A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

of a high standard. Excavations show that peasant households enjoyed a variety
of well-crafted pots of different shapes and sizes, for storage, cookery or display.
Although there were major consumers - the legions and privileged cities such as
Rome and, later, Constantinople, whose grain supplies were guaranteed by the
emperors - the economy of the empire was characterised by a network of smallscale
free enterprise as merchants, manufacturers and craftsmen collaborated to
supply the consumer needs of a steady market. Studies of lead and copper
pollution (from Roman industrial sites) trapped in the ice cores of the Arctic
show that it rises from almost nothing in prehistoric times to a peak in the
Roman period, then reverses to prehistoric levels and does not regain the scale of
Roman activity until the sixteenth century. Similarily analysis of shipwrecks
from the period AD 100 to 300 show impressive trading networks throughout the
Mediterranean, again unequalled until the sixteenth century.
It is the disappearance of this industry and trade that provides the most
evocative evidence of economic collapse. Britain is an extreme example, but
during the fifth century virtually every building craft simply vanishes from
archaeological sites. Brick-making ceases and is not seen again for 800 years;
stone is no longer quarried or tiles manufactured. It is not until the Normans in
the eleventh century that large stone buildings such as castles and cathedrals
reappear. It is possible to argue that living standards fell even below those of the
Iron Age peoples of the island before the Roman conquest, since these, at least,
enjoyed trading contacts with the continent. As elsewhere in Europe, the
monetary economy simply ceased to exist. At Hoxne in Suffolk, a hidden cache
of treasures from the early 400s, at the end of the empire, was made up of 14,000
coins as well as silver and gold ware. Two hundred years later, the early seventhcentury
Anglo-Saxon ship burial of a pagan king at Sutton Hoo a few miles from
Hoxne contained a total of only forty coins from Gaul, apparently retained as
prestige items. The contrast between the monetary wealth of an Anglo-Saxon
king and that of a rich Roman individual in the last years of the empire is
extraordinary.
The evidence from Italy reflects the same collapse. Here a population
estimated at seven million in the first century AD dropped to as low as four
million in the seventh century. A hundred dioceses recorded in late antiquity
vanish completely from the sources. 5 Small towns were particularly hard hit,
and many of the surviving Italians relocated to fortified hillsides or found
protection as serfs or soldiers of local lords. At a material level, tiles, which had
been known for centuries and which had, during the years of stability, roofed