0301A

The principal supporting argument is the relationship between 'co-axial' landscapes and Roman roads. In these widespread landscapes, the field-boundaries and the lines of minor roads are apparently determined by sets of approximately parallel lines, all lying in the same direction. It is as if areas covering many square miles had been laid out at some remote period, each at more or less a single go. These landscapes seem to antedate major Roman roads, which swing across them, doing little to determine their arrangement. Additional evidence for the detail of the countryside going back at least into the Roman period comes, for example, from Wiltshire: on the Marlborough Downs parish boundaries (very probably following ancient property boundaries) disregard the Dark Age Wansdyke, though this is still a great feature in the landscape.

A visitor to Britain in AD500 would, however, have seen plain traces of the destructive consequences of Roman withdrawal, above all in the towns. The government and economy of Roman Britain had depended very largely on towns. The largest towns, administrative capitals for wide areas, were not only big but grand. The basilica beside the forum of London had a floor area close in size to modern St Paul's cathedral. The legionary fortress at York was one of the largest in the whole empire, with a dominating facade, eight multi-angular towers facing south across the River Ouse, and its headquarters building with a basilican hall supported by columns over thirty feet high. One stage down were the capitals of the civitates, the erstwhile tribal areas which were the main territorial subdivisions.
Lower down the hierarchy was a scatter, (in some areas fairly dense) of market towns. Even small places were often walled; Britain seems to have been more thickly fortified than any other part of the empire.

Much of the existence and prosperity of' the larger Roman towns depended on the presence of the government and/or the army. Urban economies depended largely on the Roman provision of peace and good communications. Crucial urban institutions relied upon the maintenance of an ordered society. A Roman town of even modest proportions would have a bathing complex of very considerable size; the scale of such a complex at such a major town as Wroxeter (Viriconium) was comparable to that of a major medieval monastery. The maintenance and running of such an establishment was a socio-economic feat possible only in an ordered society.

A common clich� on the fate of former Roman towns in Britain is that while some life in towns may have continued, urban life in a true sense cannot have done so. This statement is doubtless safe enough, particularly if fortified by a prudent observation on necessary local variation. Great difficulties arise, however, in dating urban changes. Archaeologists' main means of dating for Roman Britain are coins and pots. From the early 5th century coins almost ceased to be imported and the mass production of pottery stopped. Society lived off existing stocks of coinage and pottery: a great hindrance to archaeological dating. But it is more than a reasonable guess that by 500 almost all towns had ceased or were ceasing to be major centres of population. This is not to say that people were no longer using towns: it could easily be at about this time that people at Cirencester turned their extra-mural arena into a kind of fortress or others at Winchester sought to wall up at least one of the city's gates.
It is likely that the overwhelming impression made by cities and towns at this date would have been of immense ruins. London and other Roman cities would have presented an aspect like that of' Rome as it appears in 16th century engravings, a vista of semi-ruralised shattered magnificence. Very little remains of all these ruins now: gateways at Lincoln and Colchester, fragments of wall there and elsewhere. What happened to the rest? For the most part we simply do not know: we have descriptions of the levelling of St Albans (Verulamium) around AD1000, and another, more strictly contemporary, that of Roman Carlisle (Lugubalia) in about 1120. There, William of Malmesbury tells us that bonfires had to be lighted against the walls to decompose their mortar before the demolition gangs set to with battering-rams.

If we know a little about the destruction of' buildings, we know next to nothing about what happened to monuments. Very occasional finds indicate some of what has been lost, but might still have been there in 500: for example, fragment of life-size or more than life-size statues are found: here a head, there hand, somewhere else a finger. Place-names tell its a little about Roman survivals. An Oxfordshire village is named from a mosaic pavement there: Fawler. In England a considerable number of civitas capitals lost even their names, suggesting disruption so profound that even a sight as conspicuous as a ruined town could lose its identity. This did not happen in Gaul. Similarly, in Gaul, many place-names (ending in ... ville) derive from those of Roman country houses, villas. While there were many villas in Roman Britain their names are lost; archaeology suggests that their domestic buildings very rarely survived for many generations, if at all.

Not all was necessarily destruction. Not only did much of the landscape survive; some towns retained, if not large populations, then at least governmental functions. For example, The Venerable Bede, writing in c. 731, called Canterbury the metropolis of the dominions of Ethelbert, king of Kent. Archaeological evidence can be strangely suggestive on such matters. Thus there is evidence to suggest that the great hall of the headquarters building at York remained in use until the 10th century. If so, the Anglian kings of Deira had a Roman base indeed. A more remarkable tale is hinted at in London. For long the site of the amphitheatre there was unknown. When it was found it was in a notable place: immediately beside the medieval (and modern) Guildhall. Could it have been that the amphitheatre continued to be used for major assemblies, and was thus a focus of government? More in Part B....