Portrait of Britain: AD 500
James Campbell peers into the murk of the ‘Dark Ages’ and sifts truth from fiction about our post-Roman history.
For Britain the fifth century was traumatic: the withdrawal of the last of the Roman garrison in the first decade of the century was followed by increased raiding by invaders who established settlements: Irish in the west, Angles and Saxons in the east. But not all of Britain had been part of the empire and not all Roman Britain had been governed or Romanised with the same intensity. The populations living in the non-Roman, or non-Romanised, areas could well have been larger than those of the Romanised parts: mountainous areas can support surprisingly large populations. In the early 19th century half of Scotland’s population was found in the Highlands.
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