The Decline of Roman Britain

Many years ago a scholar discussed the history of these islands during the fifth century in a book called The Lost Century of Britain. It was not a very good book, but the title was well chosen: the disappearance of Roman Britain was a catastrophe and we are still much in the dark about how it happened. The results of the Roman withdrawal, however, are clear enough. Within a century Roman Britain became a dead civilization, as dead as the Maya civilization of Yucatan. In a.d. 400 Britain was still an integral part of a Roman Empire that embraced the civilized western world, and its administrative structure was recorded in a general gazetteer of Roman administration, the Notitia Dignitatum. One hundred years later the Roman Empire of the West had vanished, and Britain was so cut off from Rome that a subject of vital import to the world of the fifth century, a change in the date of Easter, could be matter of indifference to the English, because they were not Christian, and of ignorance to the Britons, because the news could not reach them. In a.d.