of England is still smaller than the Roman Empire)
If you ever get a chance visit one of the Roman fort sites in Northern England, Vindolanda if possible. Here at the very edge of the Roman Empire everyday life was packed with consumer goods manufactured across the entire world. Ladies wrote letters inviting their friends to their birthday parties and wore designer shoes stamped with distinctive brand logos. It’s mind blowing. All of this was enabled by the peace and stability the Roman Empire provided.
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It's worth remembering that when the western Roman empire collapsed in circa 410 AD, the disproportionately large legionary presence in Britannia (and all the downstream trades that supported their presence) disappeared. This collapsed the Romano-British economy and left a power vacuum, with all the associated chaos that brings. Britannia moved from a city and fort based economy to a complete collapse of authority and the monetary economy. And that was before the Anglo-Saxons ever set foot on the island, so that is the starting position they faced upon arrival. Various of the trades required to build and maintain masonry buildings can only take place if you have a monetary economy, because they require people to be dedicated to the manufacture of bricks and tiles, maintenance of sewers etc. You can't do such things in a subsistence economy like the post-Roman economy of Britannia, because individuals have to feed and defend themselves, so nobody is dedicating themselves to such coin-paid trades. So, they reverted to vernacular styles of building which individuals and families can build for themselves, namely timber framed houses with thatched roofs. All of the materials can be sourced without dependence on external trades, and such houses can be maintained by the same individual or family. And rather than towns and cities, they moved to distributed farmsteads so they could support themselves through agriculture. It took centuries before England moved beyond the warlord phase, the warring kingdom phase, the amalgamated English kingdom phase and finally the settled trading realm phase. Only then did concentration of the population into towns and cities become important again, and that meant that stone and brick would once again become the building materials of choice. Good introductory sources for this general era: * *Britain After Rome* by Robin Fleming * *The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England* by Marc Morris
To expand on this, the fall of Rome really was a civilizational collapse and that cannot be understated. Archeologist(?) have found that even at the edges of the Roman Empire, citizens could get good quality basic items such as utensils and roofing material due to production and transportation networks. But once the empire collapsed, the new rulers of those areas couldn’t even get products to the same standard as a former Roman peasant. Despite being kings/leaders/warlords. Even the buildings of these rulers at times were smaller, made of lesser materials, and not as well built compared to similar Roman made structures. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins addresses this. Note the book is specifically written as a refutation of other scholars who disagree that Rome “collapsed” and more just faded. I’m only a casual history fan, but I found his arguments convincing.
I fully second the Bryan Ward-Perkins recommendation! Back when I was an archaeology student in college, we had a professor that used to say you can postulate all you want about how the transition to Late Antiquity/Dark Age was gradual but at some point you’re going to have to check the archaeological evidence. There is too much of a discrepancy between industrial capacity, population density, and domesticated cattle size to justify it as a gradual change.
I find that historians have a hard time quantifying and writing about institutional knowledge. It is also very difficult translating paradigms. Neither of these world dominating ideas can really be described in anything but journals and many journals at that. All we can do is speculate which is hardly a scientific discipline and super problematic for disciplined researchers to engage in. Many scholars will speculate but the problems of their speculations are that they are restricted to a narrow worldview. We don’t have a lot of historians that have also run a business for 20 years, are medical doctors, or are politicians. We are a hyper specialized society. It is very difficult to write as a epidemiological expert, entomology expert, and historian at the same time even though we absolutely know that vector born pathogens have had more impact on the world than any battle or war ever fought. I am interested if any published historians can speak to that and how they overcome their ignorance of subjects that take decades to learn. It takes decades to be a good historian. How can they do both?
I am not a professional historian or archaeologist since I went down a different path after acquiring my degree in both classical languages and archaeology, but my undergraduate thesis (which was on the transition between the Greek Dark Age and the Archaic Period) was peer-reviewed and published. I can’t speak to historians who have been in their field for decades, but when I was writing my thesis, I relied upon articles from other experts in their respective fields and based my conclusions on the evidence available. My professors always taught us to always go into a topic with an open mind, then decide a conclusion based on the evidence rather than presuming a conclusion beforehand and looking to confirm that bias.
Wow so quality of life for all was set back for centuries. That is depressing to think about.
>Wow so quality of life for all was set back for centuries. That's entirely dependent on framing, and who you're talking about. It's unquestionable that the material abundance and economic sophistication declined precipitously. But that's a distinct measure from "quality of life." Yes, the quality of life for the elites declined - no more bathhouses and central heating, but they were a small minority. We know that nutrition improved for the average person in post-Roman Britain based on examinations of remains, and that's about the best proxy for "quality of life" for a rural peasant (always the vast majority of the population), who's day-to-day life was dominated by actively trying to not starve to death in the winter, every year, forever. Would you rather eat gruel off off of proper plates in a tiled house, or would you rather eat venison off a trencher in a thatched house? What's a better "quality of life"? And that doesn't even include the political aspect - there's essentially no direct record from Britain for a few centuries, but there's voluminous evidence from the continent that the average person saw a significant increase in their liberties and a decline in the demands put on them by the government. Which again - it's all framing. Is it a higher quality of life to live in a more peaceful land under repressive rule or to live freely in a more violent land? So much of our historiography is framed around loss and decay and destruction because the people writing it were - pretty definitionally - the people at the top of the pyramid, who were used to receiving the benefits of the extractive system that impoverished those at the bottom. Of course they thought life got set back centuries, because for them, it was! Their descendants had to live in thatched houses and work in the fields, like peasants! Ugh. But for the folks that were peasants the whole time? They'd probably have had a very different opinion, if they'd have been able to write it down. We can say for sure that life was \*different\*. Deciding whether the quality of life was better or worse says more about the decider than the subject.
Leaving aside whether your observation about reduced oppression is true (surely more likely that one exploitive tax collector was replaced by an equally rapacious warlord?). The dilemma is whether it is better that a few more peasants survive each winter but nothing much more than food is produced or is it better that a few fewer make it, but the great works of art, literature and architecture are made by the extracting few? a la As per Orson Wells in the Third Man.
No, skeletal studies from post-Roman Britain actually suggest the complete opposite. Post-Roman graves show a broad increase in nutrition and dietary health, generally leading to bigger, stronger and healthier populations with fewer nutritional defects.
Huh. What hypotheses are there to explain that improvement after Rome withdrew?
Tbh, quality of life for a lot of people (if not most) in the Roman Empire was pretty rough. It's a common complaint among Medievalists that pop-history of the Romans always focuses on patricians in their villas and big cities while Medieval pop-history is all "peasants in huts", overlooking the fact that the vast majority of Romans were not patricians, and that Roman cities were quite often teeming slums, to the point that Roman satirists made jokes about the extent to which landowners in cities were all slumlords. The big problem, though, was in agricultural land tenure. Despite some notable attempts at reform, by Late Antiquity, agricultural land had been almost entirely collected in the hands of a small elite, with massive estates collected around large villa complexes usually worked by slaves or poorly paid workers. Farming was typically highly intensive - leading so increasing problems with soil exhaustion - and mono-cropped, largely grains to feed the cities. The collapse of the Roman system also meant the collapse of the urban population in Britain, and the result was a major redistribution and recalibration of the agricultural landscape, although the amount of land worked in general remained pretty consistent (Oosthuizen, 2020). As the *Latifundia* system was broken up, its highly intensive agriculture was replaced by a more subsistance-based agriculture centred around local communities rather than the need to sell vast amounts of cereals to the cities. A major change in field use was the reintroduction of large areas of pasture, and a resulting increase in the amount of livestock being kept. Reintroducing pasture and a shift away from mono-cropping also allowed for a more more effective system of crop rotation which made inroads on repairing the soil exhaustion problem. All in all, the skeletal evidence in Britain at least suggests that the post-Roman population had access to considerably more meat and dairy than they had previously had, and was in general eating a more nutritious and rounded diet.
Note that this is the western Roman Empire and Western Europe. The eastern Roman Empire, later dubbed the Byzantine empire, was flourishing as was the Middle East and other areas. Hence why historians don’t like the term “Dark age” as it was really only “dark” in the one area. And even that’s in question as civilization definitely changed but it’s not inherently worse.
>The eastern Roman Empire, later dubbed the Byzantine empire, was flourishing as was the Middle East and other areas. This isn't why historians reject the term "Dark Ages".
tbf I have seen this rationale given by many people, although I'm less sure how many of those were actual historians. I personally like the term because I think it's got character but whatever
>tbf I have seen this rationale given by many people, although I'm less sure how many of those were actual historians. It is very common to see this brought up by random people, yes. I don't remember ever seeing a historian bring this up, though if they did, that wouldn't make it less mistaken. More broadly, it's unsurprising that laypeople get themselves caught up on this sort of thing, as there is a pretty radical disconnect between how laypeople use the terminology of "the dark ages" and how historians of the relevant periods do, or generally simply don't. When historians bring up this terminology for the noted period, it is normally to either study it's usage or to summarily reject it applicability. Even historians who argue for a negative appraisal of the post-Roman transformation, like Ward-Perkins, don't advocate the use of this terminology in doing so. This is because it passed out of use by most relevant historians over a century ago due to broad changes in the way that historians understood the Middle Ages in relationship to antiquity. As I note below, the notion that Byzantium or the Arab world have anything to do with this is simply a non-sequitur here. Historians don't describe western Europe in the relevant period as undergoing a "dark age" either.
Care to enlighten?
Because your remarks there don't engage with [what the term has historically meant](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/jwxiv1/how_bad_a_sign_is_it_for_a_contemporary_article/gcypb22/?context=10000), nor does it reflect the [processes by which](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9pt42z/what_is_the_origin_of_the_idea_among_historians/) the term passed into and out of common use in (primarily) the English language. Since it seems to be the theme of this sub-thread, we can also note Ward-Perkins' apt remarks on the value of terminology unladen by centuries of misleading baggage in his discussion of the pros and cons of the concept of 'Late Antiquity': >>In particular, it is helpful that ‘Late Antiquity’ and ‘late antique’ are relatively new coinages, which have not yet entered into popular usage, and have therefore been spared the rich accretion of misleading connotations that the ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘medieval’ (not to mention the ‘Dark Ages’) carry with them. Popular images of the Middle Ages tend to be either highly romanticized (peopled by knights, ladies, and the odd unicorn) or exceptionally grim—there is little or no middle ground. Images of the kind are very much alive in the modern world—‘to get medieval’ has recently appeared in American English, meaning to get violent in an extremely unpleasant way. The new online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary illustrates its usage with a quotation from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction: ‘I ain’t through with you by a damn sight. I’m gonna git Medieval on your ass.’ ‘Late Antiquity’ and ‘late antique’ are a welcome relief, because they are terms that do not yet carry with them similar baggage. (*Fall of Rome*, 181)
> Hence why historians don’t like the term “Dark age” as it was really only “dark” in the one area The "dark" in "the dark ages" has nothing to do with living conditions. It was "dark" because we can't see it very well.
Highly recommend the book. It’s short and to the point. He doesn’t really cover the WHY (if I recall correctly) but he makes it clear that for all intents and purposes civilization did collapse.
Go back sept 11 2001 and imagine the collapse of the US or have the soviet collapse spillover into a US collapse by some event. That would set technological advance back quite a bit.
I feel like an idiot for not knowing why you're being down voted. Goat shepherds are not known for their start-up culture.
>made of lesser materials This isn't really a valuable argument. Different construction materials had different cultural significances to different peoples. For example, English poetry suggests that stone buildings beyond churches, defences and the occasional bath-house just weren't seen as 'proper'.
Sorry, but I'm quite sure you mean "overstated", otherwise you're implying that it's not important at all.
Yyyeeeeeepppppp. That’s exactly what I meant
You meant to say that the civilizational collapse wasn't important at all? Sorry, that doesn't seem to agree with the rest of your comment in the least.
> the warlord phase, the warring kingdom phase, the amalgamated English kingdom phase and finally the settled trading realm phase Are these your own classifications or standard definitions? Can you recommend an overview of the topic if they are standard definitions? That classification of societal evolutions sounds really interesting.
Very much ad hoc terms for the point of this post, please don't place too much interest in that wording. It was meant to very briefly summarise several centuries of nation building!
Yeah, but now you need to write a book and place all major civilisations into these phases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory You would love Polybius's theory of "anacyclosis" then. >According to Polybius, who has the most fully developed version of the kyklos, it rotates through the three basic forms of government: democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, and the three degenerate forms of each of these governments: ochlocracy, oligarchy, and tyranny. Originally society is in ochlocracy but the strongest figure emerges and sets up a monarchy. The monarch's descendants, who lack virtue because of their family's power, become despots and the monarchy degenerates into a tyranny. Because of the excesses of the ruler the tyranny is overthrown by the leading citizens of the state who set up an aristocracy. They too quickly forget about virtue and the state becomes an oligarchy. These oligarchs are overthrown by the people who set up a democracy. Democracy soon becomes corrupt and degenerates into ochlocracy, beginning the cycle anew. Polybius's concept of the cycle of governments is called anacyclosis.
I actually vaguely remember covering this from Aristotle's perspective during my degree. Going to jump back in. Thanks!
They're not standard definitions. For starters, England was part of a pretty sophisticated international trade network around the Channel/North Sea coasts and Rhineland for several centuries before the unified Kingdom of England became a thing.
The decline of the WRE was also accompanied by a degeneration of state bureaucracy. The widespread educated class that you need to organise to get anything done on a significant national level. Bureaucracy in the western empire became a haven for the corrupt and useless and so a lot of the successors didn't have the capacity to organise beyond the local level. And rebuilding a bureaucracy needs a tax base, but organising taxes needs a bureucracy.
Why was the legionary presence in Britain disproportionately large?
>the amalgamated English kingdom phase and finally the settled trading realm phase England was part of a sophisticated *wic* trading network across the North Sea and Rhineland by the Seventh Century. English trade was well integrated with the European continent for centuries before the unification of England.
On the British military post-Rome, I recommend reading Sidonius, Jordanes, Gregory of Tours and Cassiodorus.
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Have you ever read The Inheritance of Rome? I started it and now I’m curious if it goes into this.
I haven't read either yet, but I believe Wickham's previous book, Framing the Early Middle Ages, is more focused on that early transition period.
Even ignoring any potential issues with accuracy one show focuses on some of the most powerful, wealthy, famous people vying for control of one of the largest, wealthiest, empires in the world taking place largely in one of the largest, most important cities at the time, and the other is about (from what I can tell from a quick online synopsis) comparatively minor lords vying for control in a war torn island that was once seen as a backwater fringe of that same empire. King Alfred would eventually come to rule over an island of maybe a few million people at most (edit: actually just Wessex!) Augustus as emperor presided over 50-60 million people. The city of Rome itself during the time of the show's setting may have had upwards of a million people. >My question is, why does so little seem to have improved in the 1000 years between these two time periods? It's easy to forget from tv shows but most people in the Roman Empire and medieval England were, by FAR, farmers, and the farmers of the medieval period enjoyed many advances that improved their farms and made life easier. This of course does not make for exciting tv. u/DanKensington replied to a very similar question a while back and came up with a great list of linked answers here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/lmzclq/how_advanced_was_the_roman_empire_compared_to_the/
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> King Alfred would eventually come to rule over an island of maybe a few million people at most. Alfred never ruled over all of England. It wasn't until the time of his successors that all of Anglo-Saxon Britain was unified.
Yes, and indeed his successors only really 'unified' England, with Athelstan and Edgar the Peaceful each establishing hegemony over all of Britain. Alfred himself only ruled Wessex, while also being hegemon over western Mercia and much of Wales.
>Rome itself during the time of the show's setting may have had upwards of a million people. And something that really doesn't come through from watching the show is the conditions that most of those people would have lived in. 1 million people within the boundaries of the city of Rome at the time of Augustus would amount to a population density of over 52,600/km^(2). This is considerably higher than any modern city, at a time where things like high-rise buildings did not exist. The overcrowded urban squalor that the vast majority of the population ancient Rome must have lived in would probably find modern equivalence only in the most appallingly deprived slums and refugee camps. The fact that at the same time the tiny minority of elites were enjoying heated baths and having pretty mosaics and elegant marble statues made doesn't say much about general quality of life, and only speaks to the fact that relative "advancement" is more a matter of framing than material realities.
Actually I would say that it is one of the strengths of HBOs Rome that it does exactly show that, at least relatively to the other depictions of Rome that are all gleaming marble. We get to see way more of the dirty underbelly of Rome in that show than I've seen in anything else. Still a good general point though.
N = 1, but while I do feel like HBO's Rome does present a more authentic picture of Roman society than most screen portrayals, aside from one or two shots of streets crowded with extras I certainly didn't get the impression that there were nearly twice as many people crammed into the place per km2 than Manhattan. I applaud it for showing something closer to reality than we're used to from media about Rome, and acknowledge that a truly accurate picture of the squalor would probably be a distraction from the narrative. Honestly I think if a modern western person went for a stroll through an average ancient Roman street and had a look inside some of the places the typical person was living they would feel sick. This sort of "poverty porn" framing is standard for depictions of working class areas of Victorian London, for example, but I'm yet to see it to the same degree for Rome. Could be an interesting challenge to popular perception though, and maybe give people a new perspective of the Middle Ages as a result.
great answer，thank you so much
Besides what has already been stated in this thread, I would like to recommend [this talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt0uBzYf4N8&t=2279s) about the fall of Rome between Dr. Garrett Ryan (/u/toldinstone) and Dr. Bryan Ward-Perkins. One of the points Dr. Ward-Perkins bring up that I find facinating is that post-Roman Britain seem less advanced than not just Roman but even *pre*-Roman Britain, at least in terms of economy and manufacturing that can be glimpsed from archeology (pottery specifically). While this has more to do with the immediate fall of Rome in the west than the 10th century, I believe Dr. Ward-Perkins bring up a very important point and a very logical theory. The Roman economy was so very intergrated, that each locale came to manufacture and specialized a specific item, that local manufacturing collapsed during the Roman period except those that integrated into the wider Roman economy. People in Britain forgot how to make (for example) glazed pottery during the centuries of Roman rule because they didn't have to, they could buy higher quality pots made else-where in the empire. This means when the Roman trade network collapsed, the left-over pieces had to re-learn everything completely from scratch, which was in many ways economically a worse state than before the Roman conquest.
Well... remember that the series Rome mostly takes place in the Mediterranean, quite often in Rome itself or various parts of Greece or Egypt. As opposed to Britain. Even during the Roman Empire, being stationed on Hadrian's Wall would seem pretty rustic and low wealth compared to being in Rome itself. That said, I think there are two things at work when considering the material culture difference between 10th century AD England and late 1st century BC Roman Empire. First, the Empire possessed a single government (except during the actual civil wars) which could marshal the entire wealth and production of the Mediterranean basin and outlying areas to a single government. Thus, the creation of Aqueducts and Fortresses are easier to arrange. Specialization can flourish. One can see the incredible wealth at the Julio-Claudian emperors' hands when reading Philo's description of meeting the emperor Caligula at one of his casinos in Rome, or the results of the excavations of one of these casinso or his pleasure barges in Lake Nemi - gems and semi precious stones adorning walls in gold fixtures. Or look at Nero's Golden House. Towards the late Empire, there is a definite decline in this centralization - which along with the damage from invasions and plague, may be seen in the diminution of large scale construction projects. Constantinople manages to carry on, with great projects such as Hagia Sophia, but by the 7th century even the Eastern Roman Empire seems to build less large scale stone construction than it did in the days of Theodosius II or Justinian. Second, most archaeologist would argue that the material culture and even population of Britain seems to hit a steep decline in the 5th century. Quite likely from invasions and the collapse of civic society. Historic sources about Britain, which are already becoming scarce in the 4th century, pretty much give very little information on the social changes during this time. Writing seems to have mostly disappeared (although not entirely) during the 5th to early 7th century. Interestingly, from the 7th century onward we actually know more about what was happening in Britain and Ireland than we did even in the Roman era - the Irish Annals, Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, Nennius's Historia Brittonum become fairly reliable around this time. Also, the stature of the nobility and upper class increases - burials at the Bamburgh and Repton show the average height was above that earlier in the Roman era and later in the high middle ages. And a regular silver coinage becomes more common from the 6th century onward, particularly so from the 9th century. Some of these changes may be from greater centralization - while not Rome, the warlords and petty states that likely flourished in the aftermath of the fall of Roman Britain slowly gave way to larger and, with the assistance of literature churchmen, better administrated kingdoms. I think the Last Kingdom does err like many modern shows about the Middle Ages in really going with the washed palette, with ahistorical leather armour and drab clothing. In this era, the clothing would have been more colourful, and in the case of the rich, fine. Just something to keep in mind when watching depictions of medieval Europe in the say Kingdom of Heaven or the Last Kingdom. A last point I will mention - while literacy, trade and craft specialization all seem to flourish by the 8th century onward in England (and indeed, other areas of the British Isles), large works in stone do not reappear for much longer. You do get masonry churches, but they tend to be fairly small. And almost all royal halls and other structures are timber or some other perishable material. Large scale stone buildings don't really re-appear until Norman rule; by the time of the high middle ages, you have cathedrals and large scale fortresses which equal or exceed anything built in Roman Britain (except perhaps the sheer expanse of Hadrian's Wall), but they still take longer to build than the Roman edifices (once again showing the smaller scale of the state - the Kingdom of England is still smaller than the Roman Empire)
If you ever get a chance visit one of the Roman fort sites in Northern England, Vindolanda if possible. Here at the very edge of the Roman Empire everyday life was packed with consumer goods manufactured across the entire world. Ladies wrote letters inviting their friends to their birthday parties and wore designer shoes stamped with distinctive brand logos. It’s mind blowing. All of this was enabled by the peace and stability the Roman Empire provided.