To have lived in the cities, towns, and countryside of Britannia in 350 C. E. was to inhabit a functioning, vibrant Roman province, sustained by a robust economy, an expanding urban infrastructure, and all the cultural markers and creature comforts characteristic of the later Empire.

But visit those same cities and towns and country estates a hundred years later and the scene would be barely recognizable. By 450, Britain’s urban fabric lay in ruins, its Romanized economy had disappeared, and its political culture was atomized, chaotic, and coming to be dominated by speakers of English.

The fate of Roman Britain and how it was that this once-prosperous province came to tumble so precipitously out of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the 5th century presents a series of fascinating questions matched by a notoriously difficult and fragmentary source base that has long resisted easy answers. Historian Samuel Collins surveys what is known now and looks at the innovative ways in which new light is being shed on old problems in the fall of Roman Britain.

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