Margaret Leigh

It seems, then, that the elusive ‘big men’ of the fifth century might be found in a number of characteristic places: at Roman forts with evidence for continued life; in some, perhaps many of the smaller towns with coherent hinterlands; on some villa estates; in the hillfort country of the west and north and along Continent-facing navigable rivers.

Geographers might classify it as a ‘break of bulk’ location, where goods were transferred between river and road at a point where those networks met. Goods landed here from along the River Cam would pass close to the grand Fenland tower house at Stonea; thence south, west and east into the province’s heartland. By the time it gained stone walls, Gr

At least two female landowners are known from Britannia. Melania, a celebrated Christian patron and the immensely wealthy wife and cousin of Valerius Publianus, owned estates across the empire, including land in Britannia, at the beginning of the fifth century. Her portfolio is known to historians only because she and her husband were induced, by n

Close to the boundary between Essex and Cambridgeshire, on a Roman road apparently blocked by a series of major fifth- or sixth-century linear earthworks,l lies the town of Great Chesterford. This is a landscape of crossroads and frontiers – between the boulder clay plateau of north-west Essex and the Fenlands of Cambridgeshire – where the old trib

Geographers might classify it as a ‘break of bulk’ location, where goods were transferred between river and road at a point where those networks met.

Projecting the aisled halls and villas of the late Roman province, which tell of thriving rural lordship, into the century after, say, 450 is a tough ask. Archaeology has little to say of individuals like Vortigern, Hengest, Arthur or Ambrosius, although one might ascribe to them, as a governing class, the planning and execution of the linear earth

Unlike coin, paid out from the imperial treasury in wages and taxed directly at markets, tax raised in kind and consisting primarily of consumable, perishable foods – ale, honey, meat and cheese – along with grain, wool, linen, underwood, timber and crafted items, could not be moved over great distances. Their production and consumption were, essen

The fort at Banna (Birdoswald) on Hadrian’s Wall is, perhaps, the best place to catch sight of localized lordship in its early development.b The last army pay wagons cannot have arrived here much later than the 390s; the last visit by a Dux Britanniarum probably occurred in the same decade. Banna’s fifth-century commanders responded by expediently

As material barriers, many of the larger linear earthworks of the Early Medieval landscape functioned most effectively to control the movement of livestock. Small armies might ignore a ditch and bank or climb over or around it; cattle and sheep are much less inclined to scale something as massive as the Wansdyke, especially if they are being herded