Epic book title: ten extra brownie points (redeemable for CCs on stacker) to the designer or publisher who came up with it

Also, in these Norwegian-Viking and England-won't-win-the-WC times (#1522442, #1516054, #1520076) it's incredibly appropriate

How's this for an opening setup?

Imagine a Romano-British gentleman in the middle of the fourth century. He lives somewhere in the fertile countryside of what would become southern England, near the estates whose rents pay for his lifestyle. His home is a comfortable rural mansion where he resides with his family members and the slaves who look after them. He speaks and reads Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, though perhaps he addresses his tenants in Brittonic, the Celtic tongue of the British Iron Age. As a Roman citizen he grumbles about taxes yet knows that the state keeps the peace. The imperial economy brings him clothes, pottery, wine, spices and books.

Two centuries later, this equivalent social-status man, is an Anglo-Saxon war chief.

He lives in a drafty timber hall with a beaten-earth floor, surrounded by his family and armed retainers. He speaks Old English and is illiterate, though his culture is rich in poetry and heroic tales.

The collapse of Roman Britain was an astonishing retrogression in living standards and civilizational highs.

In his splendid “How England Began,” Nicholas J. Higham tells the story of how the Romano-British gentleman gave way to the Anglo-Saxon war chief. As Mr. Higham notes, our understanding of the transformation of Roman Britain into England is beset by problems of evidence.

Hashtag, welcome to deep(er) history.

• not many written sources
• archeology not that helpful because the early medieval peoples didin't use much of lasting material
• Gildas, the dominant historian whose writings have survived, "is both fascinating and obscure"
• plus, a few surviving mid-400s letters.

"This truly was a dark age, at least in the sense that we know so little about it."

Mr. Higham, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Manchester, steers readers through this difficult terrain. After introducing Roman Britain in broad strokes, he gives a judicious account of how imperial authority on the island was swept away in a chaotic period of civil war and barbarian invasion. In 407 the long-unpaid Roman army in Britain rebelled by proclaiming a common soldier as Constantine III. This new emperor led his forces into Gaul in a bid for supreme power but was ultimately defeated and executed in 411. There was no serious effort afterward to restore imperial power on the island. Roman Britain didn’t so much end as fade away.

About the same amount of land farmed, so possibly economic life didn't change too much for ordinary people... except that they may have been entirely different peoples:

The Saxons, he writes, brought “an entire cultural, linguistic, and ideological package.” They cremated their dead, spoke the Germanic ancestors of Old English and were pagans. Mr. Higham accepts that these newcomers violently subjugated some regions. While he allows that the “conquest and colonization” of much of lowland Britain by the Saxons drove its transformation into England, he demonstrates that the process was more complex and drawn-out than is sometimes supposed.

archived: https://archive.md/VEt6A

How England Began: From Roman Britain to the Anglo-Saxons was published by Yale University Press earlier this year