If You Don’t Need It, Why Keep It? Urban Edition

One reason people assumed for so long that the period from AD 410 CE to 800 was an age of darkness and end of civilization was that in England, cities disappeared. A few of the Roman cities continued on, but most lapsed into disuse and faded from memory as other than a great place to find pre-cut rock for other things. More mainland Roman urban areas lasted through the Dark Ages/ Late Antiquity and into the Medieval period, far more. For English language historians [glowers at Gibbon], the conclusion was obvious: The end of Rome meant a dark age of poverty, hunger, ignorance, and barbarity until the slow, faltering rebirth of the Classical period in the Renaissance.

Besides Gibbon having a large bone—Columbian mammoth sized bone—to pick with Christianity, a lot of the assumptions made by early historians came from not knowing what they didn’t know. If you depend on government records, and you don’t have a literate government, well . . . Also, it was assumed that Rome had used all stone all over, like the cities in Italy or Gaul. Thus, the absence of evidence meant that nothing remained because someone had quarried the ruins, namely the benighted barbarians. The last assumption was that once founded, cities lasted forever because, well, they were cities. Cities don’t just go “poof” and vanish. People need cities. Right? Yes?

That is, until they don’t. In the past 50 years or so, more and more historians are working with archaeologists and climate people and physical geographers and realizing that, “No one needed that town/small city, so why keep it around?” If the garrison marches off to Rome never to return, are the suttlers and tavern-keepers and “professional ladies” going to stay around? What about the farmers who supplied Rome, and who had to pay taxes in grain, or wine, or fabric? If the market no longer exists, why produce for it when you can do better by farming or raising other things? Or by letting more land go fallow to regain fertility? If your national government stopped requiring tax payments of any kind, would you work as hard if you could make the same income in fewer hours? That’s what happened in Roman Britain, and other places on the fringes of the empire. In some districts, when the army was recalled closer to Rome proper, dependents, the government, higher clergy, and everyone else who could went with them. So who needs towns?

The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes didn’t. They had a lower population density, and farmed. They collected “taxes” in animals, some grain, and so on. A lower population concentration didn’t need cities. If marginal trade routes had been abandoned, why put towns there? Especially when the plague of Justinian combined with sucky weather in the Northern Hemisphere in the 500s-600s to lower the overall population of the continent and Britain? Towns faded away. London, York, a few others continued but smaller, built with wattle-and-daub rather than stone. A Saxon lord’s “palace” was a large wooden hall, not a stone praetorium. Those don’t leave a lot of archaeological evidence, unless you realize that you need to look for discolored patches of dirt in a pattern. It can be very, very subtle. A hearth, loom weights if they were abandoned, post holes, lost bones from a meal, perhaps bits of pottery . . . That’s not a lot to go on. No wonder everyone focuses on graves and hordes! Metal is much easier to find nowadays.

So a lot of Roman towns and villages went away, abandoned gradually as the need for them faded. Rome didn’t come back, the new arrivals (when they arrived) didn’t need them, or the towns were in bad locations for defense. Many would revive later, in the 800s-900s, and after as trade increased once more and the weather became drier and warmer. London became a city with stone again, as did York and others. New towns and cities grew as needed, or as planted to take advantage of resources. The sea ate a few old towns, such as Dunwich.

In a way, we’ve seen the same thing in the US. The Great Plains and West had a lot more towns and villages before the 1930s, because people needed schools, post offices, shops, and government services within reach, and the population had not concentrated as much in urban areas. After the Depression and WWII, cities seemed to be where prosperity and trade flourished. Mechanization and then automated irrigation meant that each acre farmed needed fewer people. The Green Revolution of the 1960s-70s allowed fewer people to grow far more food. So the tiny towns disappeared, then the small villages, then the smaller towns . . . When the grocery store closed and the post office went away, that was often the death-knell. Now we can add hospitals and medical clinics to that list, thanks to events of the past 20 years or so.

A city unneeded goes away. And often gets recycled. Why not? We historians just didn’t realize that, because we didn’t know what we didn’t know, and we’d never observed the process in our lifetimes. Now we know, and a lot makes more sense.

But it was still a pretty dark age if you were in the wrong (or right?) place at the wrong time.

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