Life during chaos

If there's one place and historical period I could choose to know more about, it would be England during, and immediately following, the withdrawal of the Romans in the fifth century C. E.

For one thing, this would settle once and for all the question of whether King Arthur was a real historical personage, a completely fabricated legend, or somewhere in that gray area in between.  Whoever (or whatever) he was, I doubt our picture of him was anywhere near accurate:

This one, either:

Both of which are kind of a shame, for completely different reasons.

In any case, besides finding out more about the King of the Britons, I'd love to have more knowledge about what exactly was going on back then.  There are very few written records from Britain following the withdrawal of Roman troops from the northern and western parts of the island by the (usurping) Emperor Magnus Maximus in 383.  Things stabilized a little after Magnus was deposed and executed in 387, but Roman rule in the west was definitely crumbling.  The final blow came in 410 when Roman settlers in what is now southern England -- many of whom had been born there -- pleaded for help from Rome against the "barbarian" Celts, who were not above taking advantage of the instability, and Emperor Honorius basically told them to bugger off and take care of their own problems because he had more pressing concerns, the biggest being that Rome had just been sacked by a shitload of Visigoths.

This meant that running England fell to whoever could manage to keep their head on their shoulders long enough to do so.  In some places, these were the Romano-British magistrates who chose not to decamp when the powers-that-be back on the Italian peninsula left them to their own devices; in other places, Celtic or Pictish warlords.  This period saw the beginning of the Saxon invasions from what is now Denmark and northern Germany, something that would historically and linguistically change the entire face of the country.

But the fact remains that we don't know much for certain.  The earliest record we have of the era was written at least a century after the events it chronicles -- Gildas's De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) -- but it contains as much hagiography and finger-wagging about pagan sinfulness as it does history.  (For what it's worth, Gildas doesn't even mention King Arthur; the first time the Once and Future King appears in a written record is Nennius's Historia Brittonum, from around 900.  If Arthur was real, this omission seems a little curious, to say the least.)

In any case, between the withdrawal of the Romans in 410 and the unification of England under King Æthelstan of Wessex in 927, we don't have a lot of reliable sources to go on.  To be fair to the English, they had other fish to fry during those intervening centuries, what with the horrific Plague of Justinian ripping its way through Europe in the middle of the sixth century, repeated invasions by the Angles and Saxons, and then the depredations of the Vikings, starting with their destruction of the "Holy Island" of Lindisfarne in 793.  Virtually the only people who could read and write back then were monks and clerics, and you have to figure that what they'd have been writing while they were being hacked to bits would have been gruesome reading anyhow.  (Possibly, "Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Arimathea.  He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of Aaarrrrggh.")

The topic comes up because a new study out of the University of Cambridge that found something surprising -- at least in one region, the economy didn't tank completely when the Romans jumped ship.  Pollution by heavy metals, as nasty as it can be, is a decent proxy record for the robustness of trade and industry; when things are really bad, chances are you're not going to be doing much smelting of silver, iron, and lead.  The team, led by archaeologist Martin Millett, found that in sediment cores from the River Ure in Yorkshire, the levels of metal contamination stayed fairly constant throughout the period.  This is evidence that the Roman settlement at Aldborough -- the Roman Isurium Brigantum -- continued to be a trading hub despite the chaos.

This, of course, doesn't tell you what was happening in other parts of the island.  It could be that Aldborough just happened to hang on longer, for reasons we'll probably never know.  Eventually, the plague and the repeated invasions caught up with them, too, and in the seventh and eighth centuries, there wasn't that much happening, at least not smelting-wise.  The "Dark Ages" in England are "dark" not because they were necessarily any more barbaric than any other period, but because we know so little about them -- and this gives us at least a small piece of information about one town's fate after the fall of the Roman Empire.

I'm always attracted to a mystery, and there's something compelling about this period.  Undoubtedly why there have been so many works of fiction that are set in pre-Norman England.  It's nice to have one more bit of the puzzle, even if neither the worlds of Sexy King Arthur nor Silly King Arthur are likely to come anywhere near the reality of what life was like back then.

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Lingua franca

Here's a question I wonder if you've ever pondered:

Why do the Spanish and French speak Romance languages and not Germanic ones?

It's not as weird a consideration as it might appear at first.  By the time the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the last part of the fifth century C.E., the entire western part of Europe had been completely overrun by Germanic tribes -- the Franks, the Burgundians, and especially the Visigoths.  This latter group ended up controlling pretty much all of southern France and nearly the entirety of Spain, and their king, Euric, ruled the whole territory from his capital at Toulouse.  It was Euric who deposed the last Western Roman emperor, poor little Romulus Augustulus, in 476 -- but showing unusual mercy, sent him off to a (very) early retirement at a villa in Campania, where he spent the rest of his life.  That he felt no need to execute the kid is a good indicator of how solidly Euric and the Visigoths were in control.

So the Germanic-speaking Goths more or less took over, and not long after that the (also Germanic) Franks and Burgundians came into northern France and established their own territories there.  The country of France is even named after the Franks; but their language, Franconian, never really took hold inside its borders.

Contrast this to what happened in England.  The Celtic natives, who spoke a variety of Brythonic dialects related to Welsh and Cornish, were invaded during the reign of the Emperor Claudius in the year 43 C.E., and eventually Rome controlled Britain north to Hadrian's Wall.  But when all hell broke loose in the fifth century, and the Roman legions said, "Sorry, y'all'll have to deal with these Saxons on your own" and hauled ass back home, the invaders' Germanic language became the lingua franca (pun intended) of the southern half of the island, with the exception of the aforementioned Welsh and Cornish holdouts.

All three places had been Roman colonies.  So why did France and Spain end up speaking Romance languages, and England a Germanic one?

The easier question is the last bit.  Britain never was as thoroughly Romanized as the rest of western Europe; it always was kind of a wild-west frontier outpost, and a great many of the Celtic tribes the Romans tried to pacify rebelled again and again.  When the Romans troops withdrew, there weren't a lot of speakers of Latin left -- exceptions were monasteries and churches.  Most of the locals had retained their original languages, and when the British Celts told the troops "Romani ite domum" (more or less), they just picked up where they'd left off.

The problem was, when the Angles and Saxons started arriving in huge numbers over the next two centuries, there wasn't a single dominant language there to stand up against them -- just a bunch of various dialects spoken by tribes that never were all that numerous, and didn't get along very well with each other anyhow.  So the West Germanic language the invaders spoke became the common language, eventually evolving into Old English.

The situation was different in France and Spain.  By the fifth century, those had both been solidly Roman for three hundred years.  The Celtic/Gaulish natives were by this time thoroughly subjugated, and many had even thrown their lot in with the conquerors, rising to become important figures.  (One example is first century B.C.E. writer and polymath Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, who despite his Roman name was from the Celtic Vocontii tribe in the western foothills of the Alps.)  Business, record-keeping, and administration were all conducted in Latin; most of the cities were predominantly Latin-speaking.  

The Germanic tribes who swept through western Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries had an interesting attitude.  They didn't want to destroy everything the Romans had built; they just wanted to control it, and have access to all the wealth and land.  They didn't even care if the Roman town-dwellers stayed put, as long as they acknowledged the Goths' overlordship.  (Which almost all of them did, given that there were no other options.  Practical folks, the Romans.)

The invading Visigoths, Franks, and Burgundians had no written language we know of, so when they settled in to rule the place -- and most importantly, to do business with the local landowners -- their only real option was to learn Latin.  Latin became the prestige language, the language you learned if you wanted to go places, much the way English is now in many parts of the world.

The result was that Latin-derived Old French and Old Spanish were eventually adopted by the Germanic-descended ruling class, ultimately being spoken throughout the region, while the opposite pattern had happened across the Channel in England.  Interesting that the Franks gave their name to the country of France and its language, but the only modern language descended from Franconian is one spoken two countries northeast of there -- Dutch.

It's always fascinating to me to see how chance events alter the course of history.  You can easily see how it could have gone the other way -- the Visigoths might have been more determined to eradicate every trace of Romanness, the way so many conquerors have done.  Instead, they saw the value in leaving it substantially intact.  Not because they had such deep respect for other cultures -- they weren't so forward thinking as all that -- but because they recognized that they could use the Roman knowledge, language, and infrastructure for their own gain.  The result is that my Celto-Germanic ancestors spoke a language derived from Latin, even though by that time it was about the only Roman thing about them.

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