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One British Thing: A Fifth-Century Ceramic Beaker

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2019

Robin Fleming
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Abstract

A post-Roman folded beaker allows us to see traditional Romano-British material culture and material practices continuing into the fifth century and helps us understand the problem of the blanket labeling of all objects made after ca. 400 as “Anglo-Saxon.”

Type
Original Manuscript
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 174 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2019 

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References

1 Evison, Vera, An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Alton, Hampshire (Stroud, 1988), 18–20, 51Google Scholar; Speake, George, Anglo-Saxon Animal Art (Oxford, 1980), 54–58Google Scholar and plates 5–7.

2 Evison, Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Alton, 37–38, 41–45.

3 Myers, J. N. L., “The Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes,” Proceedings of the British Academy, no. 56 (1970): 145–74Google Scholar, fig. 7.3; Colgrave, Bertram and Mynors, R. A. B., eds. and trans., Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1969), 51Google Scholar.

4 Evison, Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Alton, 25.

5 Evans, Jeremy, “Forms of Knowledge: Changing Technologies of Romano-British Pottery,” in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Britain, ed. Millett, Martin, Revell, Louise, and Moore, Alison (Oxford, 2016), 510–31Google Scholar. Although some pottery from the early fifth century used organic tempers, it is now understood that vegetable tempers only came to dominate in England from the early sixth century on. Hamerow, H., Hollevoet, Y., and Vince, A., “Migration Period Settlement and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Pottery from Flanders,” Medieval Archaeology, no. 38 (1994): 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Fitzpatrick-Matthews, Keith J. and Fleming, Robin, “The Perils of Periodization: Roman Ceramics in Britain after 400 CE,” Fragments, no. 5 (2016): 1–33Google Scholar, at 12.

7 For explanations as to why this happened, see Evans, Jeremy, “The End of Roman Pottery in the North,” in The Late Roman Transition in the North, ed. Wilmott, Tony and Wilson, Peter, British Archaeological Reports (BAR) British Series 299 (Oxford, 2000), 39–46Google Scholar, at 41; Mark Whyman, Late Roman Britain in Transition, ad 300–500: A Ceramic Perspective from East Yorkshire (Ph.D. diss., University of York, 2001), 357–62.

8 On the much smaller-scale but continued production of Roman wares into the fifth century, see the articles in Gerrard, James, ed., Romano-British Pottery in the Fifth Century, special issue, Internet Archaeology 41 (2016)Google Scholar, https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.41.9; Fitzpatrick-Mathews and Fleming, “Perils of Periodization.” For older ideas that all Roman-style pottery ceased to be made after 400 CE, see Fulford, M. G., “Pottery Production and Trade at the End of Roman Britain: The Case against Continuity,” in The End of Roman Britain, ed. Casey, P. J., BAR British Series 71 (Oxford, 1979), 120–32Google Scholar; Evans, “End of Roman Pottery in the North,” 39–46; Ward-Perkins, Bryan, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar. For arguments that all pottery produced after 400 CE was based on the household-centered craft traditions of Germanic settlers, see Myers, J. N. L., The English Settlements (Oxford, 1986), 63–73Google Scholar.

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10 Fitzpatrick-Matthews and Fleming, “Perils of Periodization.”

11 For the New Forest beakers that were common in this part of Hampshire during the late Roman period, see P. A. Tyers, “New Forest Slipped Wares,” Potsherd: Atlas of Roman Pottery, http://potsherd.net/atlas/Ware/NFCC.html. For a general discussion of deskilling in the late Roman period across the West, see Mannoni, Tiziano, “The Transmission of Craft Techniques according to the Principles of Material Culture: Continuity and Rupture,” in Technology in Transition, AD 300–650, ed. Lavan, Luke, Zanini, Enrico, and Sarantis, Alexander C. (Leiden, 2008), xli–lxGoogle Scholar. For three examples of deskilling in post-Roman Britain and the material consequences of deskilling, see Fleming, Robin, “Recycling in Britain after the Fall of Rome's Metal Economy,” Past and Present 217, no. 1 (November 2012): 3–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fitzpatrick-Matthews and Fleming, “Perils of Periodization”; Robin Fleming, “Old Buildings, Building Material, and the Death of Recycling in Post-Roman Britain,” in Recycling and the Ancient Economy, ed. Andrew Wilson (Oxford, forthcoming).

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19 Evison, Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Alton, 25.

20 Millett estimates between 3.3 million and 3.66 million: Millett, Martin, The Romanization of Britain: An Essay in Archaeological Interpretation (Cambridge, 1990), 181–86Google Scholar. Richard Hingley's estimate is between 2.5 million and 3.6 million: Hingley, Richard, “The Roman Landscape of Britain: From Hoskins to Today,” in Prehistoric and Roman Landscapes: Landscape History after Hoskins, ed. Hingley, Richard and Fleming, Andrew (Macclesfield, 2007), 101–13Google Scholar, at 110). And David Mattingly's estimate is 2.5 million: Mattingly, David J., Imperialism, Power and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2011), 219Google Scholar. More recent estimates, based on the work of the Roman Rural Settlement project, suggest that population numbers peaked in Britain in the second century rather than in the fourth, and that we may need to scale back our population estimates of the late Roman period to something on the order of 1.75–2.25 million: Fulford, Michael and Allen, Marty, “Introduction: Population and the Dynamics of Change in Roman South-Eastern England,” in Agriculture and Industry in South-Eastern Roman Britain, ed. Bird, David (Oxford, 2017), 1–14Google Scholar, at 5–13.

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