OFF: settlement of England (was: Re: Mountain Grill (!))

[Jill Strobridge]

British Roman town planning was rather imposed on the native
Britons and, though some of the more wealthy landowning tribal
leaders were part way there, the idea of building 'public works' as
a bribe to get yourself elected needed quite a lot of direct
encouragement from the Roman authorities.    Most of the big stone
buildings therefore were probably built and owned either by
Imperial Rome itself or by landowners based outside Britain who by
the late Empire period, were too busy worrying about their Gaulish
and Roman estates to bother about their British residences.   The
British climate being what it is must have led to a fairly rapid
decay of most of the stone buildings and without maintenance, money
or stone working knowlege town centres may have become very
dangerous places and probably best avoided.  And when the supply of
coinage dried up then land became wealth and the best place a
landowner could be was in his house on his country estate with a
private army to guard it.

So auxiliaries and estate owners that didn't get drawn into the
Imperial civil wars (and many of them would have been) and didn't
flee to France would have gone back to being local leaders in a
countryside of slowly decaying villa estates.    The Visigoths (I
think I'm correct in this?) attempted to emulate Roman authority
and adopted the trappings of Roman power but the Huns weren't even
remotely interested in these aspects of Roman civilisation.     The
steady influx of Anglo-Saxon settlers were also far more interested
in land acquisition and generally it seems ignored stone buidings -
which by that stage were probably more trouble than they were worth
to reconstruct by a culture that did not have any great stone
building traditions.

In the end it was church leaders and bishops who became guardians
of the urban centres and churches that formed the focus of urban
survival where it did occur (but not in Britain).

Well - at least that's as I understand it from my recent studies!

This has travelled a long way from Mountain Grill I fear!

jill
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jon Jarrett" <jjarrett at CHIARK.GREENEND.ORG.UK>
To: <BOC-L at LISTSERV.ISPNETINC.NET>
Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 11:51 PM
Subject: Re: OFF: settlement of England (was: Re: Mountain Grill
(!))


> On Mon, 28 Feb 2005, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:
>
>> On 27-Feb-2005 21:56, Jon Jarrett wrote:
>> > What's recently been found to be lacking is,
>> > apart from possibly at Wroxeter, any continuity between this
>> > Germanic
>> > settlement and the subsequent one. Obviously the idea of
>> > solkdiers going
>> > native is a good one, and it surely must have happened; but
>> > it's not so
>> > far been possible to find any place bar Wroxeter where such
>> > forces may
>> > have based which then turned into an Anglo-Saxon settlement.
>> > This is
>> > puzzling a fair few people.
>>
>> Maybe it turned out that a good place for an auxiliary garrison
>> was just
>> not a good place for a farming settlement?  Perhaps once the
>> imperial
>> pay cheques were no longer coming in, the soldiers decided to
>> "get out
>> of town" and set up somewhere else?
>
>        It's a theory. Most of these auxiliaries may well have
> been
> farming for their keep already, but I don't think, even though
> this was
> done elsewhere in the Empire, anyone's ever managed to *prove* it
> was done
> in Britain. One theory is of course that they were just withdrawn
> with the
> other troops, following the pay... But if they had done as you
> suggest,
> I've no idea how we'd go about establishing it archaeologically.
> Roman
> military kit in new settlements I guess; but how to tell this
> from spoil
> and so on?
>
>        This sort of thing is why I started working on a filed
> with
> evidence :-) Yours,
>                    Jon
>
> ObCD: Blue Oyster Cult - _Secret Treaties_ (I've been lucky with
> my
> listening on these off-topic posts so far... )
> --
>                Jonathan Jarrett, Birkbeck College, London
>    jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk/ejarr01 at
> students.bbk.ac.uk
>  "As much as the vision of the blind man improves with the rising
> sun,
>       So too does the intelligence of the fool after good
> advice."
>       (Bishop Theodulf of Orleans, late-eight/early-ninth
> century)
>
>