Despite the minor limitations of this video, the content of the Professor's speech is certainly worth listening to. Ignore the recent 'The Dark Ages Werent Really Dark' stuff put out on popular media. Yes, there WAS a dark age when Roman power collapsed. And it lasted several hundred years.
I believe the controversy of the term "Dark Ages" comes from the various definitions of what that means. Some consider it a decline of culture during the early post-Roman years. Some call it dark because of how difficult it is to find archaeological evidence from some of the early post-Roman cultures. Some call it dark because it may literally have been dark due to 2 massive volcanic eruptions around 536 CE. The term is valid for many reasons but shouldn't be so easily generalized.
@@d.t.bigley7254 Indeed. The collapse was significant and multidimensional. ART: Complex and realistic sculptures and paintings with perspective in 100 AD vs. crude and primitive mosaics in 800 AD. Advanced and rich texts and poems written by Ovid, Virgil, or Horace for example vs. an extremely small amount of texts in the 700s, 800s, and 900s AD and mostly copies of religious texts like the Bible. CULTURE: Big and advanced Roman baths, circuses, and amphitheaters vs. what ??? primitive buildings in the 800s AD. TECHNOLOGY: large and advanced construction projects - aqueducts and roads vs. wells (simple holes in the ground) in 700s, 800s, and 900s AD.
camera work was a bit dodgy but that was still one of the best talks I've seen on youtube, no bs virtue signalling just facts and information. very good.
Hello there! Thanks for uploading this. I am from Córdoba, Argentina and I learn History at the University and it is very helpful to watch and hear Bryan-Ward Perkins talking about what happened after the Roman Empire dissolved. Thank you very much and please keep on loading stuff like this. Greetings!
These BYU videos are really badly edited. Simple principle: When the lecturer is showing a really interesting slide WE DON'T NEED TO BE LOOKING POINTLESSLY AT HIM THREE QUARTERS OF THE TIME! We just need to hear his voice whilst we look at the picture that he's showing, to see in detail what he's telling us about it. That takes a long steady shot of the picture. Cut back to the lecturer only when he's not showing an interesting image.
Don’t exaggerate: It is still possible to rewind to the image and observe what he has explained before. A few years ago I would have had no access to such brilliant lectures and I am indefinitely thankful for all this fascinating knowledge provided to us for free!
The reason it happened is very clear. Rome tried to run a consumer economy with renewable resources. Their only fuel source was wood. Their farming was organic. The resulting collapse was the result of exhausting both the farmland and forests after centuries of peace and was very severe.
@1:04:56 The disappearance of the pottery wheel is not hard to comprehend if you consider that the population levels could\should\would have quickly bottomed out and collapsed shortly after the Roman Government and Legions pulled out. Wasn't much of the pottery exported in by this point too? Once the Government left and the coin stopped entering the isle, the Roman-British economy had to collapse. All those people that directly supported the military with the food and supplies would be out of a job. All the suppliers to those suppliers were out of a job. And all the consumer goods that just those two groups purchased stopped being purchased... putting those other groups out of a job... Its a very rapid economic collapse. No money means no food. Starvation and famine. Sure, someone knew how to make the wheel... but there was no one who could afford to buy it anymore, or even needed it anymore... Everyone had to fall back to subsistence survival. And if your family spent the last few generations making wheels (or other consumer products) and not farming, you lost that farming expertise, and would likely not survive the first winter (especially if you don't know how to safely preserve your food). The loss of the pottery wheel, along with everything else, is a result of a quick and harsh economic collapse, probably over 1, maybe 2 generations.
The loss of the economy in Britain is easy to understand, if you believe that the Romans only really had a Military economy (after the Plundering economy period was over). Once the military pulled out, so did all the input of the coins into the local Britain economy. No more army after ~400 A.D., no more coins from Rome coming into the island. What ever was left on the island, the local farmers and pottery makers, could not survive on their own without the influx of money from Rome. This was a military economy, not a wealth generating one. This was one of Rome's weaknesses, but, when you are the first superpower of the world, you will make mistakes... Great video, Bryan-Ward Perkins is awesome, and his reliance on the archaeology to tell the story results in some intriguing ideas.
Does the migration of Britons to Brittany have anything to do with this? My understanding (and I may be wrong) was that there were several years of crop failure and famine in Britain. It's very hard to grow wheat and other Mediterranean crops in Britain, and only possible in the South East, which is why that was the Romanized part of the country. After the famine a large portion of the population migrated to Armorica in Gaul (now Brittany), leaving the South-East depopulated and vulnerable to invasion.
The map shown at 08:30 is interesting, showing little Romanisation of Wales and the North, and likewise of Dumnonia, but with seemingly villas everywhere in the Seven valley area between these two 'native' areas. Could therefore a Brittonic speaking Wales+Yr Hen Ogledd have been separated from the Brittonic SW by a Latin-speaking Romanised tract? This would explain perhaps why the fragments we have of North Brittonic are very similar to the (Proto-)Welsh of the time, whereas Cornish (and its later Breton offshoot by migration) are much more distinctive. I.e. could this split be backdated to the time of Romanisation, the age of the villas etc., rather than as is generally assumed, to several centuries later, following the departure of the legions and the arrival of the English barbarians?
Stupid questions: (1) The jewelry at Sutton Hoo: Making such jewelry obviously required long years of learning. Who would acquire and maintain the necessary skills if there's no one to buy such jewelry? (2) Tens of thousands of literate, civilized Britons must have remained in Britain when the Roman legions left. How could they have retrogressed so quickly -- almost instantly?
No questions are stupid. I don't see the evidence for any collapse of civilisation in Perkins' lecture. Pottery and coin finds remain unbroken after the Roman legions leave Britain and farming continues apace. The quality of art hardly changes.
1) Imported craftsmen. 2) No legions = no protection. No protection = no trade and lots of pillaging. No trade and lots of pillaging = central economy dies. Economy dies = off to the fields with you, cause the books aren't that nutritious.
(1) The jewelry was probably imported, from the Eastern Roman Empire, or Persia, where they most likely still have had craftsman who knew how to make such things. There is archaeological evidence of Eastern Roman Empire trade in Wales from the ~6th century, so we know that even after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern side was still alive and trading for a bit longer. (2)* They didn't regress so quickly, but probably over 1-2 generations or so. Think about it, legions pull out, the money stops coming in, education ends, and after a very short few generations, no one (the kids or grand-kids) can read or write anymore. Even those that could (grandparents), there would have been nothing to write on anymore anyway... Also, substance living is very hard, and does not leave much free time for such things. You will spend most of your day just hunting or growing food to survive, as there would be no more grain carts from Rome (or where ever Rome was getting the grain from to feed everyone). Last point, the elite, if they were smart, would have cashed out and followed the troops back to Rome if they could. If each generation was 20 years or so, then you could say that 40 years after the army left, most people were illiterate and just barely surviving off the land. *Last point. To go from a trade based economy, propped up by the input of gold from the military, back to a substance economy, is very hard to do. Most people would forget (or never learned) how to grow their own crops, or enough of them, to survive. If someone told you today that all the supermarkets where you get your food are now closed, and you must grow your own food, how many people do you think could quickly adapt back to that. How many people would know that you need about 1 acre of land, per person, per year, and that you must grow spring, summer, and fall crops, and must save and preserve some for winter? Those that miscalculate that, would starve.
Adam Frisk, I think you offer a great and significant point. With the legions now gone, robbers, bandits, and pirates would have been everywhere, stopping or hampering most local trade and commerce, only leading into a deeper decline. The legions really did offer security, stability, and compliance with the laws and rules.
@@adamfrisk956 Especially in Britain where they invited the Anglo-Saxons from Germany as mercenaries to protect from the Picts and Scotch. The Anglo-Saxons turned against the Britains and drove them West into Wales and Cornwall. These were the days of King Arthur.
Not camera work, but editing. The camera can't record the images that are projected onto the screen. Those images must be taken from the files of the speaker's presentation and must be edited into the visual record of his talk, after he's finished speaking.
I think the problem is UK scholars think of the "Romano-British" as middle-class Englishmen. Surely the fact foreign soldiers had to be garrisoned throughout the occupation shows the British were a slave class. When the army and then plantation owners had to withdraw the slaves after 400 years of oppression were easy pickings for the Saxons.
When the Empire collapsed, the periphery also were declining - so it was in the past. The collapse of the Soviet empire led to the prosperity of one part of the periphery - the Western, another decline - the southeast (except for the rich mineral resources of Kazakhstan) and the turbulence in the third - Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia
I suspect the towns people needed to grow their own food because the weather deteriorated. After all, the Roman warm era fed whole armies of urban proletariate, legionnaires, and construction workers. Later? Perhaps the Northern barbarians moved South for the Winter? One late Roman commentator even mentions colder weather. Warm eras expand agricultural lands, and populations grow. A little bit of cooling and the marginal lands collapse in a cascade. Reference the post medieval cooling. The link bellow shows climate changes from Greenland ice corps.
Dark Ages in Britain is mayby right, but i am surprised how much money the anglo saxons paid to the danish. I am also surprised that the european continent learn about read, whrite and add from the iro-scotish monks ans nuns. That`^s not Italy, that^s Scotland and Ireland. We see roman livestyle in the mediteranian. If you want olive oil, wine you leave the hadrians wall and go to mediteranian. 550AD the Population generally, decreased by plagues, so people could move in to abandon homes in continental europe. 375AD it was more difficult for the romans to provide a homeland for the visigoths.
Suso Medin I mean an article in Wikipedia, wich is not available in english, it mean the lost of books in the late antiquity. de.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCcherverluste_in_der_Sp%C3%A4tantike may you can translate it in english and you will know. In the carolingian monasteries People paint the letters they see accuracy whithout reading and understanding. Some People coult read write and add !sure! Whe write mainly ´with abc like the carolingians but romans write all with ABC, They do not know abc. AVE CAESAR
It seems that you have a generational loss of knowledge. As if the experts suddenly die before they can pass on their skills and even the apprentices die off... and only so few are left that knowledge is lost? Is there any evidence of population levels? And Roman manufacturing and trade were very centralized to settlements so if plague or disease swept through then the more highly populated and trade center would be most at risk for catching their death. So only those working in isolated rural homes might survive. These people would not posses any of the manufacturing skills and they would shun the settlements as centers of death; that would get passed on culturally and explain why the settlements are completely abandoned and never resettled and even the building materials are left unused.
> even the building materials are left unused. I will add, that even if there were piles of unused Roman Tiles all around, without the mortar or any type of advanced glue, how was anyone to use them? We know they lost the formula for concrete. I assume that something related was used to keep the tiles on the roofs and walls, and that secret was lost for centuries.
economic and cultural recovery was well underway in the west and then came Islam and the end of the entire trade system of North Africa and the Mediterranean. Islam was more responsible for the prolonged economic malaise that marked the Dark Ages and once Europe sailed west everything changed.
Considering that the founder of Islam himself was a trader of sorts, I doubt the Islamic rulers were idealogically opposed to trade or wealth creation.
+G.K. Chesterton I think he means that the disruption in Mediterranean trade is what held back north European economies. In the height of the empire every coast of this sea was Roman. multiple polities made trade dangerous, more expensive, harder and less profitable.
+RonJohn63 to give an idea. He means that he does not have exact measurement but he does have trends. Do not forget that this is an Oxford Professor who is reluctant to claim something without hard, statistical evidence.
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Despite the minor limitations of this video, the content of the Professor's speech is certainly worth listening to. Ignore the recent 'The Dark Ages Werent Really Dark' stuff put out on popular media. Yes, there WAS a dark age when Roman power collapsed. And it lasted several hundred years.
I believe the controversy of the term "Dark Ages" comes from the various definitions of what that means. Some consider it a decline of culture during the early post-Roman years. Some call it dark because of how difficult it is to find archaeological evidence from some of the early post-Roman cultures. Some call it dark because it may literally have been dark due to 2 massive volcanic eruptions around 536 CE. The term is valid for many reasons but shouldn't be so easily generalized.
@@d.t.bigley7254
Indeed. The collapse was significant and multidimensional.
ART: Complex and realistic sculptures and paintings with perspective in 100 AD vs. crude and primitive mosaics in 800 AD.
Advanced and rich texts and poems written by Ovid, Virgil, or Horace for example vs. an extremely small amount of texts in the 700s, 800s, and 900s AD and mostly copies of religious texts like the Bible.
CULTURE: Big and advanced Roman baths, circuses, and amphitheaters vs. what ??? primitive buildings in the 800s AD.
TECHNOLOGY: large and advanced construction projects - aqueducts and roads vs. wells (simple holes in the ground) in 700s, 800s, and 900s AD.
camera work was a bit dodgy but that was still one of the best talks I've seen on youtube, no bs virtue signalling just facts and information. very good.
Hello there! Thanks for uploading this. I am from Córdoba, Argentina and I learn History at the University and it is very helpful to watch and hear Bryan-Ward Perkins talking about what happened after the Roman Empire dissolved. Thank you very much and please keep on loading stuff like this. Greetings!
Appalling editing. The images were an important component and almost totally neglected. Excellent lecture though.
Really interesting lecture.
These BYU videos are really badly edited. Simple principle: When the lecturer is showing a really interesting slide WE DON'T NEED TO BE LOOKING POINTLESSLY AT HIM THREE QUARTERS OF THE TIME! We just need to hear his voice whilst we look at the picture that he's showing, to see in detail what he's telling us about it. That takes a long steady shot of the picture. Cut back to the lecturer only when he's not showing an interesting image.
Don’t exaggerate: It is still possible to rewind to the image and observe what he has explained before. A few years ago I would have had no access to such brilliant lectures and I am indefinitely thankful for all this fascinating knowledge provided to us for free!
Disagree. But I'm English and know exactly what he's describing. I'm just grateful for free eduction
The reason it happened is very clear. Rome tried to run a consumer economy with renewable resources. Their only fuel source was wood. Their farming was organic. The resulting collapse was the result of exhausting both the farmland and forests after centuries of peace and was very severe.
@1:04:56 The disappearance of the pottery wheel is not hard to comprehend if you consider that the population levels could\should\would have quickly bottomed out and collapsed shortly after the Roman Government and Legions pulled out. Wasn't much of the pottery exported in by this point too? Once the Government left and the coin stopped entering the isle, the Roman-British economy had to collapse. All those people that directly supported the military with the food and supplies would be out of a job. All the suppliers to those suppliers were out of a job. And all the consumer goods that just those two groups purchased stopped being purchased... putting those other groups out of a job...
Its a very rapid economic collapse. No money means no food. Starvation and famine. Sure, someone knew how to make the wheel... but there was no one who could afford to buy it anymore, or even needed it anymore... Everyone had to fall back to subsistence survival. And if your family spent the last few generations making wheels (or other consumer products) and not farming, you lost that farming expertise, and would likely not survive the first winter (especially if you don't know how to safely preserve your food).
The loss of the pottery wheel, along with everything else, is a result of a quick and harsh economic collapse, probably over 1, maybe 2 generations.
Great lecture.very emotional!
The loss of the economy in Britain is easy to understand, if you believe that the Romans only really had a Military economy (after the Plundering economy period was over). Once the military pulled out, so did all the input of the coins into the local Britain economy. No more army after ~400 A.D., no more coins from Rome coming into the island. What ever was left on the island, the local farmers and pottery makers, could not survive on their own without the influx of money from Rome. This was a military economy, not a wealth generating one. This was one of Rome's weaknesses, but, when you are the first superpower of the world, you will make mistakes...
Great video, Bryan-Ward Perkins is awesome, and his reliance on the archaeology to tell the story results in some intriguing ideas.
Soldiers were les than 1% of the roman population.
Does the migration of Britons to Brittany have anything to do with this? My understanding (and I may be wrong) was that there were several years of crop failure and famine in Britain. It's very hard to grow wheat and other Mediterranean crops in Britain, and only possible in the South East, which is why that was the Romanized part of the country. After the famine a large portion of the population migrated to Armorica in Gaul (now Brittany), leaving the South-East depopulated and vulnerable to invasion.
The filigree is not made of gold drops but of beaded gold wire on the Sutton Hoo shoulder clasps.
The map shown at 08:30 is interesting, showing little Romanisation of Wales and the North, and likewise of Dumnonia, but with seemingly villas everywhere in the Seven valley area between these two 'native' areas. Could therefore a Brittonic speaking Wales+Yr Hen Ogledd have been separated from the Brittonic SW by a Latin-speaking Romanised tract? This would explain perhaps why the fragments we have of North Brittonic are very similar to the (Proto-)Welsh of the time, whereas Cornish (and its later Breton offshoot by migration) are much more distinctive. I.e. could this split be backdated to the time of Romanisation, the age of the villas etc., rather than as is generally assumed, to several centuries later, following the departure of the legions and the arrival of the English barbarians?
BYU, the video and lack of PowerPoint images reflects very very poorly on you and is an insult to your speakers
Stupid questions:
(1) The jewelry at Sutton Hoo: Making such jewelry obviously required long years of learning. Who would acquire and maintain the necessary skills if there's no one to buy such jewelry?
(2) Tens of thousands of literate, civilized Britons must have remained in Britain when the Roman legions left. How could they have retrogressed so quickly -- almost instantly?
No questions are stupid. I don't see the evidence for any collapse of civilisation in Perkins' lecture. Pottery and coin finds remain unbroken after the Roman legions leave Britain and farming continues apace. The quality of art hardly changes.
1) Imported craftsmen.
2) No legions = no protection. No protection = no trade and lots of pillaging. No trade and lots of pillaging = central economy dies. Economy dies = off to the fields with you, cause the books aren't that nutritious.
(1) The jewelry was probably imported, from the Eastern Roman Empire, or Persia, where they most likely still have had craftsman who knew how to make such things. There is archaeological evidence of Eastern Roman Empire trade in Wales from the ~6th century, so we know that even after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern side was still alive and trading for a bit longer.
(2)* They didn't regress so quickly, but probably over 1-2 generations or so. Think about it, legions pull out, the money stops coming in, education ends, and after a very short few generations, no one (the kids or grand-kids) can read or write anymore. Even those that could (grandparents), there would have been nothing to write on anymore anyway... Also, substance living is very hard, and does not leave much free time for such things. You will spend most of your day just hunting or growing food to survive, as there would be no more grain carts from Rome (or where ever Rome was getting the grain from to feed everyone). Last point, the elite, if they were smart, would have cashed out and followed the troops back to Rome if they could. If each generation was 20 years or so, then you could say that 40 years after the army left, most people were illiterate and just barely surviving off the land.
*Last point. To go from a trade based economy, propped up by the input of gold from the military, back to a substance economy, is very hard to do. Most people would forget (or never learned) how to grow their own crops, or enough of them, to survive. If someone told you today that all the supermarkets where you get your food are now closed, and you must grow your own food, how many people do you think could quickly adapt back to that. How many people would know that you need about 1 acre of land, per person, per year, and that you must grow spring, summer, and fall crops, and must save and preserve some for winter? Those that miscalculate that, would starve.
Adam Frisk, I think you offer a great and significant point. With the legions now gone, robbers, bandits, and pirates would have been everywhere, stopping or hampering most local trade and commerce, only leading into a deeper decline. The legions really did offer security, stability, and compliance with the laws and rules.
@@adamfrisk956 Especially in Britain where they invited the Anglo-Saxons from Germany as mercenaries to protect from the Picts and Scotch. The Anglo-Saxons turned against the Britains and drove them West into Wales and Cornwall. These were the days of King Arthur.
this camera work is a disgrace. pictures of stunning objects and im left staring at some guy fiddling with a remote.
Not camera work, but editing. The camera can't record the images that are projected onto the screen. Those images must be taken from the files of the speaker's presentation and must be edited into the visual record of his talk, after he's finished speaking.
Pretty sure that was what the OP meant.
Usually that's because of copyright.
At least we get good sound. The lack of time on camera for graphics is exasperating.
Coins emerge when they are needed. Seems obvious, but we often overlook it.
Suso Medin What do you mean?
Please point the camera at what he's pointing his laser at.
I think the problem is UK scholars think of the "Romano-British" as middle-class Englishmen. Surely the fact foreign soldiers had to be garrisoned throughout the occupation shows the British were a slave class. When the army and then plantation owners had to withdraw the slaves after 400 years of oppression were easy pickings for the Saxons.
Very frustrating trying to watch this. i want to see the slides, not the lecturer, FFS!
OMG... who edited this video? horrid horrid horrid work...
When the Empire collapsed, the periphery also were declining - so it was in the past. The collapse of the Soviet empire led to the prosperity of one part of the periphery - the Western, another decline - the southeast (except for the rich mineral resources of Kazakhstan) and the turbulence in the third - Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia
I suspect the towns people needed to grow their own food because the weather deteriorated. After all, the Roman warm era fed whole armies of urban proletariate, legionnaires, and construction workers. Later? Perhaps the Northern barbarians moved South for the Winter?
One late Roman commentator even mentions colder weather. Warm eras expand agricultural lands, and populations grow. A little bit of cooling and the marginal lands collapse in a cascade. Reference the post medieval cooling.
The link bellow shows climate changes from Greenland ice corps.
Dark Ages in Britain is mayby right, but i am surprised how much money the anglo saxons paid to the danish. I am also surprised that the european continent learn about read, whrite and add from the iro-scotish monks ans nuns. That`^s not Italy, that^s Scotland and Ireland. We see roman livestyle in the mediteranian. If you want olive oil, wine you leave the hadrians wall and go to mediteranian. 550AD the Population generally, decreased by plagues, so people could move in to abandon homes in continental europe. 375AD it was more difficult for the romans to provide a homeland for the visigoths.
Suso Medin I mean an article in Wikipedia, wich is not available in english, it mean the lost of books in the late antiquity. de.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCcherverluste_in_der_Sp%C3%A4tantike
may you can translate it in english and you will know. In the carolingian monasteries People paint the letters they see accuracy whithout reading and understanding. Some People coult read write and add !sure! Whe write mainly ´with abc like the carolingians but romans write all with ABC, They do not know abc. AVE CAESAR
It seems that you have a generational loss of knowledge. As if the experts suddenly die before they can pass on their skills and even the apprentices die off... and only so few are left that knowledge is lost? Is there any evidence of population levels? And Roman manufacturing and trade were very centralized to settlements so if plague or disease swept through then the more highly populated and trade center would be most at risk for catching their death. So only those working in isolated rural homes might survive. These people would not posses any of the manufacturing skills and they would shun the settlements as centers of death; that would get passed on culturally and explain why the settlements are completely abandoned and never resettled and even the building materials are left unused.
> even the building materials are left unused.
I will add, that even if there were piles of unused Roman Tiles all around, without the mortar or any type of advanced glue, how was anyone to use them? We know they lost the formula for concrete. I assume that something related was used to keep the tiles on the roofs and walls, and that secret was lost for centuries.
What an absolute sweetie.
economic and cultural recovery was well underway in the west and then came Islam and the end of the entire trade system of North Africa and the Mediterranean. Islam was more responsible for the prolonged economic malaise that marked the Dark Ages and once Europe sailed west everything changed.
Considering that the founder of Islam himself was a trader of sorts, I doubt the Islamic rulers were idealogically opposed to trade or wealth creation.
+G.K. Chesterton I think he means that the disruption in Mediterranean trade is what held back north European economies. In the height of the empire every coast of this sea was Roman. multiple polities made trade dangerous, more expensive, harder and less profitable.
+G.K. Chesterton and that this situation was only changed when they opened up the Atlantic.
4:45 If "they're *not remotely accurate*", then why the heck are you presenting them???? :(
+RonJohn63 to give an idea. He means that he does not have exact measurement but he does have trends. Do not forget that this is an Oxford Professor who is reluctant to claim something without hard, statistical evidence.
Stephanie Wilson I guess my interpretation -- and use -- of "not remotely accurate" data is different from that of a Professor of Very Soft Sciences.
+RonJohn63 I am sure you have details that can be used to give accurate statistics: a luxury few historians have, but they have enough to give trends.
Roughly
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Couldnt focus . not a speaker is he.