Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

524 18. the north-western provinces
there were between Roman Britain and Saxon England were transmitted
through a ‘sub-Roman’ world rather different from what had come before
or what came after.
Even more than that of sixth-century Britain, the history of post-
Roman Noricum is a blank. After the departure of the followers of
Severinus, with the body of their master, to Italy in 488, there is only the
occasional reference in Procopius and Paul the Deacon to barbarians
settled in or passing through the region. Unlike Visigothic Spain or
Merovingian Gaul, Noricum did not weather the crisis of the fifth century
in such a way as to be able to reconstruct something of the Roman world.
Yet in many respects its experiences during the migration period were not
so different from those of Britain, north-eastern Gaul or Gallaecia. It was
the subsequent absence of a power capable of re-creating something of
the earlier systems of government and organization that proved crucial to
its distinctive development. Whereas the Franks in Gaul and the Visigoths
in Spain look like the heirs of the Roman empire, their contemporaries in
Britain and Noricum do not. The extent to which a region saw reconstruction
in the sixth century was as important in the development of what had
been the north-western provinces of the Roman empire as were the dislocations
of the fifth.
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