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In the year 408 AD, the inhabitants of the Roman provinces of Britain received unpleasant news.
The western Roman Emperor Flavius Honorius (384-423) told his dismayed subjects that they would have to look after their own protection in the future.
The troops stationed on their island are currently needed elsewhere.
The Emperor expressed confidence that his troops would return when the crisis on other fronts was resolved.
But that turned out to be a pipe dream.
Rome's administration finally withdrew from Britain.
The “dark age”, the “Dark Ages”, began.
A spectacular find in Chedworth, around 150 kilometers north-west of London, now proves that it was apparently not that dark.
There, archaeologists discovered a well-preserved Roman mosaic which, according to evidence of radiocarbon dating, was laid in the 420s.
Apparently a wealthy owner of a villa (country estate) had allowed himself the luxury of renovating his house and moving a wall in the process, which happened no later than 424.
Soon afterwards he treated himself to a new, lavish floor.
The complicated design of the mosaic with a series of circles that are alternately filled with flowers allows the conclusion that specialists were still in the country at that time who could be won for such jobs with reasonable fees.
Archaeologists uncover a mosaic discovered during National Trust excavations in Chedworth
Source: dpa
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The mosaic is proof that the decline of culture after the end of Roman Britain happened more slowly than expected, says archaeologist Martin Papworth of the National Trust Foundation.
"The creation of a new space and the laying of a new floor indicate prosperity and that the mosaic industry has continued 50 years longer than previously known."
The villa was not far from Corinium Dobunnorum (today Cirencester in Gloucestershire), the capital of the province of Britannia in the 4th century, the second largest city in Britain.
Its decline at the beginning of the 5th century impressively demonstrates the consequences of the withdrawal of the Romans.
Because with the army withdrew the tax collectors who had raised and administered the funds to maintain the public infrastructure.
And with the soldiers, important customers for trade and commerce were missing.
Soon theaters were being used as quarries, traffic passed over collapsed columns, and slum quarters emerged in the city palaces, writes the historian Alexander Demandt in his handbook on late antiquity.
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Numerous finds show that the Romanized elites who stayed in the country withdrew to their estates.
Some of these Roman-British rulers had income that enabled them to live a luxurious life there.
Some, like the owner of the Chedworth mansion, invested their funds in building their houses.
Others thought bigger and hired private armies to protect themselves against barbarian raids.
Some retired to their villas, others invested in dangerous mercenary troops
Source: dpa
The graves of these mercenaries, who were recruited on the mainland, have been discovered in Cantia, Kent.
They are likely to have been the vanguard of the Anglo-Saxons who haunted the coasts of Britain from the 5th century onwards, and finally went over to the permanent conquest of land.
They conjured great calamity, as the monk Gilda reported:
“They let the Saxons, who have an unspeakably bad reputation and hate God and people, come to our island like wolves in a sheepfold, in order to have them throw back the northern peoples (the Picts and Scots; d. Red.) .
How dark was her mind, how desperate, how stupid and dull. "
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Perhaps they would have better invested their wealth in the luxury of their homes.
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