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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2015
It is perhaps best at the beginning of this paper to clear away an illusion that readily I besets us, as we look back on the Dark Age that followed the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain-the illusion that there was something unique in the fate of our island. ‘The barbarians thrust us into the sea, the sea thrusts us back to the barbarians’,—and Aetius, the Roman Patrician, turns a deaf ear. As a matter of fact, Britain only suffered the fate that befell Dacia in the 3rd century, and Gaul, Spain, the Alpine and Balkan districts in the 4th to the 5th. One after another the provinces, once Roman, were overwhelmed under the barbarian tide. The only unique point in the case of Britain is her position as an island—twenty miles interval by sea may well be equated to a much greater distance by land. History, however, sometimes compenesates its blows. Britain, the lost island of the West, attracted the fatherly attention of the Popes of Rome earlier than some continental districts nearer home. She began to regain from Pope Gregory the Great what she had lost through Aetius.
1 J.R.S. 1922, pp. 74 ff. ‘The Roman Evacuation of Britain’, by R. G. Collingwood.
2 Whether the stocks of late Theodosian bronze were increased by ‘cast’ imitations is not certain. It might well be so—but evidence is lacking.
3 For a very valuable map and discussion of Theodosian hoards in Britain, see B. H. St. J. O’Neil in Archaeological Journal, 1934, pp. 284 ff.
4 Collingwood, in article quoted above, speaks of Bede as writing only from hearsay. Bede does not make that impression on all readers.
5 Cp. Num. Chron. 1933, pp. 145 ff, 170 ff. ‘Terling Hoard’, by B. H. St. J. O’Neil and J. W. E. Pearce.
6 Gildas, Epistola (Mon. Brit. 2, p. 30 B) of priests ‘ uno sane perdita denario maestos et ad unum inquisitum laetos ‘. Earlier he writes of them as ‘ ipsi vel obolum non dantes ‘.
7 R. E. M. and T. V. Wheeler, Reports of Research Committee of Society of Antiquaries, 1932.
8 H. Mattingly and W. P. D. Stebbing. Site-finds from Richborough, Num. Chron. 1939, pp. 112 ff.
9 B. H. St. J. O’Neil, Num. Chron. 1935, pp. 284 ff.
10 Cp. particularly T. V. Wheeler, Num. Chron. 1937, pp. an. ‘Hoard from Theatre at Verulamium’.
11 This is my own belief, but the date is under dispute. Some good authorities would place it some thirty years earlier. (See ANTIQUITY, 1940, XIV, 64-8. Ed.)