Robin Fleming

What was Britain like in the Dark Ages? Who walked across the landscape we now inhabit? Do objects such as those found in the Staffordshire hoard reveal a far more sophisticated, wealthy and militarized society than we had previously imagined? Britain After Rome stitches together a wealth of research and imaginative engagement to bring us as close as we can hope to get to the tumultuous centuries between the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West and the arrival of the Normans nearly seven centuries later. Robin Fleming depicts a country whose towns were abandoned, where Christianity had disappeared, and where immigrants and invaders came to settle. Yet it is also the world in which many of today's villages were founded, and Britain's vernacular languages and political arrangements were forged. Britain after Rome offers tantalizing glimpses of the surprising and resilient peoples who remade Britain in the centuries after Rome's collapse. It allows its readers to see Britain's history in a quite new light. 'An excellent, gripping and persuasive read . . . offers an entirely new insight into the past' British Archaeology' A sweeping work of impressive scope' Archaeology Review

The Fall and Rise, 400-1070

Britain After Rome

Although lowland Britain in 300 CE had been as Roman as any province in the empire, in the generations on either side of 400, urban life, the money economy, and the functioning state collapsed. Many of the most quotidian and fundamental elements of Roman-style material culture ceased to be manufactured. Skills related to iron and copper smelting, wooden board and plank making, stone quarrying, commercial butchery, horticulture, and tanning largely disappeared, as did the knowledge standing behind the production of wheel-thrown, kiln-fired pottery and building in stone. No other period in Britain's prehistory or history witnessed the loss of so many classes of once-common skills and objects. While the reasons for this breakdown remain unclear, it is indisputable the collapse was foundational in the making of a new world we characterize as early medieval. The standard explanation for the emergence of the new-style material culture found in lowland Britain by the last quarter of the fifth century is that foreign objects were brought in by "Anglo-Saxon" settlers. Marshalling a wealth of archaeological evidence, Robin Fleming argues instead that not only Continental immigrants, but also the people whose ancestors had long lived in Britain built this new material world together from the ashes of the old, forging an identity that their descendants would eventually come to think of as English. As with most identities, she cautions, this was one rooted in neither birth nor blood, but historically constructed, and advanced and maintained over the generations by the shared material culture and practices that developed during and after Rome's withdrawal from Britain.

The Material Fall of Roman Britain, 300-525 CE

"This book is based on the three separate studies that made up the Intra Family Income Study ... all of the Māori and Pacific Islands examples are taken from the [studies] ... enriched and extended the examples from the Pākehā study with details ... from unpublished interview notes"--P. [vii] and [ix].

Income Sharing in New Zealand Families

The Common Purse

One of the most stimulating and original contributions to Conquest studies, covering the period 950-1086.

Kings and Lords in Conquest England

A thorough and complete survey of all the legal actions and references in Domesday Book.

Robin Fleming

About

Books

Join the club