Reunion tours are oftentimes mirred in problems. Cover acts, on the other hand, can provoke interpretations not even considered by original creators. Both of them cannot exist without the infrastructure of the past. Writing about those infrastructures might not seem glamorous. It might not even seem necessary. At the first glance, it involves handling a mundane subject, talking about stones and bricks and mortar. But those elements converge in structures that lie at the bottom of everything we must analyse if we are to understand the Late Antique and Early Medieval transition.

Throughout this book I have tried to argue that infrastructures have a deeper meaning and that, like empires, they sometimes refuse to die. They enjoy a peculiar kind of afterlife in which they manage to exert influence on land and in society for a long time after their original creators are gone. Their materiality enables or at least helps the survival of immaterial elements: Laws, governance practices, even religions. While infrastructures can also collapse and decay, they rarely do that overnight. They still exist and even in ruins can exert immense influence.

In this book we have seen that the narrative of infrastructural survival is intertwined with all the major narratives, including political, social, and religious. The story of Roman roads in charters shines a new light on the internal organization of Late Antique and Early Medieval societies as well as on the structure of the land they used. The account of the fate of former Roman urban spaces helps to better recognize regionalized political organization in Britain, forms of land ownership, survivals of Roman Vulgar Law. The relationship of the Church with Roman infrastructures provides us with a better understanding not only of the Christianisation process but also the connections, material and symbolic, of early England with the wider world, imperial ideas and intellectual circles of post-Roman Europe. Not only people but also infrastructures bound Late Antique and Early Medieval Britain to Merovingian Gaul, Gregorian Rome or Byzantine Constantinople.

‘Infrastructural history’ or even ‘infrastructural biography’ is necessary in order to really understand the processes behind transformative periods in history. One of the major points of this book is that the continuity/discontinuity dichotomy used as a methodological framework for analysing post-Roman West is largely useless; for infrastructures are resources that can be deactivated and reactivated.