1. Roman Britain - The Work of Giants Crumbled

Some time in the 8th or 9th century, somewhere on the island of Great Britain, an unknown British poet clambered through the rubble of an overgrown ruin. Like so many people from this age, which has been called the Dark Ages, we don't know this poet's name. We don't know when they were born or when they died, even where they're from. But they wrote a poem in the language of Old English that has survived to this day, and that poem gives us a glimpse into the lost and decaying world they inhabited. It was a world of mystery, scattered with the enormous crumbling ruins of a bygone age. Radlish is this qualistan, how wondrous this wallstone, shattered by fate, castles a smash the work of giants crumbled, ruined the roofs, tumbled the towers, broken the barred gates, crossed in the plaster sheedings of a pin, torn away, fallen, eaten by a aldo underre or torne. This poem is known simply as the ruin, and it's thought the ruin it describes is that of the British Roman town of Bath. The poem itself has come down to us as something of a ruined object too. It was damaged by fire at some point in history so that its words break off and cut out, just like the shattered masonry it describes. But what we have is enough to picture the crumbling ruined buildings and the effect they had on its poet. You can almost feel the light falling through the broken roof and smell the still water while luxurious baths once stood. You can picture the solitary figure of the poet clambering over the piles of masonry, and you can almost hear them wondering who built this place. How did they construct the vaults of these cavernous halls? And why, after everything they'd built, did they leave it all behind? My name is Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilization's podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory, and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall? And what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time, who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode of Fall of Civilizations, I want to look not at the collapse of a whole empire, but at just one part of it, the island of Great Britain as it was under the rule of the Roman Empire. I want to show how a great civilization was built almost overnight and endured the test of centuries against overwhelming odds. I want to explore its fatal flaws and describe what happened after its final dramatic collapse. At the time the poetry of the ruin was written, Roman Britain was already a distant memory. It was remembered as a time of giants and legends. But for nearly four centuries until its fall, Britannia had been one of the Roman empires most enduring possessions. To get to the start of this story, we have to rewind back through the centuries, to the first century BC, when the power and confidence of the Roman Empire was at its height. This was the very twilight of the period we call the Roman Republic. And in this period, Rome was still a kind of democracy. While power was concentrated in the wealthy and land-owning classes, Rome did hold elections, and the power of the Senate acted as a check on the might of its rulers. Under this system, Rome had conquered vast swathes of territory across Europe, into Greece and Turkey and along the North African coast. Its empire was vast and constantly expanding. But at this point, the ragged chalk coast of the British Isles was still the frontier of what the Romans called the known world. Britain for Rome was a mysterious and frightening place. According to Plutarch, some even believed the island of Britain was a legend. The island furnished much matter of dispute, some argued that its name and story had been fabricated, that it had never existed. Although the crossing from mainland Europe to the British Isles is only 30 kilometers at its narrowest point, its body of water exposed to the harsh weather systems of the North Sea and North Atlantic. The Roman historian Amianus Marcelinus describes its dangerous and unpredictable nature, a narrow space of sea that swells with dreadful surges and then sinks again to be as flat as a level plain. By the middle of the first century BC, this treacherous and unpredictable crossing had already defeated the ambitions of several generals and emperors. Julius Caesar famously invaded the British Isles twice, in 55 and 54 BC. And both of these campaigns did little more than sink Roman life and treasure into the marshy lands of Kent and the Thames Valley. Caesar would go on to gather all of the power of Rome's institutions to himself, and he would pass Rome onto his successor Caesar Augustus as a dictatorship. Augustus, who ruled as the first Roman emperor, planned three separate invasions of Britain that each fizzled out uselessly. And generations later, the notorious mad emperor Caligula even amassed a great invasion force of 200,000 men on the Normandy coast, poised to take the island of Britain for Rome. And this attempt might have been successful, had Caligula not been the mad emperor. On a whim, he reportedly ordered his men to give up the invasion of Britain and gather seashells from the Normandy beaches instead. Britain for the Romans was an unobtainable prize. It was a land of mystery, peopled by wild and unpredictable barbarians. After returning from his failed invasions, Julius Caesar wrote with palpable horror about the British inhabitants. Most of the inland inhabitants do not so corn that live on milk and flesh and are clad with skins. All the Britons die themselves with woe which gives them a bluish colour and a terrifying appearance in battle. They wear their hair long and have every part of their body shaved, except the head and upper lip. It was the Emperor Claudius, who finally enveloped this wild and dangerous place into the Empire of Rome. Claudius successfully landed four legions that 20,000 men on the British coast. He waited behind on the continent, perhaps wisely considering the failures of his predecessors. And he must have listened eagerly as every new report came back to him, as his men landed in Kent, crossed its chalked downs and valleys and marched north to the river estuaries of the Thames. There, an enormous mass of British fighters awaited them. The battle went on for two days, an incredibly long battle in an era that was mostly characterized by short and brutal confrontations. And after a fierce resistance, the British forces retreated to the banks of the river Thames. The Romans followed, wading and swimming through the marshes of Essex, using their engineering expertise to build bridges across the swampy ground, and after a final bloody clash, British resistance was crushed. It wasn't until victory was all but assured that the Emperor Claudius himself arrived on British shores. Famously, he brought with him a terrifying symbol of Roman power, a tamed war elephant brought from Africa. To the poor Britons witnessing the arrival of their conquerors, the sight of this animal, the heavy thuds of its footfalls and the rattling of its mighty chains, must have ended any thought they had of successful resistance. From there, Roman troops swept across the rest of the country with ruthless efficiency, into whales and the British Midlands subduing tribes as they went. But when they reached the rugged Heath and Hills of Caledonia, that's modern Scotland, the Romans met their match. These lands were ruled by fierce confederations of tribes, among them powerful warrior clans like the Picts and the Meate. The Roman historian Cassius Dio writes about these peoples with particular contempt. These trimes inhabit wild and waterless mountains and desolate and swampy plains possessing the walls, cities, nor tilled fields, they dwell intense naked and unshod in their very fond of plundering. We don't know what the picks called themselves, since almost nothing of their language has survived. The word picked is what the Romans called them, and it comes from the same root as the English word picture. It means painted, referring to the brilliant war paint they wore into battle. Today, we know them by the beautiful, ritual standing stones they left across Scotland, decorated with mesmerizing walls and curls, and I'll put pictures of these on Twitter and Patreon for you to see. At whatever else we know about them, we know that these tribal people fought with enough ferocity that the Roman advance was halted. The picks knew their land well, and they were well versed in what we today would call guerrilla warfare. The Romans knew and equipped. They ceased their advance and declared the border with Caledonia to be the final limit of their empire. They built forts along a jutting cliff that ran the whole width of the country, a shelf of igneous dollarite that formed a natural barrier between the Roman lands and the lands of the picks. One rare writing tablet found in a rubbish heap in one of these forts, and dated to the year 92 AD, shows the Roman frustration with their ongoing battles with this bunch of Ragtag natives. The Britons are unprotected by armour. There are very many cavalry. The cavalry do not use swords, nor do the Britonculi take up fixed positions to throw their javelins. The word Britonculi is interesting, because it has never been seen in any other Roman source. It's a kind of slang that loosely translates to nasty little Britons, and it gives you a sense of how the Romans felt about their new subjects. In the year 120 AD, the Emperor Hadrian visited Briton, and he was dismayed to find the Roman troops there, still beset with rebellions and raids. But he was impressed with the natural fortification, given by this ridge of volcanic stone they were camped on. He ordered this barrier to be made more fortified, with the construction of what would become the largest Roman artefact in the world. A mighty wall stretching 135 kilometres from coast to coast. This border wall would be known as Hadrian's wall, and the Romans defended it with garrisons of infantry and cavalry stationed in a string of forts all the way along its length. And the Romans weren't satisfied with this border. They would make multiple attempts to push it further north into Caledonia, but all of these attempts would fail. At one point, they even built another wall, known as the Antenine wall, 160 kilometres further to the north, at the narrowest point of the British Isles. It spans 63 kilometres from coast to coast, but it turned out to be useless. The land of Caledonia was ungovernable, and the Antenine wall was abandoned each time it was tried, its stones left to crumble into the Pety Earth of the Scottish Moors. And Hadrian's barrier stood. Rome led occasional scouting parties out into the space between the two walls. They went to barter for trusses, exchange hostages, and initiate trade. And the Romans knew went to spot a bargain. Vast hordes of Roman coins found north of Hadrian's wall suggest that for at least some of the time, Rome was paying the picks to hold back their attacks. Meanwhile, south of this snaking line of stone, Roman Britain settled into a restive piece. Though uprisings at first, the most famous of these led by the warrior Queen Budica of the Ikeenai tribe, only 17 years after the conquests of southern Britain. Rome crushed this adventure brutally, and with it some of the last organised resistance to their rule. But the province of Britannia would never quite be pacified. Everyone knows that old saying that Rome wasn't built in a day. But in Roman regional capitals like London and Colchester, these cities really did seem to go up overnight. If you compare Singapore or Dubai to photos of those cities in the 1980s, you might get a sense of how it must have felt to live in London in the decades after the Romans arrived. A small marshy fishing town suddenly transformed in the space of only a few decades into a glittering metropolis. Despite their colourful pantheon of gods, the real religion of the Romans was the religion of urbanism, the cult of the city. And they replicated the structure of Rome in every city they built. In London, Rome built an ornate forum in a theatre, enormous public buildings with marble fronts and tiled roofs, unlike anything the Britans had seen before. A new elite of Roman governors, civil servants and statesmen poured in, and their luxurious villas went up around the countryside. These residences were resplendent, with mosaics and baths even under floor heating. And each city they built became another hub in the network of roads along which imperial commodities moved. Urban Britans could now enjoy incenses and perfumes, amphras of wine and red gloss pottery from Gaul, olive oil from Spain along with pepper and spices brought from as far as India. In exchange, Britain supplied precious metals to the Roman world, gold and silver as well as lead and iron. Perhaps most importantly, the shores of Cornwall and Devon were a rich source of tin, a rare metal in the ancient world that was crucial for making bronze. But despite these benefits, Britannia was always a costly possession. Records show that larger amounts of resources were poured into the island than were ever taken out. And some at least must have realized that the empire couldn't fund this outpost forever. Part of the cost of holding Britain as a colony was due to its countryside, a hotbed of rebellion. Native Britans lived in small villages of timber, turf-walled roundhouses that dotted the land. And here tribal loyalties held greater sway than any loyalty people felt to their Roman governors. A good way to think about the situation is to look at the recent occupation of Iraq by the United States Britain and their allies. In Roman times, fortified green zones went up across Britain too, walled compounds where foreign administrators poured in to enforce the new structure of imperial society. Two inscriptions from York show imperial officials coming from as far as Africa, France, Sardinia and Greece. A rotating cast of governors came and went too. These figures often stayed in their posts for only three years or so, and none of them were native to Britain. And although we don't have complete records, there's also no evidence of native Britans ever rising to the social rank necessary to govern. This is a situation quite different to other Roman colonies like Gaul, where Rome made some effort to bring indigenous people on board with the imperial project. So while some Britans might have felt the material benefits of Roman rule, it seems they never really felt part of the shared destiny that bound the rest of the empire together during its height. Perhaps partly for this reason, it seemed the British countryside was only ever one step from anarchy. This threat of rebellion from within was coupled with raids by the Picts and the Meite on the walled northern border. And the rich traffic of trade coming to and from Europe also created a booming industry and piracy. Sea going tribes like the Saxons became increasingly bold, braving the stormy waters of the North Sea to harass shipping and even making curbsons onto the British coast. So even in this first century of Roman rule in Britain, the pressures that would eventually crush it like a tin can began to bear in from every side. One of the key measures that archaeologists use to track the cycle of peace and war in the ancient world is to look at the frequency of buried coinhords. Put yourself in the position of a person living in the ancient world. When times are good, you feel secure enough to store your silver coins or your gold jury in your home or in the family vault or even in an early form of bank. But when times are bad, you can't risk that. You might bury your silver as an extra precaution or you do so in a panic when you see the first plumes of black smoke begin to show over the horizon. And in times of mild unrest, people would come back to dig these up again later. later, once the danger had passed. But if the unrest is serious enough, there might not be anyone left to retrieve it. In that case, the coins remain in the ground, with the dates and emperors stamped meticulously on their surface. This is bad news for their owner, of course, but it's good news for archaeologists who want to track a region's history of unrest. I'm going to pick up our story again, at a point where people in Roman Britain were once again burying their coins in record numbers, right as the second century draws to a close. Since the end of the Roman Republic, Rome had undergone nearly two centuries of constant expansion, and the constant wars on its borders had been matched by a relative peace within its lands, a period known as the Pax Romana, or the Roman Peace. But as the year 200 approached, this relative peace in the Roman Empire's interior was beginning to shatter. Plague had ravaged Rome's lands, a devastating disease brought back from the east by soldiers on campaign. It killed two thousand people a day in Rome at its height, and it decimated the Imperial Army, leading to as many as five million deaths across Europe. And trouble had rained in the political world as well. Since the time of Julius Caesar and his successor Augustus, the Roman Emperor had been a dictator with supreme power. The senate and judiciary were nothing but agents of his command, rather than representing any kind of popular will. And wherever absolute power exists, there are always men who will risk everything to claim it. Against the backdrop of plague and famine, civil wars began to erupt across Europe, over rival claims to the total power of the imperial throne. And in these wars, it was quite often the generals stationed in Britannia, the Empire's farthest and bleakest province, who would hear the drums of war beat the loudest. To understand why Britannia was such a source of trouble, you only have to look at the particular paradox that Roman Britain presented. All of the threats facing it from outside and within meant that the land required the constant presence of an enormous army to defend it, as many as forty thousand soldiers at its height. That's about one-eighth of the entire Imperial Army just to put that in perspective. And this meant that any one man put in charge of Britannia's defence force was automatically one of the Empire's most powerful men. The paradox might not seem apparent at first, but this was one of the fatal flaws that led to the repeated humbling and the final fall of Roman Britain. When discussing the Romans, it's easy to get bogged down in the endless chain of colourful characters, the schemas and the drunks and the zealots, the charlatans and the soldiers that leap out at us from the histories. I want to avoid getting dragged too much into relating the stories of each and every person who had a role in the collapse of Roman Britain. But I think it does help us to zoom in on some of these personalities, so we get a sense of the kind of person responsible for what happened next. And the first character in this story is a man named Claudius Albinus. That's because Albinus is one of the first generals to make what I will call the British mistake. He will be the first, but by no means the last. Born in Tunisia to a humble family, Albinus was African, but the name Albinus means white. And he was given this name due to the extraordinary pay on us of his complexion. On his birth, his father wrote a letter about this strange phenomenon. A sum was born to me on the seventh day before the callings of December, and so white was his body at birth that it was whiter than the linen clothes in which we wrapped him. Albinus' unusual physical appearance doesn't seem to have held him back. He grew up a promising soldier and rose through the ranks of the Roman military on the basis of his skill. When he was appointed governor of Britannia, Albinus stayed for longer than many before him, and we have a good account of his physical appearance in the Historia Augusta. He was tall of stature, with unkempt curly hair and a broad expanse of brow. His skin was wonderfully white. He had a womanish voice, almost as shrill as a unix. The life of governor seemed to suit Albinus, and he might have spent the rest of his life in Britannia, governing well and rising through the ranks of Roman society. Were it not for the events that were about to unleash blood and chaos across the wide expanse of the Western Roman Empire? The beginning of these events was the death of the tyrannical Emperor Commodus in the year 192 AD. You might remember him if you've ever seen Russell Crowe's gladiator. And when Commodus died without an heir and left multiple claimants behind, the whole empire descended once again into chaos. This is the period that would cause the historian Cassius Dio to write his famous lament. Our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust. The name given to this time, the year of the five emperors, might give you some idea of the ensuing pandemonium. These five claimants, to the imperial throne, fought and died. They burnt cities to the ground, they slaughtered vast armies, until there were only two credible candidates left. One of these was Albinus, the pale Tunisian station with his legions in Britain, who was a favorite of the Roman Senate. But the other claimant was the man sitting on the throne in Rome, the ruthless emperor Septimus Severus. Back in Britain, Albinus gave a dramatic speech before his British legions, addressing them in that high pitched but piercing voice. He announced that he wanted to restore the ancient democratic power of the Roman Senate, a radical statement for a prospective ruler to make. Albinus' soldiers cheered him, and they announced that he was the only emperor they served. It was a clear declaration of rebellion. The Senate soon sent Albinus' messages of support, and with his men's loyalty secured, Albinus decided to march on Rome. He knew he would have to act decisively, and he couldn't spare a single man. He took three legions, every last soldier in Britain, and sailed for the mainland in the year 195. He must have been boyed up by such a sense of destiny on that voyage, and it would have been an inspiring sight, those tens of thousands of legionaries in their bright armour, the sea thick with ships, all sailing to Rome to restore its ancient Republic. But Albinus would not succeed. Despite being popular in Gaul and amassing a vast following, he was finally defeated two years later at the Battle of Lugdenum. It was a bloody and drawn-out affair, resting over two days, again an excruciatingly long battle in this era. The clash involved as many as 300,000 soldiers, and for a time it looked like Albinus would win. But then the tide turned, his men began to flee the battlefield, and Albinus realised that all was lost, that all his sacrifices had been for nothing. He ran himself through with his own dagger, and the Emperor Severus wasn't kind in victory. He rode his horse over Albinus his mangled body, and then paraded his head on a pike. He beheaded his family and purged his followers. The power of the Emperor as supreme dictator remained, and the Senate got quietly back into line. Albinus had lost everything, but his dash for Rome had also cost his province dearly. Over the long two years he had been at war, Albinus had left Britannia completely undefended, and with no garrison the land had descended into Anarchy. At this time, a huge part of Britain's economy was driven by the constant presence of a Roman army. So people employed to supply these men to make them bread and forge them swords, repair the leather of their stirrups. All these people suddenly had no job, and no way to support themselves. Local rebellions spread across the country, while outside forces raided and plundered with impunity. Picks from Scotland, Scotty from Ireland and Saxons from the sea, all combined to ravage the land that Albinus had left behind. Rome would eventually return to take back control. But even 10 years later, in the year 207, the Roman statesmen put back in charge. large, still wrote with fear about the dire situation the country faced. Barbarians there are in revolt, overrunning the country, carrying off treasure and destroying most things. So that's the heart of what I'm calling the British mistake. The paradox is that any sufficiently large force able to occupy Britain also presented an irresistible temptation to its commander. Any force that could hold Britain could also take Rome. And so the moment the imperial crown was up for grabs, Britain's governor would pile all his soldiers onto ships and march on the eternal city, leaving Britain undefended. The Emperor Septimus Severus, soon after trampling Albinus' body beneath the hooves of his horse, sailed to Britain to ensure that never again would another challenger arise. In response to attacks from the north, he led a huge army into Scotland to drive the attackers back into their lands. But Severus didn't have Albinus' way with the native Britons. It seems this ill-conceived adventure achieved nothing, with the border exactly where it had always been. But for good measure, he split the province of Britannia in two to limit the power of any one governor. But it wouldn't last. For Roman Britain, the clock was ticking, and although Albinus was one of the first generals to make this mistake, he was far from the last. One thing we will learn over the course of this series is that the fall of a civilization is rarely simple. One rule ended in different parts of Britain at different times and under different circumstances. It came along with the collapse of Roman authority across Western Europe. And this occurred after the time of Albinus, a 50-year period called the military anarchy. This era saw at least 26 claimants contest the imperial throne. Incessant civil wars and rampant inflation crippled the Roman economy, and German tribes made incursions into the empire's territory. It seemed like a thousand different pressures rained down from all sides. And in all of this, despite the Emperor Severus' measures, Britain would remain a fertile staging ground for rebellion. In the year 260, for instance, a Roman commander called Postumus staged an insurrection that carved Britain and Gaul away from the empire for 10 years before it was retaken by Rome. A quarter century later in the year 286, a Roman naval commander called Carousius, a common man who had risen through the ranks, declared himself Emperor of Britain and ruled for seven years before being overcome himself. And it wasn't all a history of failures. In the year 306, the man who had become known as Emperor Constantine the Great was crowned Emperor in York. He successfully marched on Rome, and although he spent the next 20 years fighting rival claimants in a series of bitter civil wars, he was ultimately crowned Emperor over both the Eastern and the Western Roman empires. For much of the third century, Rome was at war with itself, and the events of this time changed the empire forever. Rome's emperors were now military strongmen. Read across the empire had broken down, impoverishing its people. While at the same time Rome's wealthy were now an ultra-rich elite, far richer than they had ever been in history, meanwhile, the empire's enemies grew stronger and more organised, learning how to play to Rome's weaknesses, learning how to win. And as the fourth century dawned, Roman Britain's troubles would only increase. One event would soon lay bare just how far the Roman empires' power had fallen, and it's remembered to history as the great barbarian conspiracy. To set the scene, we have to imagine the winter of 367, on the Roman garrison at Hadrian's Wall. The winters in this part of the world are harsh. Cruel winds and rain would have lashed the man stationed on the wall, probably snow on the ground their breath visible in the air. This was the last bastion against the wild tribes of the north, and conditions here were harsh. Letters these soldiers wrote at the time include complaints about the cold that bit at their feet every day. The lack of holidays and not enough beer provided in their rations. But it's still hard to imagine exactly what was behind the decision these men took next. Since it was hunger, cold or fear, perhaps they were even bribed, there was no shortage of Roman coin north of the wall, let's remember. Whatever the reason, the soldiers tasked with defending the empires' northern border, mutinied. They changed sides, and allowed a waiting army of pigs from Caledonia to cross the wall. This horde swept down on the towns and villages of Northumbria. Villages burned, men and women were put to the sword. But before the Romans could send the usual reinforcements to quash this invasion, something astonishing happened. Immediately, waves of tribesmen of the fierce Atacotty from the outer Isles, Scotty from Ireland and Saxons from Germania began to land on Britain's coasts. At the same time, parties of Franks and Saxons landed on the mainland in Northumbria. And these didn't seem like random attacks. They seemed to be coordinated raids, like nothing else the so-called barbarian tribes had ever attempted before. They completely overwhelmed the Roman defences. Everywhere Roman towns burned, cities were sacked. And amid the chaos, slaves escaped and hauled units of soldiers deserted in terror. All of these, gathering together into bans that roamed the countryside, resorting to theft and murder to support themselves. The historian Amianus Marcelinus paints a scene of pure chaos. Next to Riders, the commanding general of the sea coast was killed, and another general for the Saudis was ambushed by the enemy and taken prisoner. The Atacotty, a warlike race of men and the Scots, were ranging wildly and causing great devastation, while the Gallic regions were harassed by the Franks and their neighbours, the Saxons with cruel robbery, fire and the murder of all who were taken prisoners. For two whole years, Anarchy ruled in northern Europe, until Rome sent its best general, Flavius Theodosius, to march on the roaming barbarian bans. Theodosius defeated some in battle, and he offered an amnesty to others. Another slowly returned to the region, but the damage was done. The attack of the Great Conspiracy had come as a complete surprise, and when we think about the effect this might have had on the people of the time, it wouldn't be too far off to think of this as something like the September 11th attacks on the United States. These were coordinated brutal strikes, calculated to cause maximum fear and damage, and they shook the very core of the Empire. Rome's confidence in the face of the barbarian threat would never recover. The Empire's reduced ability to protect itself was one factor in the collapse of Roman Britain, but it was only one of many. Britannia's economy had been in decline for decades, with reduced trade to other parts of the Empire disrupted by the century of civil wars, by barbarian invasions and piracy on the sea. Pottery produced in Britain began to drastically reduce in variety and decoration around this time, and iron production in the south plummeted. Whole kilns were abandoned, and the price of iron skyrocketed. Around the year 350, the Roman sewers in Canterbury started clogging up, and no one bothered to clear them. A thick layer of silt also began to build up in the public baths that everywhere stood as a symbol of Roman civilization. This decline was beginning to seep into every aspect of British life, but it was one man, an ambitious and hot-headed general called Magnus Maximus, who would play a pivotal part in tipping the land over into its final fall. This often said that history repeats itself. We're told that if we study its lessons, we can avoid making the same mistakes twice, but I think that happens a lot less than people realize. Events are so complex that nothing ever really happens the same way twice. But just occasionally in the flow of history, you do get these eddies and world pools, where it really does feel like people keep doing the same thing over and over, like the rerun of a movie we've seen before. And if Magnus Maximus had been a reader of history, if he had read the story of that previous governor of Britain, Albinus the White Tunisian, and his ill-fated march on Rome, he might have done things a little differently, as the 4th century entered its final decades. Like Almenus, Maximus was a distinguished general. He was from the Galatian region of Northern Spain, and he had served in fearsome campaigns in Africa and against German tribes on the Danube River. He had also been among the army of Flavus Theodosius, which had returned order after the events of the Great Conspiracy. Maximus was also interesting for being a devout Christian, a religion that was outlawed in the Roman Empire only one lifetime before. Maximus was assigned as the governor of Britain in the year 380, and in his first year he faced down an army of picants and scots that had overrun Hadrian's Wall, perhaps emboldened by Rome's recent weakness. After crushing this threat, Maximus celebrated by building a huge church on London's Tower Hill. But like other governors of Britannia before him, Maximus had ambitions greater than simply commanding a garrison in the Empire's wettest and windiest dominion. For the last decade of his life, Maximus had watched from afar as an incredibly unpopular emperor had sat on the imperial throne. This emperor was a young man named Gratian, and he is one of these particularly colourful characters that leap out of the Roman histories. Maximus loved to hunt, and bizarrely he spent all his time in the company of a band of sithian archers. These were men from beyond the Danube River, outside the bounds of the Roman Empire. That is to the Romans, they were barbarians. The young emperor loved the culture of his sithian friends. He even used to appear at court dressed in the full traditional garb of a sithian warrior, more lately patterned overcoat and furs. And the Roman people seemed to tolerate this eccentric emperor for a while. But in the year 378, Rome would suffer a horrifying blow. The Emperor Valens, who ruled over the eastern portion of the Empire, had brought a massive army of 30,000 men to crush a rebellion of Goths and Huns barely more than 10,000 strong. Confident in his coming victory, the Emperor Valens attacked them without waiting for reinforcements. These Goth rebels stood and fought, and astonishingly, they won. The Emperor Valens was killed along with 20,000 of his men, and his body was never recovered. This loss shook Rome to the core. Barbarian armies were now causing havoc across Rome's eastern territories, flouting the authority of the Empire. And suddenly, the Emperor Gratian dressing up like a barbarian didn't seem quite so acceptable. The people of Rome turned on him, and around the Empire, all other claimants to the throne sensed their chance. They began to gather their armies. And once again, the British paradox came into play. The hot-headed zealot Magnus Maximus, just like Albinus before him, commanded a vast army in Britain, and he, like his predecessor, resolved to march on Rome. Just like Albinus, he knew he couldn't spare a single man. He took the entire Roman garrison of Britannia, piled it onto a fleet of ships, and set sail for Gaul in the year 383. With Maximus on his way to Rome, Britain was once again left undefended. We can never know if any of Maximus' advisors told him about the story of Albinus, the pale skinned Tunisian who had marched on Rome. Did no one on that creaking ship, sailing its way to the continent? Not one of them. Mentioned to Maximus what had happened nearly 200 years before, when the last Governor of Britain had tried to become Emperor. I find this hard to believe, but that's part of history's spell. It teaches us lessons, even as it convinces us that these lessons don't apply to us. That we'll be the ones to break its endless chain. For Maximus at least, nothing mattered to him except reaching Rome and seizing the purple robes of the Emperor for himself. In the zealous Maximus did seem to be blessed. Everywhere he went, legions that were sent to fight him instead joined his cause. Enraged the Emperor Gratian met his army outside Paris, and Maximus' forces won the day. The young Emperor fled with his Scythian bodyguards, and he was killed soon after, while Magnus Maximus declared himself Emperor. But this is where the luck of Maximus runs out. Before he'd even begun to rule, his support slowly collapsed, and it did so in part because of the anarchy he left behind in Britannia. Just like Albinus, he had left his home province, the heart of his supporters completely undefended. Just as before, raiders and pirates now devastated the coasts and northern towns. The departure of the land's garrison had caused an economic collapse too, and Maximus had also taxed Britain brutally to pay for his wars. Now Rebellion's spread like a fire through dry heather. The date of Maximus' departure, 383, is the last date ever to be found on a Roman coin in Wales. It's the last date too, for any archaeological trace in the northern Penine hills. In these places, it marked the end of Roman rule in Britain. The 6th century British clerics and guilders put it more bluntly in his searing rant entitled on the ruin and conquest of Britain. Britain is left deprived of all her soldiery and armed bans of her cruel governors and of the flower of her youth who went with Maximus but never again returned. The scots from the northwest and the pits from the north, like hungry and ravening wolves, rushed with greedy jaws upon the fold which is left without a shepherd. From this point, the British economy was in freefall. After this time, British coffins stopped being sealed with nails, and boots lost their hobnails. This shows how expensive iron had become. British people now slipped on icy ground and rotted in flimsy coffins. Pottery became a lost art, and the suburbs of the cities began to empty. The astonishing thing is, Maximus was not even the last governor of Britain to make this mistake. This dishonor would fall to a common soldier called Constantine, who once and for all ended the Roman presence in Britain. He was named after the great 4th century emperor who had been crowned in York a hundred years before, and now this famous event would repeat itself as fast. After the departure of Maximus, a bloody power struggle had broken out in Britain, with rival factions tearing it to pieces like dogs after a strip of meat. His struggle resulted in the soldiers themselves choosing the new governor of Britannia, and they chose one of their own, a common soldier known as Constantine. The historian Orozius can barely conceal his sneer. Constantine, a man from the lowest ranks of the soldiary, was chosen simply from confidence inspired by his name, and without any other qualifications to recommend him. We can assume that Constantine wasn't a reader of history. That's because he would repeat the mistake of Albinus and Maximus almost exactly. The moment he sensed weakness in Rome, he took all of his British legions and sailed for the continent. Completely overwhelmed by barbarian invasions and Roman infighting, the noble born Emperor Orozius was forced to buy off this lonely soldier Constantine. He offered him the position of Co-Empra, and this precarious situation held for a few years, until an alliance of challenges chased Constantine out of his capital and killed him in the year 411. Most of his soldiers would never return to their posts in Britannia. Although Rome enough was enough, the province of Britannia wasn't worth it. The Empire was now so weakened that an army of Goths led by Alaric was now rampaging around Northern Italy and even sacked Rome itself. The first time a foreign power had done this for 800 years. The collapse of the entire Empire now seemed like a possibility, and in 410 AD, the Emperor Orozius finally declared the end of the official Roman presence in Britannia. He famously told the British to look to their own defences. Rome withdrew all remaining soldiers and administrators from Britannia. They stopped collecting taxes in the province, and this released some of the burden on its people initially, but they also stopped paying the administrators who ran its cities and managed its trade routes. And they ended the wages and supplies flowing to the local soldiers. who had fought as exhilaries in the garrison. These men didn't go anywhere. Instead, they began to tax the populations themselves, demanding money and supplies in exchange for protection. These groups would ultimately grow into the basis of very early medieval society. These warlords frequently fought their wars using the services of mercenary armies from the continent. Dupes from Denmark, Angles and Saxons from Northern Germany, men who brought their families and formed the first Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in Britain. The people forgot Latin as an everyday language and it survived only in the churches. They stopped writing as far as we can tell, since no texts have survived, and people forgot their Roman identities too, adopting the cultures of the incoming peoples. We can see this by burials in some places that have been found, matching burial practices in Germany and Norway, even though the genetics of the buried person are clearly British. And while this great social and cultural change happened, Britain's Roman cities fell gradually into ruins. Bit by bit, the great opulent villas that had once dominated the countryside were abandoned and became dilapidated. Smallest states fell first, some of them absorbed it to the holdings of richer landowners, but the large ones followed soon after. Mosaic floors cracked as roof beams fell in, while private bathhouses became homes for frogs and waterweed. In his fifth century work, The Life of Saint Germainus, Constantius of Leon describes coming across a ruined villa of this kind. Its roof had fallen in, it was overgrown with bushes and brambles, and among all the many rooms that it had once contained, there was scarcely one left that was fit to live in. Constantius tells us that the ruined villa was haunted by the ghosts of evil men. In the north of Britain, Hadrian's wall was finally abandoned, and it seems the soldiers in its forts left in a hurry. At one of the most well-preserved sites, an auxiliary fort called Vindolander, archaeologists have found Roman cavalry swords simply abandoned, dropped on the ground and left there. These are very rare finds, since in this time a sword was an expensive and precious object. Their owners would no more throw them away than a modern person might throw away their mobile phone. All kinds of objects pertaining to the daily lives of soldiers have been found left behind too, bath sandals and writing tablets, pots and buckets and buckles. One day it seems, everyone at Vindolander just got up and left. After the Romans departed and the border collapsed, local people began to use Hadrian's wall as a quarry, taking its high-quality blocks of stone to build their own houses and barns, even churches, so that now the wall is woven into the fabric of countless medieval buildings across the region. Near Carlisle, the medieval priory of Lannacost, for instance, was built using a large amount of material stolen from the wall, which runs just half a kilometer to the north. You can still see Roman inscriptions on some of the priory's stones, boasting about which legions were stationed on the wall. Meanwhile, tribal chieftains and local warlords, some of whom had been officers in the Roman army until recently, moved into the forts along the wall and used them as private castles. In one fort known as Bearduswild, it seems the descendents of the original garrison still lived there a century after the departure of Rome, passing down their uniforms, flying regimental insignia and building timber constructions inside its crumbling ruin. They probably received pay and supplies from people living in the area in exchange for protection, and they maintained a kind of Roman identity in order to increase their legitimacy. To the south, large cities like London fell gradually into disrepair. Trade at London's port had been slowing over the past century, but now it finally stopped all together. Its suburbs turned into wasteland, or were tilled for farming. The large church built by Magnus Maximus on Tower Hill burned to the ground, and it seems people lacked either the knowledge, the resources, or the will to rebuild it. London's great Roman forum too was dismantled and quarried for stone, and its public bath was torn down. Its great basilica, which was once the largest building in northwest Europe, was also taken apart. People began to be buried inside the city limits, something the Roman authorities would never have allowed. And of these burials, studies show that four times more have been found with wounds from stabbing and slicing weapons than in the previous period. London's population of nearly 30,000 people began to drift away, back to a simpler existence in the countryside, to timber longhouses, and roundhouses built of fat and water. In some places, the ancient hill forts of the pre-Roman Britons, which had lay in empty for centuries, now burst back into life. Excavations in these sites have found objects that seem to have been looted from the abandoned Roman towns and villas that now littered the countryside, dressed stone and glass and pottery. And amid the slow hollowing out of London, archaeological evidence shows that an enclave of the ultra-wealthy continued to live a somewhat Roman existence in a kind of gated community. They enjoyed the same wine and olive oil they always had, presumably imported at great expense. They denied the righty on the wall for as long as they could, but the decline was unstoppable. The rest of the city descended into chaos, and nature crept back to reclaim its streets and alleys. By the end of the fourth century, everything south of the River Thames had been abandoned. Large pockets of London's urban fabric turned into patches of overgrown wasteland, and people began to grow wheat in the middle of the city. By the end of the fifth century, London was deserted. It was now an uninhabited ruin, a city of ghosts sinking into the marsh and mud of the river. We can imagine ivy growing over its crumbling walls, and elder too, young trees pushing their roots between the bricks and stones of its buildings. The only people left in London were scavengers. They came to find things like iron nails, which could be recycled. The forests around London would also have been cut down, and so the only source of usable timber would have been that left in the decaying city. So little by little, people tore London apart. One artifact, known as the Billingsgate Broach, tells the story of these scavengers. It was dropped amid the fallen roof tiles of a building known as the Billingsgate House, perhaps by a scavenger who had looted it and feared being robbed, or by someone exploring the ruins, who simply dropped it and couldn't find it afterwards. Either way, it's a fascinating artifact that speaks of the afterlife of the ruined city of London, and I'll post a picture of it on Twitter and Patreon to see. And it wasn't only London that fell into ruins. In cities like Bath, which inspired the poetry of the ruin that we opened with, urban life continued in some form after the departure of Rome. While its great temples crumbled and grand public buildings fell into disrepair, its city authorities still managed basic repairs like re-cobbling the streets. But without their links to the Roman economy, the slow death of Britain's cities was all but assured. By the early fifth century, all of Britain's towns, large and small, simply ceased to exist. The city of York, where once the Emperor Constantine the Great had been crowned, now stood empty and in ruins, slowly reclaimed by the seasonal floods of the river Oos. We know this because archaeologists have found the remains of water beetles, water voles, shrews and froghoppers inside the city. All animals that live only in flooded and swampy ground, banished by the developments of the Roman era. The incoming Saxon people were obviously impressed by the ruins of Roman cities, but also seemed to have feared them as places of ghosts and curses. They rarely came near to the ruins and built their settlements far away from them. At some sites like Chia-Colemian, the some evidence that the wells of the decaying city were filled in to prevent people from returning. The virtual objects were also left behind, perhaps toward off the curse that was believed to hang over these crumbling stones. It's no coincidence that tales of giants form such a prominent part of British folklore. To see why, you just have to imagine the mighty temples and public buildings that were left behind in the wake of Roman rule. To people who no longer knew how to build these things. These crumbling walls, these awesome constructions of bygone centuries, must have seemed the work of a race of gods who had once walked England's rolling fields and ancient primeval forests. Perhaps to truly understand how it must have felt to live in the time after Roman rule, it's best to end the same way we started with the old English poem The Ruin. As you listen, think about what it must have felt like to live in this time, when the foreign occupiers who had brought so much change finally left. It was a time when it felt that history was no longer moving forward. That tomorrow would be a darker time than today. A time when all you had left to remember that lost golden age is the landscape strewn with monumental blocks of stone, the cavernous bathing halls, and the overgrown ruins slowly and unstoppably crumbling into the earth. Krungun, Kualawera, Kwoom and Koldegas, Swiltalta, Furname, far and wide, the slain perished, days of pestilence came, death took all the brave men away, their places of war became deserted places, the city decayed, the rebuilders perished, arm is into the earth. And so these buildings grow desolate, and this red curved roof parts from its tiles of the ceiling vault, the Ruin has fallen to the ground, broken to mountains, where at one time shone many a warrior, joyous and ornamented, with gold by its banner, on the Spurotenberg Braden Riches. Thank you once again for listening to the fall of civilization's podcast. I'd like to give a special thanks to my voice actors, Jake Bout Mills, Jacob Rollinson, Shem Jacobs, and a special thank you goes to Dr Rebecca Pinner at the University of East Anglia, for allowing us to hear the poetry of the Ruin in its original Old English. I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and tell me what you thought. You can follow me at Paul MM Cooper, and if you'd like updates about the podcast, announcements about new episodes, as well as images and maps relevant to the episode, you can follow the podcast at Paul of Siv Pod, with underscores separating the words. This podcast can only keep going with the support of our generous subscribers on Patreon. You keep me running, you help me cover my costs, and you also let me dedicate more time to researching, writing, recording and editing, to get the episodes out to you faster and bring as much life and detail to them as possible. I want to thank all my subscribers for making this happen. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider contributing and help keep the podcast running. For now, goodbye, and thanks for listening.