Read Online Foundation (History of England Vol 1) by Peter Ackroyd - Free Book Online

the north were grouped under a commander who became their chieftain. One of the first Roman leaders of the north, Coelius or Coel Hen, became in English folk rhyme ‘Old King Cole’.
    So the pattern of English life is localized and various in this period after the withdrawal of the Roman imperium . Signs of a more general change, however, can be found. The taxation system of Rome was dismantled, and the countryside was now controlled by an aristocracy of landowners. With the abandonment of taxation, the circulation of coinage diminished rapidly. By 410 the large centres of pottery manufacture had gone out of business; the demand no longer existed. Brick-making did not return to England until the fifteenth century. Villas were neglected or abandoned, becoming unused sites for later settlers.
    The days of public and monumental display in the cities had gone. But this does not necessarily mean that the cities decayed or were in decline; they had simply changed their function. They remained centres of administration for the immediate area, and housed the local bishop and the local leader, but they no longer wanted or needed the imperial facades of the third century. The basilica at Silchester, for example, was converted into a centre for metal-working. The urban population remained, and there is evidence of rebuilding at York and Gloucester in the fifth century. A new water supply, with timber pipes, was introduced to Verulamium in the latter half of that century. So a civic organization was still in operation. The Roman city of Wroxeter has been unearthed from the fields of Shropshire. It did not disappear after the Romans had left. The basilica was razed, and in its place a large wooden hall was erected; this hall became the centre for a complexof timber buildings based on Roman models. A prosperous and busy life continued well into the medieval period.
    Archaeologists have discovered, from the strata of the fifth century, a deposit spread over many towns and cities; they have named it ‘dark earth’. This was once thought to be evidence of abandonment and desolation. Now it is more correctly interpreted as the residue of wattle-and-daub dwellings. The towns and cities of the fifth century may have been heavily populated, maintaining a commercial life that never left them.
    Self-sufficiency was established upon barter and local trading. There is evidence of hand-made pottery, and quantities of raw clay that might have been used for the building of walls. The lives of the farmers and labourers of the country were changed not at all by the dislocation of leaders.
    The Confession of St Patrick, who was taken by Saxon slavers at the end of the fourth century, shows that the affluent life of the villa owner continued into the early decades of the fifth century. On Patrick’s return to England, six years after his capture, his father urged him to enter public service; local rhetoricians were employed, for example, to guide the populace. Some kind of working polity was based upon a Roman original. When Bishop Germanus came to England from Gaul in 429 he was greeted by the leading men of Verulamium in a gesture of civic unity. These are likely to have been the members of the diocesan or provincial council who had taken over the administration of the city. In the life of Germanus they are reported to have been ‘conspicuous for their wealth, fashionable in their dress, and surrounded by an adoring multitude of people’. This was not a country denuded of its prestige or affluence.
    Germanus had come in part to assist the English in their fight against the Picts and Saxons, adding weight to the suggestion that there was some sudden or overwhelming Saxon ‘invasion’. But in fact the Saxons were already here. They had been in England from the third century. They were already part of the fabric of English life. The urban and tribal elites needed Saxon warriors to defend their property; many of these soldiers married native women,