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causes of economic decline: a consideration 381
(silks, gold-embroidered robes, ivories, silverware, jewellery, wasteful and
exotic foods, the slaughter of imported wild animals, etc.). There were
important shifts in modes of aristocratic display during our period; for
instance, from the great silver dinner-services, so characteristic of late
antique Roman hoards, to the gold- and garnet-encrusted weaponry of the
highest-status Frankish graves. But I very much doubt that, within these
shifts in kind, there were absolute shifts in quantity, in favour of the
untaxed aristocrats of sixth- and seventh-century barbarian Europe.
The only solution I can think of to the very real problem of where the
tax wealth went, once it was no longer collected and forwarded to the army
and to the emperors, is to suggest that any obvious financial gains from the
ending of tax were swallowed up in a more general decline of the economy.
Perhaps there was more food per head, and perhaps people no longer had
to work so hard; but perhaps, also, there were no longer the economic
structures in place to convert surpluses of food into coins, into pots, into
mortared walls, etc.
There may, in fact, be circumstances in which tax demands (particularly
if in coin) can stimulate an economy rather than depress it: because they
encourage producers to specialize and sell in order to raise their taxmoney.
63 If demands for tax in coin can help awaken an economy, is it also
possible that the ending of such demands can help it settle down into selfsufficient
slumber? However, I would not like to argue very strongly in
favour of this idea, since any suggestion that taxing in coin is necessarily a
stimulant to economic growth is called into question by what happened at
the beginning of the fifth century. At this date, the whole empire, both
western and eastern, moved away from taxation in kind (favoured in the
fourth century) towards taxation in coin, but with curiously divergent
results. According to the model proposed above, the change should have
stimulated economic complexity and growth throughout the empire. This
did, indeed, occur in the eastern Mediterranean, at more or less the right
time. But in the west, this same period saw widespread and generalized economic
decline. 64 It may be that the model is not universally applicable, but
only works when underlying economic conditions are favourable, as they
were in the early-fifth-century east (but not in the west).
ix. causes of economic decline: a general
consideration
We have already encountered some possible causes of economic decline
(heavy taxation, the ending of state spending, and the failure of some
63 A model proposed by Hopkins (1980a) for an earlier period of Roman history.
64 Wickham (1984) 10 n. 13. For the move to tax in coin: Jones, LRE 460.
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