The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

by Bryan Ward-Perkins

  The distributive activities of the state and of private commerce have sometimes been seen as in conflict with each other; but in at least some circumstances they almost certainly worked together to mutual advantage. For instance, the state coerced and encouraged shipping between Africa and Italy, and built and maintained the great harbour works at Carthage and Ostia, because it needed to feed the city of Rome with huge quantities of African grain. But these grain ships and facilities were also available for commercial and more general use. In the case of some products, the link with this state grain trade was almost certainly a close one. At least some of the fine African pottery, which dominated the market for tablewares in the late Roman West, probably travelled out of Carthage as far as Rome, as a secondary cargo in the ships carrying grain for the imperial capital; and more of it probably travelled because African shippers had state privileges, which enabled them to move goods at a lower cost. One remarkable example of the symbiotic relationship that could exist between state and commercial distribution is found in the Italian-made bricks used frequently in buildings of early imperial times in Carthage. Moving bricks hundreds of miles overseas does not normally make commercial sense—presumably these Italian bricks reached Africa because empty grain ships were unstable without ballast, and this was a ballast that could turn a small profit.25

  The state, and commercial enterprise, both created their own sophisticated networks of production and distribution, sometimes with a close relationship between the two. Indeed from the point of view of the consumer, who is the main focus of my interest, it matters little whether an African dish reached him by way of private enterprise, by way of the state, or by way of a bit of both. What matters is that the ancient world had an array of complex structures in place, which somehow got a high-quality dish from Africa to its provincial user.

  The state may also have encouraged private commerce in more subtle ways. For instance, the first- and second-century finds from the fortress of Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall are remarkable, not only for their state of preservation, but also for the rich variety of objects to which they testify. Letters and lists survive from Vindolanda that make it clear that a plethora of objects, often dispatched from elsewhere, were in routine use by the soldiery and their families. One letter, for instance, refers to the sending of socks, sandals, and underpants; another to the dispatch of wooden articles, ranging from bed boards to cart axles. The shoes that have been recovered from this site range from standard but solid military boots, doubtless army issue, to a delicately shaped woman’s slipper, probably the property of the camp commander’s wife, which is prominently stamped with its maker’s name—the equivalent, surely, in both style and status to a modern Gucci shoe. It has rightly been suggested that this fortress, in the remotest part of a distant province of the empire, served as a beacon of Mediterranean sophistication in a consumer darkness. In defending the north of Britain, the state brought in, not only soldiers with money in their pockets, but also a mass of solidly made objects, and a tempting display of southern consumer culture.26

  The End of Complexity

  In the post-Roman West, almost all this material sophistication disappeared. Specialized production and all but the most local distribution became rare, unless for luxury goods; and the impressive range and quantity of high-quality functional goods, which had characterized the Roman period, vanished, or, at the very least, were drastically reduced. The middle and lower markets, which under the Romans had absorbed huge quantities of basic, but good-quality, items, seem to have almost entirely disappeared.

  Pottery, again, provides us with the fullest picture.27 In some regions, like the whole of Britain and parts of coastal Spain, all sophistication in the production and trading of pottery seems to have disappeared altogether: only vessels shaped without the use of the wheel were available, without any functional or aesthetic refinement. In Britain, most pottery was not only very basic, but also lamentably friable and impractical (Fig. 5.7). In other areas, such as the north of Italy, some solid wheel-turned pots continued to be made and some soapstone vessels imported, but decorated tablewares entirely, or almost entirely, disappeared; and, even amongst kitchenwares, the range of vessels being manufactured was gradually reduced to only a very few basic shapes. By the seventh century, the standard vessel of northern Italy was the olla (a simple bulbous cooking pot), whereas in Roman times this was only one vessel type in an impressive batterie de cuisine (jugs, plates, bowls, serving dishes, mixing and grinding bowls, casseroles, lids, amphorae, and others).

  5.7 Pottery fit for a king? Sixth- and seventh-century pots from Yeavering, a rural palace of the Anglo-Saxon kings of Northumbria. The vessels were hand-shaped, out of poorly processed clay, and were only lightly fired (so that they are very friable).

  In some limited areas, the story of pottery production in the post-Roman centuries is more complex and sophisticated, but always within an overall context of unmistakable and marked decline. The great tableware producers of Roman North Africa continued to make (and export) their wares throughout the fifth and sixth centuries, and indeed into the latter half of the seventh. But the number of pots exported and their distribution became gradually more-and-more restricted—both geographically (to sites on the coast, and eventually, even there, only to a very few privileged centres like Rome), and socially (so that African pottery, once ubiquitous, by the sixth century is found only in elite settlements).28 Furthermore, the range of vessel forms and their quality also gradually declined. From my own experience of excavating in the port town of Luna in northern Italy, I know that, while sherds of third- and fourth-century African pottery are two a penny on the site, fragments of sixth-century vessels are rare enough to be exciting.

  Some regional potteries also survived into post-Roman times. For instance, in southern Italy and the Rhineland wheel-turned pottery of a practical nature, sometimes decorated with features like incised combing or red paint, continued to be made and distributed quite widely through the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. But even these products display neither the high quality of many earlier Roman wares, nor the range of vessel types once available. There is no area of the post-Roman West that I know of where the range of pottery available in the sixth and seventh centuries matches that of the Roman period, and in most areas the decline in quality is startling.

  Furthermore, it was not only quality and diversity that declined; the overall quantities of pottery in circulation also fell dramatically. This fact is very difficult to demonstrate conclusively; but it will be familiar to anyone who has worked on a post-Roman site—mountains of Roman pottery are reduced to a few interesting but unassuming boxes of post-Roman sherds. In both excavation and field survey, while Roman pottery is so abundant that it can be a positive nuisance, post-Roman wares of any kind are almost invariably very scarce.

  Within this generally bleak picture there were a few islands of greater sophistication. The seventh- and eighth-century city of Rome has recently been shown to have had a ceramic history considerably more complex than that of most of the West. Rome continued to import amphorae and tablewares from Africa even in the late seventh century, and it was here, in the eighth century, that one of the very first medieval glazed wares was developed. These features are impressive, suggesting the survival within the city of something close to a Roman-style ceramic economy. But, even in this exceptional case, a marked decline from earlier times is evident, if we look at overall quantities. The post-Roman imports are known primarily from a rubbish dump of this period, excavated on the site of the ancient Crypta Balbi in the centre of the city, which produced around 100,000 seventh-century potsherds, including some African tableware and the remains of an estimated 500 imported amphorae.29 For the post-Roman West, this is a very impressive deposit of pottery—so far unparalleled anywhere else in its size and its diversity—and it points to a continuity of trans-Mediterranean trade into the late seventh century, which was unsuspected until recently. But it also needs to be put into perspe
ctive. Imports on this scale and of this diversity would be wholly unremarkable even in a provincial city of Roman times, and 500 amphorae is probably a little less than half the load of one seventh-century cargo ship.30

  Furthermore, the Crypta Balbi dump was almost certainly produced by a rich monastery, whose inhabitants belonged to the city’s elite. On the evidence that we have at present, during the sixth and seventh centuries, even in Rome high-quality pottery and imported amphorae were available only to the rich: what had once been widely diffused products had become luxury items. For instance, the survey of a massive swathe of countryside immediately north of Rome discovered large quantities of imported tablewares of the Roman period, on humble as well as aristocratic sites; but almost none, on any site, from the sixth and seventh centuries.31 Even in the few places, like Rome, where pottery imports and production remained exceptionally buoyant, the middle and lower markets for good-quality goods, which were such a feature of earlier times, had wholly disappeared.

  This picture of western decline in the manufacture and availability of pottery is placed in sharp relief by the totally different story of what happened in the fifth- and sixth-century East. Here, the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries saw the appearance and diffusion of new tablewares, manufactured in Cyprus and Phocaea (on the west coast of modern Turkey), and of new types of amphora, to transport the wine and oil of different areas of the Levant and Aegean. These products are found in large quantities throughout the eastern Mediterranean, even on comparatively humble rural sites, and were also exported westwards to Africa and beyond. On this evidence, the fifth- and sixth-century East resembled the West of earlier Roman times, rather than its much bleaker contemporary situation. These very different histories in East and West raise the obvious question of why such a divergence had occurred—an issue I shall address in the next chapter.

  The evidence of other products reinforces the picture of western decline provided by pottery. For instance, in Britain—as ever an extreme case—every one of the building crafts introduced by the Romans, the mundane as well as the luxury ones, disappeared completely during the fifth century. There is no evidence whatsoever of the continued quarrying of building stone, nor of the preparation of mortar, nor of the manufacture and use of bricks and tiles. All new buildings in the fifth and sixth centuries, whether in Anglo-Saxon or unconquered British areas, were either of wood and other perishable materials or of drystone walling, and all were roofed in wood or thatch.

  In Northumbria at the very end of the seventh century, a reforming abbot, Benedict Biscop, wished to build churches ‘in the Roman manner’ at his newly founded monasteries of Jarrow and Monkwearmouth—in other words, in the mortared stone with which he had become familiar during two pilgrimages to Rome. In order to reintroduce this technology, he brought in artisans from Gaul, including glaziers to decorate the windows (the latter described as ‘craftsmen as yet unknown in Britain’).32 The resulting buildings, which survive in part, are tiny by Roman or later medieval standards, and their windows are mere slits in the stonework, but they represent the heroic reintroduction of stone building and glazing into a region that had not seen anything of the kind for about three centuries. In a world of wooden houses, Biscop’s solid churches, with their windows of coloured glass, must have been deeply impressive.

  In the Mediterranean region, the decline in building techniques and quality was not quite so drastic—what we witness here, as with the history of pottery production, is a dramatic shrinkage, rather than a complete disappearance. Domestic housing in post-Roman Italy, whether in town or countryside, seems to have been almost exclusively of perishable materials. Houses, which in the Roman period had been primarily of stone and brick, disappeared, to be replaced by settlements constructed almost entirely of wood. Even the dwellings of the landed aristocracy became much more ephemeral, and far less comfortable: archaeologists, despite considerable efforts, have so far failed to find any continuity into the late-sixth and seventh centuries of the impressive rural and urban houses that had been a ubiquitous feature of the Roman period—with their solid walls, and marble and mosaic floors, and their refinements such as under-floor heating and piped water. At present it seems that in Italy only kings and bishops continued to live in such Roman-style comfort.33

  A limited tradition of building in mortared stone and brick did survive in Italy and elsewhere, primarily for the construction of churches, but it was on a scale that was dwarfed by the standing buildings of the Roman period (Fig. 7.4, at p. 149). Furthermore, as far as we can tell, even when stone and brick were used, the vast majority of it was not newly quarried or fired, but was second-hand material, only very superficially reshaped to fit its new purpose. In the early medieval churches of Italy, the brickwork has none of the regularity of Roman and later medieval times, and the columns, bases, and capitals were not newly worked, but were ancient marbles reused without any recarving, even if they made up a very disparate set. New carving was restricted to the small marble elements, such as chancel screens, altar canopies, and pulpits, that were the focus of the liturgy.34

  As with pottery, the change was most complete, and significant, in the lower and middle markets. In the fifth and sixth centuries, tiles, which, as we have seen, had been very widely available in Roman Italy, disappear from all but a few elite buildings.35 It may have been as much as a thousand years later, perhaps in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, that roof tiles again became as readily available and as widely diffused in Italy as they had been in Roman times. In the meantime, the vast majority of the population made do with roofing materials that were impermanent, inflammable, and insect-infested. Furthermore, this change in roofing was not an isolated phenomenon, but symptomatic of a much wider decline in domestic building standards—early medieval flooring, for instance, in all but palaces and churches, seems to have been generally of simple beaten earth.

  It is possible to question the full bleakness of my picture, with drafty timber walls, rotting and leaking roofs, and dirty floors typifying post-Roman housing in both Britain and Italy. There is no absolute rule that says that a thatched roof, or a timber building, is inferior to one of solider materials. Although now a luxury ‘heritage’ item (because it has to be renewed on a regular basis, at considerable cost), the thatch of modern England works well as a roofing material, and even offers better insulation against heat and cold than tiles or slates; and the timber houses of Scandinavia and north America are as sophisticated and comfortable as any brick building. It is therefore possible to argue that the change that happened at the end of the Roman period, from the use of solid building materials to perishable ones, was not a step backwards into discomfort, as I have portrayed it, but a step sideways into a different way of living, motivated by cultural choice.

  Precisely because post-Roman buildings were made of perishable materials, we know very little for certain about what they were really like. They are generally documented only from the holes left in the subsoil by their supporting timbers. Above these holes, depending on our inclinations, it is possible to imagine superstructures of very varying sophistication and complexity (Fig. 5.8). If we want, we can carve the wooden posts, insert wooden floors, and, of course, also fill these imagined superstructures with intricately made objects, like wall hangings and furniture—again all in perishable materials, and hence also absent from the archaeological record. Personally, given the generally very poor quality of post-Roman pottery, the product we can most readily compare with its Roman equivalent, I think that post-Roman houses were, for the most part, pretty basic. But I have to admit that I cannot prove this conclusively.

  A World without Small Change

  The almost total disappearance of coinage from daily use in the post-Roman West is further powerful evidence of a remarkable change in levels of economic sophistication. In Roman times, a complex and abundant coinage was a standard feature of daily life, in three metals, gold, silver, and copper. Gold and silver pieces, which were of considerable valu
e and therefore seldom casually lost, are rarely found outside hoards. But Roman copper coins are common on archaeological sites in almost all areas of the empire. For instance, excavation of a fairly remote fourth-century Romano-British farmstead, at Bradley Hill in Somerset, produced seventy-eight copper coins, of which sixty-nine were scattered finds, lost individually by the ancient inhabitants. Finds like these, along with textual evidence, show that coins were readily available and widely used to facilitate economic exchange, at a mundane as well as an elevated level.36

  5.8 Elaborately decorated residence, or simple wooden house? Alternative reconstructions, both of which are possible, of the same seventh-century building excavated at Cowdery’s Down in Hampshire.

  In Britain new coins ceased to reach the island, except in tiny quantities, at the beginning of the fifth century. There is, of course, a possibility that the millions of copper coins that were circulating during the fourth century continued in use, and examples of these are indeed sometimes found in post-Roman settlements and burials. However, almost all the later settlements where Roman coins are found had a pre-existing Roman phase, which makes it impossible to know whether these coins were still being used to facilitate exchange, or whether they were inert relics from a former age. If we look at post-Roman sites without an earlier Roman phase, where the possibility of confusion does not exist, scattered coins are either exceedingly rare or not present at all. For example, the large and impressive coastal fortress of Tintagel in Cornwall, a centre of very considerable political and economic importance in the post-Roman fifth and sixth centuries, has produced none of the scattered coins that would demonstrate that they were still in regular use when the settlement was at its height.37 Tintagel was a site of far greater importance and size than the fourth-century farmstead at Bradley Hill, but it is at Bradley Hill that coins were in everyday use. Like wheel-turned pottery, coinage, once common, had effectively disappeared from fifth- and sixth-century Britain.