Change and decline in late Romano-British towns

The fate of the towns in late-Roman Britain has proved a vexed and intractable historiographical problem. In the 1930s, Wheeler and Collingwood, reconstructing the antique past in an epoch of war, revolution and slump, presented an apocalyptic vision of crisis, decay and collapse in the Romano-British towns of the third and fourth centuries. ¹ In the postwar period, as bourgeois civilization recovered its composure in the sunny uplands of the Great Boom, opinion shifted sharply against this view: the towns of Sheppard Frere’s Britannia, a Romano-British version of ‘The Grandeur that was Rome’, enjoyed peace and plenty until well into the fifth century, if not later. ² These highly polarized interpretations were equally impressionistic, involving an anecdotal selection of evidence which gave free rein to images of the past painted in the colours of contemporary experience and ideology. Since then, however, two major developments in archaeological research have made possible an empirically far better grounded approach, capable of yielding a much more accurate picture.