In traditional historiography, the end of Roman rule was typically seen as a great loss to Britain, and it was seen as natural that the Britons of the fifth and sixth centuries would see things the same way. Romanophilia has been a characteristic of ‘Western’ scholarship since the Renaissance. When post-Roman sites started to be properly investigated in the second half of the twentieth century, this view continued to make sense. The years shortly preceding and shortly following the end of Roman rule had clearly seen a significant decline in terms of economy, technology, and standards of living. However, by the 1990s and into the 2000s, different perspectives were emerging, arguably as a result of the impact of Marxist and post-colonial historiography. In 1994, Ken Dark suggested that people in the un-Romanised west of Britain eagerly replaced Roman government with more traditionally native political elements. Neil Faulkner has identified the ordinary Britons of the early fifth-century as anarcho-communist revolutionaries, eagerly throwing off the yolk of Roman government by a Romanised aristocracy. Miles Russell and Stuart Laycock have argued that Britain was never a particularly Romanised part of the empire, and that its fifth-century inhabitants quickly and comfortably shed the trappings of Romanitas. On the other hand, there are arguments that Britain retained more Roman aspects than was conventionally thought, leading Dark to envision a truly ‘Late Antique’ Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. This has, in turn, been criticised. Instead of simply summarising the historiography, though, it’s probably more useful for me to lay out some of the primary evidence for you.

One thing that we must first establish is that there was no Roman ‘withdrawal’ from Britain. We know from a panegyric by the poet Claudian that Flavius Stilicho withdrew some troops in AD 401 or AD 402, but this was definitely not a full abandonment of Britain. In AD 406, thousands of barbarians crossed the Rhine, plunging Roman Gaul into chaos. The Roman army in Britain revolted, as it had done before, and, seemingly supported by civilian authorities, travelled to Gaul under the leadership of a usurper-emperor known to history as Constantine III. Constantine III had some success in pacifying Gaul, and for a time was formally recognised as co-emperor by Honorius, the legitimate emperor. It appears, however, that stripping troops from Britain left it vulnerable. Zosimus, an Eastern Roman historian writing c. 500, gives an account of what happened:

’Constantine being unable to withstand these, the greater part of his army being in Spain, the barbarians beyond the Rhine made such unbounded incursions over every province, as to reduce not only the Britons, but some of the Celtic nations also to the necessity of revolting from the empire, and living no longer under the Roman laws but as they themselves pleased. The Britons therefore took up arms, and incurred many dangerous enterprises for their own protection, until they had freed their cities from the barbarians who besieged them. In a similar manner, the whole of Armorica, with other provinces of Gaul, delivered themselves by the same means; expelling the Roman magistrates or officers, and erecting a government, such as they pleased, of their own. Thus happened this revolt or defection of Britain and the Celtic nations, when Constantine usurped the empire, by whose negligent government the barbarians were emboldened to commit such devastations.’

This suggests that the Romans understood Britain as having rebelled against them, and having left the empire of its own volition. The situation may have been more complicated than this, as Zosimus also tells us that c. 410, Honorius sent letters to the British civitates, telling them to look to their own defence. This has sometimes been interpreted as to mean that some Britons appealed to Honorius to restore Roman armies to Britain, but it may simply have been Honorius recognising the already de facto independence of the British polities. Over the next decade, Rome re-established its power over Gaul and Spain, but lacked the resources to do so over Britain. A letter transcribed in a sixth-century source nonetheless suggests that at least some Britons would have accepted the return of Roman armies to their shores. This letter was an address to Flavius Aëtius, the Roman commander in Gaul, begging for military aid against unnamed barbarians. It would appear that this request for aid went unanswered. A similar request, but made in the opposite direction, two decades later, did not go unanswered. According to the historian Jordanes, the Western Emperor Anthemius sought the aid of a British king called Riothamus in a war with the Visigoths. Riothamus brought a considerable force to Gaul, but was defeated in battle by the Visigothic army. In the case of each request, we are left in the dark as to the motivations of the Britons. Did the Britons who wrote to Aëtius long for the return of Roman rule, or were they simply seeking help wherever they could find it, as the British writer Gildas would later argue? Were these barbarians simply attacking the supplicants of their own accord, or were they soldiers employed by other Britons? Was Riothamus loyally responding to the call of an emperor he saw as his rightful overlord, or had Anthemius promised him territory in Gaul? Or, was Riothamus taking on a Visigothic threat to the British domains in Armorica? Either way, these events do tell us that Britain’s break with Rome c. 410 was not quite as clean as one might think.

The earliest sources we have on the actual attitudes of post-Roman Britons towards Rome are the Confessio and Epistola of St Patrick. Patrick is usually considered to have been writing at some point in the mid-fifth century, due to his mix of quotations from the older Vetus Latina Bible and the newer Vulgate. Patrick may well have been born when Britain was still a part of the Roman empire. At the very least, he grew up in a time when the local government structures instituted by the Romans still existed in some form, as he states that his father was a decurion (a member of the local senate who carried out duties such as tax collection). He also grew up with the Roman religion: Christianity. Patrick clearly held the Romans in relatively high regard. When attacking fellow-Britons who sold Irish Christians as slaves, to pagans, he compares them unfavourably with the Christians of Roman Gaul, who ransomed prisoners taken by the pagan Franks. Indeed, referring to these British slave-raiders, he declares, ‘I will not call them my fellow-citizens, nor fellow citizens of the holy Romans’.

Around a century after Patrick, a Briton called Gildas wrote a polemic criticising contemporary rulers and clergymen. Gildas prefaced his work with a history of Britain, in which the end of Roman Britain is viewed in a way almost completely opposite to the accounts of Zosimus. Where Zosimus saw a diocese (set of provinces) that rebelled (not without cause) and could not be recovered, Gildas claimed that the Britons were ungrateful to the superior and divinely-favoured Romans, and saw this as evident from the Britons’ repeated rebellions. Gildas believed that the mighty Romans had better things to do than repeatedly make war in defence of the weak Britons, and thus ceased to do so. Nonetheless, the hero of the last part of Gildas’s narrative is a man named Ambrosius Aurelianus, whom Gildas states ‘perhaps alone of the Romans, had survived the shock of this notable storm’. Not only did Gildas hold the Romans themselves, as well as their ‘morals and law’, in high regard, he celebrated the Roman architecture that could be seen throughout Britain, and lamented that the cities had fallen into ruin. But Gildas was not simply some sad little Dark-Age Briton, daydreaming of classical brilliance. Gildas’s literary Latin was excellent, and on a par with the highly educated writers of the Mediterranean. Clearly, he had received a proper Latin education, and in his writings he indicates that such an education could be had in Britain, and was sometimes sought after by the aristocracy. Gildas was not just nostalgic for Roman Britain; he embodied its legacy. It is possible that Gildas was an outlier, who venerated the Romans in a way that the contemporaries he castigated did not. However, other evidence would suggest that this positive view of Rome was held much more widely. Around the middle of the fifth century, a new stone settlement was built on a headland in Cornwall. Cornwall, along with most of western Britain, had never been very Romanised, but this settlement, at Tintagel, had stone, rectilinear buildings. At Tintagel, and at other elite sites such as Dinas Powys, many high-status items from the Mediterranean, such as fine pottery and glassware, have been found. In the same period, stone inscriptions in Latin became common throughout western Britain. What is interesting is that this embrace of the Roman, in these regions, took place after the end of Roman rule. But if fifth-century Britons were so enamoured of what was Roman, why was the disappearance of Roman ways of living, evident from the archaeology, so complete? James Gerrard notes the abandonment of Roman civilian ideology, but explains it not as some kind of anti-Roman sentiment in action, but rather as a necessary adaptation to the unstable, militarised world the end of empire brought. On the more material side of things, British aristocrats did not abandon their villas and move to hill-forts because they were deliberately abandoning Romanitas, but because they lacked the means to retain their Roman methods of living and Roman political ideas.