A Very Long Goodbye: Recognising Roman Urbanism in Britain

In the collection of the British Museum we can find a small writing tablet, barely ten centimeters high, made from whale bone, probably in the eighth century. It was found in rural Suffolk and is an unlikely candidate to start talking about the adaptations of urban space. But this little object exemplifies a lot of what we will be talking about in this chapter. First of all, it represents a form of infrastructure, in this case the infrastructure of writing. Secondly, it is a direct adaptation of a Roman writing tablet, a form of text technology that lived on in Britain; a little hand-held, portable notebook that would be recognisable for a Roman solider on the Hadrian's Wall and a Kentish monk alike. Thirdly, there are faint traces of runic letters scratched onto it. Most of them make very little sense, but some seem to suggest that the scribe was practicing Latin words or word endings.

The little writing tablet is a gem of an object. But it also embodies the process of adaptation and code-switching that accompanied the fate of all Roman infrastructures in Late Antique and Early Medieval Britain. While they were often adapted out of their intital context they remained bound to the legacy of the empire that helped to create them. At the same time, they became inherent parts of the landscape of Britain, and they accommodated new cultural and linguistic factors. Their existence places them beyond a simple continuity/discontinuity dichotomy, but at the same time they remained visibly part of the imperial Roman legacy. Their new emanations might not even have been produced by actors that we would describe as ‘Roman’ and yet they would still instantly evoke the imperial idea for a traveller coming from the Mediterranean.

This chapter will focus on uses and re-uses of Roman urban spaces and their infrastructure in the post-Roman and Early Medieval period as precisely those adapted from shards of the empire. We will start from the brief overview of available sources, and then look at the problem in three periods: The sub-Roman, the pre-conversion, and the period up to the time of Bede.