Vindolanda was incorporated into the eighty-five-mile
defensive wall that the emperor Hadrian constructed, but in
AD
103, when a Roman centurion, Candidus, was stationed
there, it was an isolated fort. Candidus was engaged with
his friend Octavius in supplying
the Roman garrison and
received a reply from Octavius to a letter he had sent:
Octavius to his brother Candidus, greetings.
I have several times written to you that I have
bought about five thousand modii of ears of
grain, on account of which I need cash.
Unless you send me some cash, at least five
hundred denarii, the result will be that I shall
lose what I have laid out as a deposit, about
three hundred denarii, and I shall be
embarrassed. So, I ask you, send me some
cash as soon as possible. The hides which
you write are at Cataractonium—write that
they be given to me and the wagon about
which you write. I would have already been to
collect them except that I did not care to injure
the animals while the roads are bad. See
with Tertius about the 8½ denarii which he
received from Fatalis.
He has not credited
them to my account. Make sure that you send
me cash so that I may have ears of grain on
the threshing-floor. Greet Spectatus and
Firmus. Farewell.
The correspondence between Candidus and Octavius
illustrates some significant facets of the economic
prosperity of Roman England: It reveals an advanced
monetary economy with financial services. It reveals the
presence of constructed roads,
even if sometimes in bad
condition. It reveals the presence of a fiscal system that
raised taxes to pay Candidus’s wages. Most obviously it
reveals that both men were literate and were able to take
advantage of a postal service of sorts. Roman England
also benefited from the mass manufacture of high-quality
pottery, particularly in Oxfordshire; urban centers with baths
and public buildings; and house construction techniques
using mortar and tiles for roofs.
By the fourth century, all were in decline, and after
AD
411
the Roman Empire gave up on England.
Troops were
withdrawn; those left were not paid, and as the Roman
state crumbled, administrators were expelled by the local
population. By
AD
450 all these trappings of economic
prosperity were gone. Money vanished from circulation.
Urban areas were abandoned,
and buildings stripped of
stone. The roads were overgrown with weeds. The only
type of pottery fabricated was crude and handmade, not
manufactured. People forgot how to use mortar, and
literacy declined substantially. Roofs were made of
branches, not tiles. Nobody wrote from Vindolanda
anymore.
A f t e r
AD
411, England experienced an economic
collapse and became a poor backwater—and not for the
first time. In the previous chapter we saw how the Neolithic
Revolution started in the Middle East around 9500
BC
.
While the inhabitants of
Jericho and Abu Hureyra were
living in small towns and farming, the inhabitants of England
were still hunting and gathering, and would do so for at
least another 5,500 years. Even then the English didn’t
invent farming or herding; these were brought from the
outside by migrants who had been spreading across
Europe from the Middle East for thousands of years. As the
inhabitants of England caught up with these major
innovations, those in the Middle East were inventing cities,
writing, and pottery. By 3500
BC
, large cities such as Uruk
and Ur emerged in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq. Uruk may
have had a population of fourteen thousand in 3500
BC
, and
forty thousand soon afterward. The potter’s
wheel was
invented in Mesopotamia at about the same time as was
wheeled transportation. The Egyptian capital of Memphis
emerged as a large city soon thereafter. Writing appeared
independently in both regions. While the Egyptians were
building the great pyramids of Giza around 2500
BC
, the
English constructed their most famous ancient monument,
the stone circle at Stonehenge. Not bad by English
standards, but not even large enough to have housed one
of the ceremonial boats buried at the foot of King Khufu’s
pyramid. England continued to lag behind and to borrow
from the Middle East and
the rest of Europe up to and
including the Roman period.
Despite such an inauspicious history, it was in England
that the first truly inclusive society emerged and where the
Industrial Revolution got under way. We argued earlier (
this
page
–
this page
) that this was the result of a series of
interactions between small institutional differences and
critical junctures—for example, the Black Death and the
discovery of the Americas. English divergence had
historical roots, but the view from Vindolanda suggests that
these roots were not that deep and certainly not historically
predetermined. They were not planted in the Neolithic
Revolution, or even during the centuries of Roman
hegemony. By
AD
450, at the start of what historians used to
call the Dark Ages, England had slipped back into poverty
and political chaos. There would be no effective centralized
state in England for hundreds of years.
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