The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain

by Neil Faulkner

Why did Rome abandon Britain in the early 5th century? According to Neil Faulkner, the centralized, military-bureaucratic state, governed by a class of super-rich landlords and apparatchiks, had siphoned wealth out of the province, with the result that the towns declined and the countryside was depressed. When the army withdrew to defend the imperial heartlands, the remaining Romano-British elite succumbed to a combination of warlord power, barbarian attack, and popular revolt.

Genres: History, Roman Britain, Nonfiction, British Literature

288 pages, Paperback

First published August 31, 2000

About the author

Neil Faulkner FSA was a British archaeologist, historian, writer, lecturer, broadcaster, and political activist. Educated at King’s College, Cambridge and the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, Faulkner was a school teacher before becoming an archaeologist.

He was currently a Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, Editor of Military History Monthly, and Co-director of the Great Arab Revolt Project (in Jordan) and the Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project (in Norfolk, England). On 22 May 2008, he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

An analysis of the history of Roman Britain from a Marxist perspective. Faulkner, who sadly died earlier this year, was also an activist and had some interesting perspectives on modern life. He wrote about the First World War as well as archaeology. He has also written a book entitled Creeping Fascism which looks at the rise for the far right (for example Trump, maga and Bolsonaro) and arguing that fascists with come to power through elections. He’s an interesting thinker.
In this work he does not follow the classic Marxist line about Rome, that it was a slave mode of production. He argues from the evidence that Rome was kept going by “robbery with violence”. Conquests produced slaves and loot and then colonies which could be taxed to fund the army. The army took a massive percentage of the Imperial income and was funded by ongoing conquest. This worked whilst conquest was easy and possible. But once the size of the Empire meant it was almost impossible to manage and new conquests were not easy or straightforward then the inevitable decline began.
Faulkner examines the different layers of Roman Britain, urbanisation and the later decline of towns, the untamed tribes in the north, agriculture, taxation and the role of the army and its forts. He uses the archaeological evidence and such written records as are available. It’s a good read and provides a refreshingly different perspective to all the grandeur that was Rome stuff.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fairly well written account of the Roman occupation of Britain. Easy to read although often with too much (easy to skip) descriptions and/or statistical analyses of archaeological evidence. As with his other book I have read Faulkner seeks to use knowledge of how people act including recent political theories alongside an archaeological analysis to provide a grand narrative of events with a bottom up bias.

Faulkner’s overriding theme is that the Roman Empire was an imperialist and exploitative one whose continual expansion was both due to but also predicated by its military might – the latter due to the need to find increasing stores of both plundered wealth and sources of ample food enabling the system of: “bread and circuses” for the poor; a local Romanised gentry able to gain the benefits and status of Roman culture as well as acting as the local administrators and tax gatherers, on which in times of plenty they could take an additional cut; towns acting as a nexus not just for the gentry to have as a second home for their civic duties and culture but as an indispensible centre for tax gathering and for a class of middlemen – traders and money changers; and most of all an army which acted both as guarantors of peace and tax revenues but also as a massive consumer of food and materials, and which increasingly was funded by the personal largesse of the emperors.

As the Empire expanded from fertile areas to unfertile wastelands (including the North West of Britain) this equation did not work due to the inability of the land to supply sufficient wealth or food to support the society described above. As the Empire bumped up against such boundaries its necessary expansion ceased and the society started to break down: insufficient tax revenues meant that the gentry actively tried to avoid rather than embrace civic duties; troop strength was insufficient to offer guaranteed protection against barbarian raids (from Picts and Anglo Saxons in Britain); low scale civic rebellion against exploitation became harder to contain. This in turn led to divisions in the Empire – between the army-supported grandees and land-owning gentry as well as the emergence of rival emperors (many based in Britain) which exacerbated the fall.

[Raymond Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyone, of course, knows the more famous work by Edward Gibbon as a monumental achievment, though many have questions on it these days (in the light of new archeological evidence); It still remains the classic work on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. This, at first, you may think is simply a way to steal thunder from a much more impressive work and in a way its title suggests such to be the case. This, however, is a work of great thought and possibly the best work relating to the end of the Roman occupation of Britain. Many things ring true here and little seems false, the arguements are reasoned and reasonable. Though no one will ever know the truth about the disintegration of the Roman occupation of britain this gives very reasonable and considered reasons for it. Thoroughly recommended.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Populist TV series, such as the BBC's What the Romans Did For Us, were repeated endlessly on British digital history channels to emphasise the heritage of the Roman Empire in its farflung outposts such as Britannia. It's true that Britons are indebted to them for a lot of technology and for the cultural legacy left to us in history, literature, religion, the law and so on.

But freelance historian and archaeology journalist Neil Faulkner argues that the Roman Empire was "a system of robbery with violence, that it was inherently exploitative and oppressive, and that it was crisis-prone, unstable and doomed to collapse". Furthermore its main use is as an Awful Lesson to us in the modern world, "dominated as it is by corporate capital and imperialist war," just as in Late Antiquity. His polemic is powerful and cumulative if, as he says, "essentially negative".

There is a lot of weight hanging on a title that pays homage to Gibbons' great multi-volume work (which, incidentally, also inspired Isaac Asimov's sequence of SF books in the Foundation series). The 2004 paperback edition reinforces his political views and includes an additional final chapter on Dark Age Britain entitled 'From Commune to Kingdom' which seems to put the final nail in the coffin of Roman Britain.

[Dom Puzool · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author Neil Faulkner has tried to masquerade his book as a work on the Decline and Fall of Roman Britain. In actual fact it is a spurious piece of Marxist invective against the crimes (so called) of Imperialism. Oh those nasty Romans they were just so awful and of course what applies to the Romans applies also to...........surprise, surprise......Americans !!! (check out the introduction to the 2nd edition).[return][return]If you want to be a self righteous leftist then fine but please, please go practise your under graduate politics elsewhere and stop spreading this far left nonsense. There are far better books out there on the subject so avoid this propaganda piece - unless of course you enjoy lefty pretentiousness.