Early Medieval Britain was more Roman than we think. The Roman Empire left vast infrastructural resources on the island. These resources lay buried not only in dirt and soil, but also in texts, laws, chronicles, charters, even churches and landscapes. This book uncovers them and shows how they shaped Early Medieval Britain. Infrastructures, material and symbolic, can work in ways that are not immediately obvious and exert an influence long after their creators have gone. Infrastructure can also rest dormant and be reactivated with a changed function, role and appearance. This is not a simple story of continuity and discontinuity: It is a story of adaptation and transformation, of how the Roman infrastructural past was used and re-used, and also how it influenced the later societies of Britain.
Author(s): Mateusz Fafinski
Series: The Early Medieval North Atlantic
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 240
City: Amsterdam
Cover
Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Prologue
I. Frameworks: From Historiography to the Principal Terms
1. Infrastructure
2. Governance Resource
3. Continuity
4. Re-Use
5. City
II. Movements: Charters and Roman Transport Infrastructure
1. Writing Roads Down: Roman Roads in Documentary Practice
2. The Eastern Charters
2.1 Source Introduction
2.2 Roads and Bridges in Boundary Clauses
2.3 State of Maintenance
2.4 Obligations and Burdens
3. The Western Charters
3.1 Source Introduction
3.2 Roads in Western Charters
3.3 Alienation
4. Conclusions
III. Accomodations: Roman Urban Spaces in Post-Roman and Early Medieval Britain
1. A Very Long Goodbye: Recognising Roman Urbanism in Britain
2. Urban Spaces in the Sub-Roman Period (c. 382-c. 442)
2.1 Transformations of Roman Towns in Britain
2.2 409/410 – the Year(s) Nothing Happened?
2.3 Candidates for Limited Urban Survival
2.4 Coins and Urban Spaces
2.5 Problematising the Shift
3. Urban Spaces in the Pre-Conversion Period (c. 442-597)
3.1 Tax-Gathering and Re-Use of Roman Towns
3.2 Limited Urban Functions and the Idea of Multifocal Governance
4. Urban Spaces in the Conversion Period and the Times of Bede (597-735)
4.1 The Strategies of Activation
4.2 Sources of Authority
4.3 Between ‘Continuity of Place’ and ‘Urban Continuity’
4.4 Perceiving Roman Urban Spaces
5. Conclusions
IV. Spaces: The Church and What Rome Left
1. Tinkering with the Past: the Church and the Inheritance of Rome
2. Law and Space
2.1 Regulating the Role of the Church
2.2 Acquiring and Granting Space
3. Symbolical Geographies
3.1 The ‘Christian Foundation Legend’ and Roman Remains
3.2 Recreating Rome
3.3 Reoccupying Urban Spaces as Ecclesiastical Capitals
4. Memory and Infrastructure
4.1 Whithorn and Remembering Rome
4.2 Wilfrid and the Importing of Memory
5. Conclusions
Epilogue
Bibliography
List of Maps
1 Post-Roman Britain
2 Post-Roman West and important places mentioned in the text
List of Figures
Fig. 1-3. The phases of the creation of the symbolical landscape in Kent
