The village of Kibworth emerges into the light of history in the first century AD. The Romans invaded these islands in AD 43, and Britain became a province of the Roman Empire: its name, Britannia, simply Romanizes the Prydein of its native speakers (as it still is in Welsh; its meaning is ‘land of the painted people’). Their conquest of lowland Britain seems to have been swift here, and even perhaps without fighting. Rapidly extending their power north and west, the Romans engineered great military roads, Watling Street, Fosse Way, Ermine Street and the Via Devana, all of which cross in Leicestershire in the very centre of the island. There they laid out a new capital which they called Ratae Corieltauvorum – ‘The Ramparts of the Corieltauvi’ – at the junction of Fosse Way and the Via Devana, where a small Iron Age settlement already existed on a low gravel terrace by a ford of the River Soar. The early Roman fortress has yet to be detected by modern archaeologists below the grand remains of the later civitas, but it seems likely that the legions present in the area were the Ninth or Fourteenth.
Soon the short-lived military cantonment became a well-heeled tribal capital in the province of Britannia Secunda, its administrative functions replacing the Iron Age fort at Burrough on the Hill and the tribal mint at Old Sleaford. From the late third century, after an imperial reorganization, the province received a more grandiose title honouring the empress: Flavia Caesariensis. By then the town was walled with a forum and basilica, a huge bath house and even a small gladiatorial arena. Beyond the city a network of farms – villas – spread out across the countryside providing the food surplus for the army and the bureaucracy, and wool for export. So the Celtic ‘Land of Rivers’ became a prosperous Roman colony in the British province of Flavia Caesariensis.
To the Romans, Britain was always an alter orbis, another world (that is, situated outside the traditional tripartite division of Europe, Africa and Asia) ‘set at an angle’ to the European landmass. The island was one of the last to be annexed to the imperium and remained a peripheral place, though valuable for its raw materials: its tin, silver, gold and lead, its grain and above all its wool (which would be a staple of the economy throughout the Anglo-Saxon and medieval periods). But though on the edge of the civilized world and in some sense ‘underdeveloped’ as we would say, the province took on the air of a land of milk and honey in some colonial literature: ‘How lucky you are, Britain,’ gushed one Roman panegyricist in AD 310:
more blessed than any other land, endowed by Nature with every benefit of soil and climate. Your winters not too cold, your summers not too hot; your cornfields so productive, your herds numberless, your dairy herds overflowing with milk, your sheep flocks heavy with wool: and to make life even sweeter, your days are long and your nights short, so while to us the sun may appear to go down, in Britain it merely seems to go past!
He might have been writing about the villa estates around Kibworth and Medbourne, ‘the best grazing land in Britain – if not the world’, as Kibworth farmers still describe it today.
The people of Britain thus became part of a bigger world. Even here in Leicestershire imports came from the farthest corners: a Hellenistic Greek box with fine ivory decorations showing the Egyptian god of the dead, for example. The jackal-headed Anubis found its way to Leicestershire on the same sea routes that brought pilgrim flasks from early-Christian Alexandria. The people of the Roman villa estate at Kibworth found themselves part of what the Romans called an oikoumene, a single world; and at this moment a citizen could travel from the Atlas Mountains to Hadrian’s Wall or from Syria to York (as the world traveller Demetrius of Tarsus did) and still be part of the imperium. A Greek-speaking British doctor, Hermogenes, raised his altar here in Greek to the ‘Mighty Saviour Gods’ of the mysterious oak-clad island of Samothraki in the Aegean Sea. Likewise Roman émigrés erected shrines to their ancestral deities by Celtic streams and sacred woods, like the one near Leicester at the spring of Willoughby on the Wolds which they called Vernemetum, using the old Celtic word for a sacred grove. In the ‘Land of Rivers’ water shrines were naturally especially popular among locals and colonists. No fewer than seven sacred springs have survived around Kibworth and the Langtons, where the Celtic goddess Anu is still honoured today at her ancient spring, though now in the guise of a holy well dedicated to the Christian St Anne. At Hallaton, St Helen, the mother of Constantine, has taken the place of Elena, the Celtic deity of the waters. In the thirteenth century the customary pilgrimage of the Kibworth people was to an ancient chapel above the Welland by a still more ancient sacred spring.
All this was the residue of the ancient pantheism of the Celts. Such indigenous cults were easily assimilated to the Mediterranean classical pantheon. In this part of Leicestershire figurines of Venus have been found, and clay lamps bearing her figure binding her hair. The three-horned bull deity of the Celts, Tarvas Trigaranos, was happily accepted here by the Roman colonists. The Celtic cock became a symbol of Mercury. Hercules too found his local avatar here in Leicestershire. The world before monotheism was naturally and easily ecumenical. A civic-minded Roman Briton, Aponius Rogatianus, commemorating his parents and ancestors, endowed his local mithraeum with an altar to ‘Mithras of Persia, the Greek Apollo, Anicetus of the Celts and Sol of Rome’, in his mind all names for the same god. Such syncretisms were typical of the time. The Leicester citizen who treasured his Egyptian ivory Anubis, the food dealer on Hadrian’s Wall, the merchant in Colchester or the soap maker in Aleppo, the scribe in the baking square of Timgad or the flax maker by the breezy beaches of Amorgos whose crimson-dyed cloths were exported as far as Britain along with the fine Samian found all over Kibworth, all could say, ‘Cives Romanus sum.’
Roman Britain at its height was a populous land. One of the surprising recent developments in our knowledge of Roman Britain has been the enormous increase in rural settlements discovered by modern surveying techniques, by field archaeology and aerial photography. This means that old estimates of the population of Roman Britain at 2 million maximum are probably way off the mark. By the third century the population was more than 3 million – maybe even 4 million at the height of the empire, before military disasters and social conflict in the late fourth century were followed by climate change, and a series of pandemics, famines and natural catastrophes between the middle of the sixth century and the late seventh. It is an extraordinary thought that Roman Britain may have had a larger population than England at the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558.
The towns were the essential transmitters of Romanitas. Civilization after all means life in cities. The people of the Kibworth villa and its peasants and slaves, like all such places across Britain, were dependent on their local provincial capital with its market and its amenities. The civitas of Ratae was ruled by leading members of the community, probably in this part of the world descendants of the tribal aristocracy of the Corieltauvi. If our villa owner belonged to an important clan with wide estates it is possible that he was a member of the council of the colonia, a citizen of Rome but proud of his Celtic lineage and tribal identity. (Celtic royal names from such people – Maporix, for example – have turned up in graffiti in Leicester.) Such men were expected to provide for many civic amenities from their own pockets, a duty at first willingly accepted but later enforced as the economy was progressively squeezed. In the second and third centuries towns all over Britain were provided with civic buildings and other amenities. But the urban population was sustained by the countryside, by the villas. Food production was the major occupation of the population. And wool was a major part of the surplus of any landowner. So with the exception of a small mercantile class, wealth was dependent on land ownership. The economy of our villa would have been mostly in arable, and also in sheep whose fleeces might have been carted off by road to the imperial weaving mill in Winchester before being exported as ‘British woollens’. Some of the great villas were almost what we would recognize in the eighteenth century as wool mills.
The boulder clay lands of Kibworth, Glen and the Langtons were a valuable source of income to their owners back in Roman times, just as they were after 1066 to landlords like the Norman Hugh Grandmesnil, the Harcourts and Beauchamps in the Middle Ages, or Merton College, all of whom organized, regulated and exploited the labour of their workforce in much the same way. Even in Roman times it appears that a proportion of the population were free farmers. But the Roman Empire organized farming in Britain on a large scale for the first time, increasing food production to feed the army and the bureaucracy. And with a fast-growing population, the countryside was increasingly opened up to farming, as is revealed locally by the pottery scatter found in the fields around the villa site at Kibworth, and by the frequent finds of pieces of stone querns or hand-mills which were used to grind flour. From now on until the Industrial Revolution Kibworth would be a farming community.
As for the ordinary people, circular huts appear on the magnetometry surveys, where seven or eight houses can be distinguished, but no doubt more lie underneath the present village and adjacent fields. The inhabitants were of British descent (of largely the same DNA shared by Irish, Welsh, Scots and most lowland English even today). As we have seen, they were British-speaking; though perhaps with a sprinkling of people of foreign descent who spoke the Latin language too. During the empire most of the peasants lived in timber-framed houses with mud walls and thatch – the indigenous style of peasant housing till recently in south Leicestershire (in the 1860s Kibworth still had nearly twenty of these ‘mud houses’).
As for the villa itself, modern excavations of villas and town houses in the region have given us a sense of how the owners and the workforce lived. Such houses were in reality just big working farms with barns, stables and accommodation blocks for the slaves and other staff. Inside they were sparsely furnished, as farming places still tend to be. They had plastered or tiled floors, wooden furniture with simple decoration. Little bronze dolphins as table brackets (such as have been found locally) might be the only hint of city style; a locked box decorated with bone inlay to contain valuables; tripod lamp stands for the clay oil lights which were used everywhere after nightfall. In the second century, along with cheap local pottery or wooden tableware for everyday use, the Kibworth villa owner used fine orange-red Samian tableware for special occasions. In the corners of the main living room were little incense burners – tazzas – used in the ceremonies of the house, such as family commemorations and anniversaries. For domestic cults there was a shrine room with a little stone altar to the gods of springs and waters. These spirits and deities as we have seen had a very tenacious life around Kibworth and in the little valleys down to Hallaton and the Welland. And though our villa was an ordinary place, later in its existence it had a mosaic floor and plastered walls with wall paintings. In the local capital house murals have been excavated which are among the best found in Britain and which give an idea of what provincial firms of painters could achieve. In luminous colours they show shaded verandas hung with garlands and lamps, peacocks and yellow singing birds, musical instruments and the theatrical masks of comedy and tragedy. The pigments range from deep red ochre, cinnabar and lime, blue frit, terre verte, soot and charcoal, to still intense yellow ochre. They are a haunting suggestion of the good life that spread out even to the villas along the Glen and Langton Brook.
Farming was the key activity and food production the most important job in the empire. Traces of Roman farming at Kibworth may still be detected on the ground. In Kibworth Harcourt aerial photographs and old maps reveal traces of huge ancient furlongs such as are found in other parts of Celtic Britain. The crucial evidence comes from two quarters, the first being a dig by the local archaeologist Bert Aggas, who has already figured in this tale. Aggas never published his finds but left a set of detailed notes with hand-drawn maps and plans. Just outside the village at the town end on the Leicester road, as we have seen, he excavated a prehistoric burial tumulus which had been used as a windmill mound in the thirteenth century. In the same field he also found scattered fragments of Roman pottery left by ‘manuring’ (when broken pottery mixed up with the manure in the farmyard is taken out and dumped on the fields). Field-walking by villagers in 2009 picked up more sherds in a neighbouring ploughed field.
We know then that the windmill field and its neighbours were under cultivation during Roman rule. Running away from the windmill mound across today’s pasture there is still a prominent rise in the ground which from tithe maps can be identified as the former edge of a huge ancient field whose hedge has long since been grubbed out. The old field divisions here have mainly gone since the last strips of the medieval open fields were broken up after enclosure in 1789; but the ridge and furrow still visible on the ground show the older pattern. With the seventeenth-century estate maps in Merton College we can see what was once here. In an arc round the northern edge of the village was a large field more than a kilometre long and known as the Banwell Furlong. The prehistoric windmill mound was at its western end, the newly discovered villa close by. Then on the other side of the A6 (which was evidently already a track in prehistory) there was another huge curving furlong precisely lined up with the Banwell. This furlong was of the same dimensions – a thousand yards long – and was also ploughed in strips across its width. In the Middle Ages this second great field was called Peasehill or Peas Sik Furlong (an Old English word, ‘peas’ is first recorded in the eighth century – its meaning was wider than modern ‘pea’, covering a variety of green legumes and describing one of the staple crops of the Dark Ages and of the medieval three-field system). The Roman pottery sherds under the plough ridges indicate that these furlongs were cleared in Roman times or earlier, and that they had never gone out of cultivation for any long period of time between the later fourth century and the high Middle Ages in the heyday of the open-field system.
Banwell Furlong then and its companion Peasehill are perhaps fields from the late Iron Age or the time of the Roman villa. The peasants grew grain and legumes in these fields, which they ploughed with the improved Roman heavy plough. They kept pigs and cattle. On the streams they grew osier beds, in the meadow flax for clothing, dye plants, woad and madder in their cottage gardens. Their basic food in addition to meat consisted of the vegetables which have been the staple diet in Britain ever since: peas, beans, onions, garlic, white carrots and cabbage. Beyond the big fields they opened up grazing land on the clays for the sheep flocks that must have provided the commercial wealth of the estate. With the villa then, the pattern of the manorial economy, which would last until the eighteenth century, or even later, was set.
With such scattered evidence – field finds, surveys, metal detectors, chance coin finds – we can build our first tentative picture of the village. It was a classic Romano-Celtic tribal settlement of huts and farm protected by an outer ditch and hedge. We can imagine a few hundred acres of arable, some woodland, sheep pasture and several ox teams kept in the villa barns. The workforce would have been mainly dependent peasants, coloni, and their families, with some hired labour and some slaves, servi, who lived in a workers’ block among the farm buildings. But there were also free tenants farming their own fields with their own oxen and their own flocks.
That is as far as we can go in building up a picture from the fragmentary finds in the soil. To endow the early people of the village with the warmth of life we must turn to the fragmentary inscriptional material from Leicestershire (including vivid curse graffiti scratched on pot-sherds), supplemented by Roman texts discovered in recent years elsewhere in Britain. Fragments of letters from elsewhere in second-century Roman Britain are from garrison communities but vividly convey a flavour of the civic life of the provinces: grouses about deferred promotion, birthday invitations, grocers’ orders, the weather and for some émigrés, Romans like Marcus Novantico for example, the irritatingly provincial customs of the natives – the Brittunculi, ‘the little Brits’.
Some texts were written by native British-speakers whose day-to-day speech was Celtic and whose Latin was plainly tentative (as might be expected in a countryside only lightly Romanized), but the letters reveal the everyday life of real people whose concerns were no different in many ways from those of today: news, shopping, charitable donations, family connections, the mess, the club, ordering luxuries from London – Massic wine for birthday parties and festivals of the goddess, ‘Celtic beer’ for daily consumption (British drinking habits have not changed). Virilis the vet writing to his academy chums ends with a flourish: vale Londini, ‘farewell, deliver this at London’. In Leicester there is Primus, the tile maker, the women Atica and Martina; and one of the more delightful couples from anywhere in Roman Britain, Lucius the gladiator and his actress lover Verecunda, his scratched love token telling of a match surely made for the Roman tabloids: in short, the stuff of civic life of any time.
Such letters and the supplies they describe, with news of the outside world, came from the city to the villa by horse or ox-drawn carts past milestones set by the deified Hadrian with their comforting sense of measure and order and permanence. And with them a last glimpse of late-Roman Kibworth. In the veranda round the villa courtyard the stores are unloaded from the wagon; as the lamps are lit the coloni are bringing the oxen in, while slaves scurry about their tasks. For the dinner party fairy lights are strung out into the open air. The kitchen is busy. Tonight there will be food on the tables, Samian wine, Italian fish paste and Colchester oysters. In the corner of the shrine room terracotta tazzas spiral incense in front of the altar to Mercury as the owner and his family pour a libation to the ancestors, around them even here, as a classical poet said, the ‘soft breeze of wealth’. The luxuries bought by civilization. For the elites at least, the gifts of Romanitas.
From the late third century the Roman world was rocked by a series of crises that would lead eventually to the fall of the empire in the West and the collapse of civic order and the disappearance of Roman power from Britain. This ‘awful revolution’ was played out against a background of social uprisings and class war, the internecine rivalries of usurpers and warlords, and bitter religious divisions which helped undermine the ethos, the group feeling, which had underwritten the idea of Romanitas. But the biggest factor in these changes was the migration of impoverished immigrants from outside the empire who would turn lowland Britain into a world of pagan Germanic tribes – and then eventually into a Christian Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England. All these changes are marked in the story of the village, at first almost imperceptibly, later in vivid detail as the life of the people unfolds in their landscape.
In the 330s in York the restored empire of Constantine the Great was formally proclaimed Christian, but in the village life seems to have gone on as usual. There is no trace of Christianity yet in the area, though the coins the people carried in their purses as they went to market in Leicester or Medbourne carried Christian emblems now along with the emperor’s head. As yet decline and revolution were only a shadow on the horizon, and Christianity was not yet the future but merely, perhaps it seemed to the old families of the Corieltauvi in the hills between the Glen and the Welland, a faint damp stain rising up the wall of their traditional culture; and it was one whose spreading spores would eventually disintegrate not just the old image but the mansion itself. However, the first serious anxieties which arose for the people of the late-Roman village came in the form of a very real physical threat: the barbarians.
Around the year 400 the peasants were still farming their strips of arable on the Banwell Furlong, giving their surplus to a local British lord. They still used coin to buy and sell in the neighbouring towns. One clue may be illusory, but a tiny find made at Kibworth may hint at the coming change. It was made near the windmill mound, fifty yards from the villa site, by the side of the local track which became the A6, just where it crosses the Jurassic Way. There, a late-Roman belt buckle plate or strap end turned up, decorated with a dragon-like figure. The buckle is identical to a bronze belt buckle of the late fourth or fifth century found in the ruins of the Jewry Wall bath house in Leicester. These items of late-Roman military gear are often associated with army units drawn from Germanic peoples beyond the imperial frontiers. Could this be a hint of a late-Roman army in Kibworth in a time of growing anxiety? Could it even have belonged to a Germanic mercenary, one of the laeti or foederati which late-Roman civic communities employed for their defence? Such an isolated find would not be worth interrogating did we not know elsewhere of the presence of such people, and it could be a faint pointer to the growing militarization of society even in the countryside. Did warfare or disorder spread down the Via Devana towards 400? On such tiny hints it would be unwise to build much. The buckle could after all have been lost by a soldier home on leave. But nonetheless in the wider world the times were changing.
Before Constantine the empire had already been rocked by disasters; the third century had been a time of civil wars and military juntas. In the 330s the new order of Constantine adopted Christianity and for a while deployed its forces with renewed energy and muscular conviction. But later in the century there were more rebellions and regional secessions. The coin finds recorded by John Nichols in the eighteenth century and those found since show Kibworth was still an active late-Roman community through the fourth century; indeed, the villa itself may have survived. Archaeological explorations in the wider region show villas still working after 400 close by in Rutland and the Welland Valley and new metal detector finds show the circulation of coinage well into the fifth century. The Kibworth settlement then still functioned in a world of trade and markets through the fourth century and into the fifth, maybe even still with connections to a wider world. But towards the end of the fourth century the military threats seem to have grown which would eventually lead to the Romans abandoning Britain.
As glimpsed in our fragmentary sources, and from finds in the soil, the fall of Roman Britain is as yet imperfectly understood. But the tale in Britain superficially resembles decolonization struggles in the modern world, or the factional fighting that happens in the post-colonial aftermath, as say in Angola and Darfur, with suppressed regional and tribal identities reasserting themselves as they did in the late-twentieth-century Balkans. The reasons for the breakdown of the Roman Empire in its different regions were similarly complex. Economy and climate, a widening gulf between social classes, structural and bureaucratic failure in the army and civil service, ethnic rivalries and an increasing dependence on brought-in military aid as complacency took over self-help: all played their part. The pervasive sense was of ‘the Other World against This World’, coupled with that indefinable loss of ‘group feeling’ that leads to failure of nerve in a civilization.
The fall of Rome then involved complex processes, as great changes in history always do, out of which our modern identities and communities emerged. For the Kibworth settlement life went on as it had through the late fourth century, its local markets still functioning at Leicester and the little town at Medbourne. Only after 400 does the impression grow of a coming Dark Age. The clues are again provided by recent coin finds. The last large shipment of Roman coins to pay the army began to arrive in Britain in AD 402. After around 407 no new coinage is in use. Finds from buried hoards suggest the last currency to circulate in the region between Kibworth and the Welland were of the usurper Magnus Maximus (383–8), Arcadius (Eastern emperor 383–408) and Honorius (Western emperor 393–423). All these are also represented in new finds by local metal detectorists around Kibworth. Coins of Honorius found nearby in Rutland surprisingly suggest the circulation of money well into the fifth century, and with that a functioning economy. But the coins are not the whole picture. In the late fourth century our narrative sources from the centre show that the administrative coherence of the Roman world was beginning to break down, and at the same time there are the first hints of the presence of large numbers of Germanic migrants from outside Britain.
In the late fourth century the growing disorder had begun to present pressing problems for the civic authorities in Britannia. The Romans had never conquered Ireland or what is now Scotland, and there were now constant raids from these quarters. There were also raids from Angles, Saxons and Frisians along the North Sea coasts, a mere two or three days’ sailing from Jutland and Saxony. Writing before the crisis, in the 380s, the Byzantine historian Eutropius says the north-western seaboard was already infested by Franks and Saxons all the way down to Brittany. This was the result of a longstanding tension between those inside and those outside the imperial frontiers. Back in the third century the Romans had studded the coast on both sides of the Channel with forts extending from Brittany to Frisia, and from the Solent to the Wash. For almost two centuries now the British authorities had also employed federates, mercenaries and economic migrants, planting them in colonies outside their cities, to defend not only against seaborne invaders but also against other tribes and kingdoms around their borders inside Britain. There had always been this kind of policy of recruitment in empire. Inscriptions on Hadrian’s Wall show Frisians and Germans employed there as early as AD 212. In 278 the emperor brought Germans living beyond the Oder to Britain to quell a revolt; in 306 Constantius Chlorus brought in Alemanni. More recent Rhineland pottery found on Hadrian’s Wall is from German forces used in the reorganization of northern defences in 369. Britain then was already changing.
The process of deliberate settlement by the government was continuous and long term. Many of these troops married local women and remained in Britain. It is possible even that the belt buckle found in Kibworth belonged to such a person. The Roman authorities in Britain also bred German laeti, subsidizing their families to live on estates as agricultural workers and peasant soldiers – farming the lands attached to the forts of the ‘Saxon shore’ and owing military service. Though sparsely mentioned in Roman accounts such people reappear in the early Anglo-Saxon law codes under that name. In the coastal zone especially, along the ‘Saxon shore’ on the eastern seaboard, Germanic languages were already spoken, and the first signs were on the way of a mixed British–Germanic society.
In the last years of the fourth century and the first years of the fifth, the empire was rocked by tremendous events. A series of revolts took place in Britain, where tyrants used the province’s military resources to fight continental wars. The reverberations created in the Kibworth area are revealed in the burial of moveable wealth, among these the Whitwell Hoard of 870 silver siliquae, one of many buried at this time. On the last day of December 406 a huge confederation of barbarian tribes crossed the Roman defence works along the Rhine and eventually settled permanently inside the empire. Within months, in early 407, a British soldier proclaimed himself Western emperor and stripped Britain of its troops to fight a savage civil war lasting four years before it ended with the usurper’s death. Almost inevitably in the midst of this perfect storm – with Goths marching in Italy, Vandals camped on the Rhine, and usurpers fighting each other’s legions in Gaul – the Roman government chose to sever connections with the province ‘at the outermost edge of the known world’.
In 410 the empire was already split between East and West with emperors in Rome and Byzantium. In the eastern Mediterranean heartland, on the edge of Europe and Asia, Constantinople was secure behind the vast new Theodosian land walls, its empire more urbanized, populous and wealthy, with standing armies and a powerful fleet, the bastion of a Greek civilization that still ruled to the Euphrates and Aswan. In the Latin West the Emperor Honorius had moved his court from Rome to Ravenna to be nearer the Alpine passes, the military axis of empire, but also behind the coastal saltings, malarial marshes and winding waterways of Ravenna, to be better protected from barbarian attacks which were now threatening Rome itself.
Our information about the ensuing events in Britain comes from the historian and civil servant Zosimus, who worked for the imperial treasury in Constantinople. It was in 410 in Ravenna, Zosimus tells us, that the Emperor Honorius, in response to a British petition for military aid against Saxon barbarians threatening their shores, wrote his famous letter to the twenty-four civitates, the city councils of Britain, ‘ordering’ or ‘exhorting’ or ‘counselling’ them to provide for their own defence. This critical moment in British history Zosimus records in a laconic parenthesis with a frustrating lack of detail:
Thus happened this revolt or defection of Britain and the Celtic nations, when Constantine usurped the empire, by whose negligent government the barbarians were emboldened to commit such devastations … [then] Honorius, having sent letters to the cities of Britain, counselling them to look after their own security …
On 24 August 410, the city of Rome fell to Alaric and the Visigoths, 800 years after it had last been entered by a foreign army. The Eternal City was not destroyed, its people not massacred, though they endured three days of looting. But as a symbolic moment it has few peers. The mausoleums of Augustus and Hadrian and the graves of other emperors were ransacked and their ashes cast into the Tiber. Bronze portrait busts, gilded peacocks and funerary furniture tumbled into a rubbish heap.
The dreadful symbolism of the moment was recognized at the time and cast reverberations far and wide. Far away in North Africa in the sleepy provincial town of Hippo Regius (now Annaba in Algeria), the former pagan, ex-professor of rhetoric in the schools of Milan and now a Christian bishop Augustine was inspired to conceive the idea of his magnum opus. With Rome sacked and Huns, Goths and Vandals breaking the frontiers of the imperium, he would write about the End of History, and a new city that would rise – the City of God, a Christian world to usher in the end of time, in which history was redemptive, purposive and leading to an appointed end. It was an interpretation which barbarian successors in the northern reaches of the empire would embrace wholeheartedly and never quite abandon; a book whose ideas defined the mentalities of the Dark Age West, of the barbarians who built their new kingdoms on the ruins of Rome and who in time would become the new Romans.
Now we enter the period where our evidence simply gives out, both for the village and for lowland Britain as a whole. On the ground even the scatter of archaeological finds dies out and we are reliant on a few tantalizing hints in written sources, the most important being from a civil servant far away in Constantinople who perceived these distant events through a glass darkly. Zosimus’s disappointingly brief account has had a transfixing power in the narrative of British history. He was a bureaucrat in Constantinople with a greater tale to tell than the fate of a remote underdeveloped province far away from the powerhouses of civilization in Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria. But we can supplement it (cautiously) with the earliest narrative source for British history, the priest Gildas in his book The Fall of Britain. Gildas was writing in the 540s, well over a century after these events. But he wrote in a still literate zone (the Cumbrian region), in a learned culture with its own living Latin tradition, and he had access to both oral stories and written records. His is the only near-eyewitness account and he had a good general grasp of what had actually happened in the cities of lowland Britain in the decades before his birth, and in the villa societies in the regions of the Welland, the Weald and the Cotswolds. His main goal was not historical accuracy but a raging polemic against the failings of contemporary British rulers, and some of the more lurid parts of his text describing blood and thunder, fire from sea to sea and the violent destruction of cities, with the dead left unburied in the streets, have found no confirmation in archaeology. But Gildas was clearly well-informed on these events, some of which he alludes to in passing as if they are still common knowledge looking back over the previous century and a half.
As Gildas tells it, the turning point came in 383, when the country was stripped of troops by the Roman general Maximus. From then Britain, ‘despoiled of her whole army’, reeled under growing instability with attacks from Irish raiders in the north-west and Picts in the north. Gildas seems to refer to the same events as Zosimus but with more detail: ‘As a result of their terrible and ruinous onslaughts, Britain sent envoys with a letter to Rome desperately requesting a military force to protect them and vowing wholehearted and undiminished loyalty to the Roman Empire so long as their enemies were kept at a distance.’
Gildas tells of the despatch of a well-equipped legion by sea from Gaul, the defeat of northern enemies and the refurbishment of a turf wall in the north. But after reinforcements were withdrawn, more invaders came by sea. Then ‘for a second time envoys set out with their petition.’ Gildas tells the tale (apparently from an oral tradition) of how one arrived in Rome, ‘so it is said’, and rent his clothes and cast dust on his hair in the ancient gesture of supplication. ‘The Romans were as distressed as is humanly possible by the story of such a tragedy’ and again sent military aid and won some spectacular victories with their ‘surge’. But such an enemy – like the Taliban today – is notoriously prone to vanish – and then return.
The Romans again responded. Further reinforcements were sent, the wall in the north was refurbished and victories were won, but with new crises on the continent once again legions were withdrawn, leaving Britain open to ‘annual plundering expeditions that took heaps of loot overseas’. Finally the aid dried up, and here Gildas seems to give us the gist of the contents of the letter sent to the city authorities in Britain mentioned by Zosimus; we may imagine the town council of Ratae among the twenty-four colonia of Roman Britain receiving this fateful missive: ‘The Romans informed our country ( patria) that they could no longer be taken up with such energy-sapping expeditions.’ The huge military resources ‘of so great and splendid an army’ could not be committed by land and sea for the sake of battle with mobile enemies, thieves and bandits who would not engage in conventional warfare, and had no taste for face-to-face, hand-to-hand combat.
These are words we have heard often with insurgencies in our own time. All the more difficult because the Romans had no means of seeking the enemy out in their own bases, which lay far beyond the frontier of Romanitas. One imagines the assembled citizens bracing themselves:
Rather (from now on) the people of Britain should stand alone, get themselves accustomed to arms, fight bravely, and defend with all their powers their land, property, wives, children and more important their life and liberty. Their enemies were no stronger than they unless the Britons chose to relax in laziness and torpor. This was the Romans’ advice.
Even then, Gildas adds, there was still a final injection of public money. There were last-minute military construction projects from public and private funds and new military constructions, defensive walls, and ‘the citizens were left instruction manuals on weapons training.’ Also, to combat the growing threat from another quarter, Anglian and Saxon sea raiders from the continent, the Romans ‘left towers overlooking the sea at intervals on the South Coast where they kept their ships: for now they were afraid of the barbarian beasts attacking on that front too’ (this is apparently a reference to the refurbishment of forts on ‘the Saxon shore’, actually erected during the previous century but restored at this time). And then, finally, says Gildas, ‘et valedicunt tamquam ultra non reverturi’ – ‘then they said goodbye, meaning never to return’.
Of these tumultuous events locals in the valleys of the Glen and the Welland must have had knowledge through their provincial and civic authorities in Leicester, and through long-distance hauliers, merchants and travellers who were always a source of news. But, of course, in the villas to the south, at Great Glen, Langton and Kibworth, the world did not change that year; nor perhaps for the next few decades. In some places in the Welland valley in the early fifth century villas were refurbished, new extensions built, new mosaic floors laid; so not only did town councils and rural landlords continue to function but even travelling firms of mosaic craftsmen were still able to find work. But what of those last-ditch injections of military funds, and the defence instruction manuals mentioned by Gildas? Is the belt buckle found near the Kibworth villa after all a clue to the increasing frequency of raids from the sea? Were the local nobility of the Corieltauvi concerned enough to employ their own laeti, importing paramilitaries to their towns and farms? For them, for their peasant tenants and their slaves, the revolutions of the fifth century were as yet only a shadow on the horizon. But in the years after 410 they must have been fully occupied with the events described by Zosimus from afar in Constantinople: ‘then the British set about organizing their own defence and freed their cities from the barbarian attacks … and went on living on their own without obedience to Roman laws …’
The next forty years are among the most critical in British history but are among the least understood. The situation on the ground was evidently radically different between western Britain, where Roman British society survived with cities and tribal ‘kings’, and the east, where a mixed British and Germanic society was already developing. But the Roman world didn’t disappear into a void: civil society still existed. Even close to London in 429 Verulamium was a still functioning city, where the former Roman official Germanus of Auxerre, who came from Gaul to visit the shrine of Alban the protomartyr, could be received by civic authorities and find pilgrim hostels and the wherewithal to receive visitors. Indeed some cities – Bath, Cirencester and Gloucester among them – survived as centres into the late sixth century. But, according to a Gallic chronicle, in the late 440s ‘Britain fell under the control of Saxons.’
Gildas’s account also points to the same decade: he says that in 446 attacks by Anglo-Saxon raiders had become so severe that British authorities made a further last-ditch but fruitless appeal for military aid in a letter to the Roman consul Aetius. By then, if later traditions are to be believed, disorder had spread across southern Britain and civil wars had broken out between regional warlords, with mercenary revolts and counter-marches by predatory armies. Gildas gives us graphic images of the breakdown of civic order: demolished buildings and overturned altars, unburied dead in town squares. Where this took place is not known, for no archaeological evidence of wholesale devastation has so far been detected, and it may be that Gildas is reporting a localized disaster. But there is one significant detail where his sweeping account has been amply confirmed. In lowland Britain this was a period of progressive abandonment of cities by local authorities and of retreat to the old Iron Age hill forts. Over forty of them have yielded archaeological evidence of this shift, among them Cadbury Castle in Somerset and the magnificent fort at Burrough Walls on the Jurassic escarpment over the Wreake valley near Leicester – the old tribal centre of the Corieltauvi. There is no doubt then that by the middle of the fifth century important social change was in the offing. Romanitas was on the wane and in lowland Britain, still populous, and in places still well-off, a return to older modes of society was under way.
And in Kibworth, our scanty sources, such as they are, now run out. The villa is abandoned, its wall paintings crumbled, the floor tesserae scattered and its coins are out of use. The local community is left to fend for itself under a Welsh-speaking chief (though perhaps still owing allegiance to a civic authority in Leicester), while to the east the news is of a growing number of Anglian and Frisian settlements, in some places tribes and clans settled under their chiefs around towns, bearing weapons in exchange for land, speaking a language very different from that of the Britons. Romanitas with all its benefits is over now, and its technology, its level of material wealth – and its order – for many would not be regained till the eighteenth century. Locally and nationally the narrative now moves into the hands of the newcomers.