Offa and the Mercian Wars by Chris Peers Read Free Book Online Page A

have been a good thing. Bede, for example, cites the letter to the consul Aetius as evidence that the people were eager for the Romans to return. But other writers contradict this claim. Nennius actually states that the Britons rose up and drove the Romans out, and Gildas in his polemic criticises them for their habit of rebelling, ‘sometimes against God . . . and often against foreign kings’. The Roman writer Zosimus appears to confirm this view when he states that barbarian invasions encouraged some of the inhabitants of the island to ‘leave Roman control and live their own lives, free of Roman laws.’ Roman laws may well have seemed oppressive, especially those which restricted people to hereditary occupations and prohibited civilians from bearing arms. In addition the burden of taxation under the later Empire fell disproportionately on the poor, while a small minority became fabulously rich. Salvian, in his De Gubernatione Dei, wondered that the ordinary subjects of the Empire did not desert en masse to the barbarians, observing cynically that ‘the enemy is more merciful to them than the tax collectors.’
    Similar factors may even explain the paradox that Christianity, which had become the official religion of the Empire under the emperor Theodosius in the late fourth century, continued to thrive in the west of Britain – the region where Roman influence had always been weakest – while apparently disappearing in the more Romanised east. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that it had never been popular with ordinary Britons living under Roman rule, and it may have been discarded along with the rest of the discredited Roman way of life (Russell and Laycock). We also have the testimony of Bede that as late as the seventh century recently Christianised Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were apt to revert to their more familiar old pagan practices when under stress, as happened in Sussex during the plague of 664. In what were to become Wales and Cornwall, however, the new religion was less tarnished by association with the Roman occupation, and so it was able to spread further west to Ireland, and thence north to the Picts and Scots, on its own merits.
    Another objection to the idea of ethnic continuity cites the presence of the English language, which is clearly related to Germanic dialects and just as clearly different from Welsh and other ‘Celtic’ tongues spoken in the west of the island. The usual explanation for this situation is that before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons the whole of Britain was occupied by people speaking Celtic languages, but this is difficult to prove, as evidence for any native language in eastern Britain in Roman times is almost non-existent (Oppenheimer). People can replace their languages with new ones over time, as can be seen in Turkey and Hungary, for example, where Asiatic languages introduced by small numbers of conquerors from further east have replaced those originally spoken in historic times. It may be that English took over from whatever had preceded it much more slowly than our sources suggest; the documents we have are written in Latin or Old English, the languages of the ruling and literate classes, but there is little evidence of what the ordinary people were speaking until after the Norman Conquest. Alternatively, contacts across the North Sea between eastern England and northern Germany had probably been strong since the Iron Age, and Germanic language and culture may already have been established in the island, or at least have been familiar enough to facilitate their rapid adoption when Roman influence disappeared.
    The extent of the economic decline of post-Roman Britain can be exaggerated, and despite the lack of archaeological evidence it is hard to believe that people forgot how to make pots, for example, or ceased to be able to carry out repair work on Roman buildings (Fleming). One reason for the apparent abandonment of Roman towns