The study of urbanism between a.d. 300 and 600 seems to be undergoing something of a renaissance of late. This volume (the publication of a Leicester PhD), in contrast to the theoretically driven Late Roman Towns in Britain (A. Rogers, 2011), offers a firmly empirical approach to the thorny challenges presented by town life, or life in towns, during the long fifth century.
The author has brought his experience and skill as a field archaeologist and urban excavator to bear on an ambitious subject. He seeks to explore the evidence for occupation, function and role of urban places during the fourth to sixth centuries and attempts to understand how and why these roles and functions may have changed. The result is a generally impressive marshalling of evidence, some of which is obscurely published or unpublished. Speed deserves to be congratulated for bringing this information — the results of countless commercially-funded urban excavations — to the attention of a wider audience.
The ambition of this volume is, however, its greatest failing. In attempting to tackle the late and early post-Roman archaeology of nine major Romano-British towns it is inevitable that gaps begin to show. We could question why London, Colchester, Canterbury, Cirencester, Winchester, Silchester, Leicester, Lincoln and Wroxeter were selected for inclusion but Dorchester (Dorset), St Albans and Caerwent were excluded. The discussion of the nine towns is also variable. Leicester, which S. knows personally, is excellent and detailed. That of London (here I write as someone who has worked on the capital's late Roman archaeology) is underwhelming. The complex situation in Southwark is dismissed in a paragraph and the satellite settlements of Staines and Croydon (to which Shadwell and Old Ford might be added) are treated equally abruptly. These sites suggest that a late Roman ‘doughnut effect’, where noisome economic activities relocated ‘out of town’, could have occurred. It also brings into question the idea of the town defined by its walls as a unit of analysis.
Unwritten is any definition of what a town is, or was. The result of this solidly un-theoretical approach is to return to the kinds of implicit definition that underpin early analyses of Roman urbanism (such as Wacher's Towns of Roman Britain). Yet our definition of town-life might be very different from an early medieval, late antique, late Roman or early Roman conceptualisation of urban living. Was living within a wall circuit enough to make an individual an urbanite in the fifth century? It might have been, but to us this would be ‘life in towns’ and not town-life. Some theoretical discussion might have set the analysis on a sounder footing.
The concluding chapters provide models of urban transformation that will undoubtedly provide food for thought — and argument. ‘Sub-Roman urbanism’, ‘Anglo-Saxon ruralised nuclei’ and ‘failure and shift’ are interesting hypotheses. Whether the evidence that S. has marshalled really supports any of these interpretations is debatable. It is telling that most of the evidence for ‘sub-Roman urbanism’ (122–5) is based on textual sources and my heart sank at the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for a.d. 577 being trotted out yet again as evidence for urban continuity even though it has long been recognised as a much later West Saxon fabrication to lay claims on Mercian territory (P. Sims-Williams, ‘The settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle’, Anglo-Saxon England 12 (1983), 1–41).
The volume is handsomely produced and richly illustrated. One major frustration concerns the referencing. Time and again I encountered in-text references that did not have entries in the bibliography at the back of the volume. This reduces the value of the work as a resource for other researchers and students.
Urbanism between a.d. 300 and 600 remains a fiercely contested and fast-moving subject. The recent paper on Wroxeter (A. Lane, ‘Wroxeter and the end of Roman Britain’, Antiquity 88 (380) (2014), 501–15) underlines this point: even items of faith can be shaken by fresh eyes and critical reinterpretation. S.'s work is a useful snapshot in time but it will probably not be the last word on the subject.
