What we are offered in nine short chapters is a materialist social history of the end of Roman Britain. Some of these chapters rework the arguments rehearsed by the author in the pages of academic journals, yet they are concerned not with the experience of squabbling warbands but with the lives of the masses. The disappearance of the Roman tax-pay cycle produced a time of dislocation, a loss of skills, and an economic reorientation with profound effects. Charting how those effects manifested themselves is Fleming’s task, pursued through an analysis of the life cycles of objects and materials. Some of the “orthodox” big questions around ethnicity and identity get, rightly in my view, short shrift. We have tied ourselves in knots trying to separate and define ancient avowed and ascribed identities from language, material culture, isotopes, DNA, and aDNA. Where has this gotten us? Up a creek without a paddle, writing the retrospective perceptions of a minority of Early Medieval literate men onto the physical remains of the fifth and sixth centuries. This book refreshingly demonstrates how other narratives and, most importantly, other actors—local and immigrant peasants and artisans—can be placed center stage.
