Camelot Legend

[Labster]

Since we mentioned it on the call the other day, I thought I'd share a research candidate from a historical blog I've been reading:

Finally, for our book recommendation, in keeping with our discussion of late antiquity and the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, I want to recommend R. Fleming, Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise 400 to 1070 (2010). In the first post, I noted at several points that the experience from the fourth through the sixth century of Roman Britain was differently timed and in some ways substantially more severe than that on the continent and this led a few people to ask for more details, so it seemed fair to offer a focused treatment.
The thrust of the book fits its title: the fall and then rise of Britain after the collapse of the Roman Empire. One happy structural element here is that every chapter is date-bracketed in its title, nailing down the exact when to which it applies, which matters a lot in a book that is all about change but also features chapters focused on themes as well as specific periods. Using a mix of literary sources and quite a bit of archaeology, Fleming presents a narrative that begins in the second century with the emergence of a Roman urban culture in Britain powered by trade which was in turn motivated substantially by the Roman military presence. Importantly, the decline of that urban culture begins well before the collapse of the empire: already in the 360s it begins to falter as the declining security situation in the rest of the empire steadily denudes Britain of troops and administrators and as a result the urban centers their economic impact sustained first faded and then vanished entirely with nary an Angle or Saxon yet in sight.
From there, Fleming documents the reconstruction of Britain and this narrative is even more important than that of decline, cutting directly against the idea of the early medieval period as one of stagnation or grim darkness. Instead what follows is the establishment of new polities, the reemergence of trading communities, new towns beginning in earnest in the ninth century, steadily increasing economic activity and also increasingly flourishing religious life. Throughout, Fleming’s focus on archaeological evidence roots the discussion in the lives of actual people, often well below the elite, and how their conditions and ways of living changed over the period from the fourth century to the eleventh.
Now it should be noted that Fleming’s book is written for a general audience, which comes with both advantages and disadvantages. The main loss is that of notes: there are no foot- or endnotes here. Instead, the book comes with a selected bibliography, chapter by chapter. This is enough for the general reader to go on, but it may frustrate the reader who wants to track down specific claims or examples. Nevertheless, the great advantage of this book in this regard is that it is accessibly written for a general audience, eschewing academic jargon and written in engaging prose. Well worth a read.

This was something of an aside in his series on the Decline and Fall of Rome -- or is it really a "change and continuation" of the Roman Empire?  The answer depends rather on how you look at it, but based on the scant evidence of that period it seems things were significantly worse in Britain.

No specific notes on the Matter of Britain as a whole, which still lurks on the fringes of history, because there really isn't any historical evidence from that period.