Sub-Roman Britain (Cavalry etc)

[Alanus]

Alan,

I agree. Of course, probably fewer and fewer people probably read Latin (or any language) during this period.

Yes. Not only in Britain but throughout Europe, yet kept alive by monastecism to finally reach a university level. Probably no coincidence that the University of Southern Wales was not-long-ago called "Saint David's."

I've read that civilization is a veneer only two generations thick. Which I take to mean that even we could degenerate back to cavemen that fast if all the underpinnings of our culture were removed, Lord of the Flies fashion. But what the consensus seems to be saying here is that the Roman underpinnings of sub-Roman Britain were not kicked away, and in fact are still evident centuries later. Today, even.

I'm in favor of the "Three Generation Principle;" it just takes a little longer. :wink: According to recent "end of days" films like The Road or The Book of Eli, the thing starts in one generation.

What I think I see is a political disintegration which worked against an organized resistance to the Anglo-Saxons, perhaps because the sub-Roman Britons didn't see the Germans as as big a threat as their neighboring tribe, civitas, warlord/kinglet. Just as rival emperors destroyed huge portions of Rome's army fighting each other even as barbarians overflowed the empire's borders.

We find it big-time in Gilas. It's the beginning of the end. Then it's repeated in Nennis and Bede; but by then we are 400 years after the fact, then even later. Some of it was pure fancy, like the statement that the Britons were pulled off the Wall with grappling hooks. Even a chimpanzee can avoid a grappling hook. But then again, we see it in the movies-- where some guy watches a flamming arrow arc through the sky and land in his chest. (Must have been Mr. Magoo! 8) )

So the technology to field a well-equipped, well-organized military, including cavalry, remained, but the focus to do so did not? :?

That's a good summation. Nobody forgot how to plant crops or forge a blade. The crofters and craftsmen just shifted allegience, sometimes under (Saxon) pressure, sometimes voluntarily. This is the picture that we never got from historians like Carte (1776) to Morris (1976, or thereabouts). Two centuries of Saxons as rabid baby-killers, all dressed up like Stellen Skarsgaard. :roll: