The Arthurian legend shows a romantic picture of the epoch when the Romans left Britain. Wise druids advised the king, the noble knights of the Round Table protected the land, and the king himself ruled in the castle of Camelot. But there were no knights then, nor could the Britons build great buildings of stone, and the armed hosts did not protect the peasants , they squeezed them out.
The two hundred years after the departure of the legions are difficult for the historian to grasp. The Romans wrote everything down, even if surprisingly little survived. The records ended abruptly with Rome’s withdrawal. Only individual settlements, the typical shard layers after the end of Roman rule and isolated archaeological finds tell of the time after that.
Archaeologist Max Adam nevertheless sets about reconstructing the history of the first kingdoms. “The fragments we have left to hold against the light are tiny,” admits Adams. “How the first Christian empires came into being cannot be verified.” Max Adams is willing to fill in the blanks with imagination, but also holds back and doesn’t drift off into the novelistic. “The greatest challenge in archaeology,” he describes the balancing act, “is that of imagination.” Archaeologists can never really “get a handle on empty space and time: the unknown months, weeks, years, or centuries that elapse between the last meticulous scrubbing of a mosaic floor and the grassy field that now covers it.”
As expected, the legendary Arthur cannot be proven. All that remains is that it was a time of warriors. “The only thing that can be said,” writes Adams, “is that if there were no Arthurs, there probably were Arthurs. Mounted warriors employed to protect cities and trade.” We don’t know much about the two hundred years between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Christian missionaries at the end of the sixth century. The traces only bear witness to the decline and decay of the former greatness. The population declined, as did life expectancy and the birth rate.
100 years after the Romans left, the cities are deserted. They were the centers of Roman administration and economy. The second mainstay are the large villas. A “villa” was not primarily a luxurious residence, but a production unit – an industrial estate. Designed for a global economy, they too fell apart. The remains of houses and forts became cattle pens – for cattle were precious. In Arthur’s time there was no battle for treasure or even the Holy Grail. The conflicts were small and dirty. People stole livestock and grain or tried to protect their own from robbers. The power had shrunk, it had shifted to the level of a castle, a town or an estate.
Life was ruled by the practical imperatives of survival. Human roles were dictated by the needs of the agricultural year and the ever-revolving cycles of birth and death. Everything that was “more” and did not just serve mere survival disappeared. It is a life without higher culture and useless baubles. “They made pottery, spun yarn and weaved textiles, made pins and needles from bone, made buckets to carry water and milk, and forged their own tools. They combed the lice out of their children’s hair, plucked their eyebrows and trimmed theirs moustaches.”
And yet Anglo-Saxon Britain was born at that time. But Adams rejects the idea that an invasion by a foreign elite would have filled the gaps left by the Romans. From this fed the late Arthurian myth and the Victorian mind set on inventing a proto-form of what it saw itself as the British nation. The British of the 19th century emphasized ethnicity and faith, because they used them to justify their own brutal colonial regime. That had nothing to do with the confused circumstances of the dark centuries. “People belonged to the land where they were born,” writes Adams. “They belonged to their household; to their master. To a broad group that recognized a common kinship; to a tribe and perhaps to an ideology that was reflected in different burial practices.”
The conflicts of the 5th and 6th centuries did not stem from people fighting people, according to Adams it was a kind of culture war. On the eastern side of Britannia, the ruling classes rejected the legacy of Rome and considered themselves descendants of the native people who had long fought the Romans. In the western half, the elites drew on the Roman legacies. Both groups waged constant wars against each other, but both were British.
The kings of the early kingdoms should not be imagined too magnificently. Adams argues pragmatically: Everything that an idle king and his court used up had to be extorted from others. Given the low productivity of agriculture, no magnificent Camelot could develop. “In fact, royal households and their accompanying warbands were greedy for calories. The larger the force, the more bread, ale, meat, honey, fuel, wood, weapons, and ornaments they consumed.”
The real kings have little in common with the mythical counterparts woven into the romantic tales of Arthur, Guinevere, and Parzival. The first kingdom doesn’t even bother to dismantle the romantic set pieces. It leads through a barren world that has left us little.
Quelle: The First Kingdom, BBC Podcast
