Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

the community of the realm 439
peers of the honorati were to be found to some extent among the other families
of their civitas who had responded to the new challenges, but for the
most part at the regional level. Contact between such men might be established
during the phase of life spent in imperial service. Above them, there
remained a higher élite who dominated the top offices at court, and the successful
honoratus would seek their patronage. 5
Local success thus demanded a considerable investment of time and
effort in imperial structures. Indeed, the sine qua non for entry into the imperial
bureaucracy was a traditional classical literary education, which required
ten years or more of private schooling with the grammaticus. 6 Thus, much
of the childhood, let alone the adult life, of even ordinary members of the
late Roman élite was shaped by the need to be successful in a political game
whose rules were dictated from the centre. Local and regional political
communities all the way from Britain to North Africa continued to have
great importance, but this is hardly surprising. Much more noteworthy is
the fact that there was a real sense in which all Roman landowners, marked
out by their specific literary culture, were made at least potentially part of
one community by imperial political structures and their accompanying
ideologies. 7
2. Transformations in political economy
By a.d. 600, a series of royal courts had replaced one imperial centre. None
of the successor kingdoms occupied an area as big as a late Roman prefecture,
let alone the western empire as a whole. In former Roman Britain, the
political landscape consisted of a host of small kingdoms, British and
Anglo-Saxon, many occupying only part of an old Roman civitas. 8 In sheer
physical distance, therefore, the new states did not face the communications
problems of the old empire. On a whole series of other levels, their
difficulties were serious and manifold.
Not least, the new states had to establish political boundaries – on the
ground and in people’s perceptions – where none had previously existed.
The new political boundaries did not coincide with Roman regional boundaries,
and, in the first instance, surviving Roman landowners maintained
contacts across the new frontiers. 9 Indeed, the political élites of the new
kingdoms were made up of disparate groups of at least two kinds. The
5 By the fifth century, senators were graded in three ranks: clarissimi, spectabiles and illustres, in order
of seniority. Increasingly, the first two became honorific, with most privileges and active membership
6 of the senate accruing to illustres alone: Jones, LRE ch. 15. Kaster (1988) esp. chs. 1–2.
7 Not, of course, that the empire managed to integrate all the élites within its notional borders to
the same degree.
8 On Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Britain, see respectively Bassett (1988) and Dark (1994).
9 E.g. ch. 15 (Wood), pp. 434,6 above; cf. the letter collections of Ruricius of Limoges and Sidonius
Apollinaris.
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