Summary: Something strange has been happening in our story… and I’m going to very briefly touch upon the arrival of the Anglo Saxons simply because I want you to see how much things have changed. As you might remember, when we began on Season two, we saw Roman Britannia in collapse and the introduction of a new cultural group that was a mix of farmers and mercenaries: The Anglo Saxons. And these people were frighteningly poor. The Romano-British were definitely not living the high life that they were under Constantine, and some of them were definitely in dire straits. We saw plenty of evidence of public spaces being left to decay and others deliberately torn down. We also saw a shift from heavily industrialized lifestyles, where a single town would only produce one product, to a more localized economy. And we saw a rise in defensive structures, likely in response to raids that came along with the destabilization that the region was going through. But we also saw places like Cadbury Congresbury that were British trading centers that thrived following the withdrawal of Rome, the arrival of the Anglo Saxons, and through the period where Gildas tells us that everything went to hell in a handbasket. And then following that period of instability, we’re told that the Britons got their lives back in order and started to get more organized (though into individual kingdoms) and got… uh… a little bit decadent. So the take away is that, following the withdrawal, Britons might have gone through some chaos and dealt with raids and violence, but they also stayed organized enough that they had kingdoms, retained literacy, and their economies stayed strong enough that the decadence of their leaders was apparently a problem. So even though Rome had largely collapsed in the West, the Britons (at least some of the Britons) were still holding on and maintaining their power structures.
