Is it correct to see the kingdoms of the fifth-century west as `fundamentally Roman`?

Is it correct to see the kingdoms of the fifth-century west as `fundamentally Roman`

The collapse of great civilisations provokes nowadays an uneasy fascination . This is the more so when the civilisation in question is the one which shaped much of the culture and religion of the western world down to the present day . Moreover , out of the disappearance of Roman Britain were to grow the states which eventually gave rise to modern England , Scotland and Wales . For these reasons and others the period covered in this work has already been covered

by many other books with a variety of perspectives . Clearly it is impossible here to examine more than a few s relating to the late Roman west . But they demonstrate that while the required imperial structures of administration , finance and defence were firmly in place , local response varied . Moreover , the themes we have looked at will recur in our study of late Roman Britain , and will form an essential background both to developments in the island in the fourth century , and to the nature of the changes of the early fifth century . If we step back from consideration of Britain in isolation , how does what we have been considering compare with the broader picture in Gaul and elsewhere ? The first thing to say is that the ending of Roman Britain is entirely comprehensible within the framework of the ending of the western empire The processes which led to it were processes operating within the late Roman state in the west and which affected other areas of the west Britain seems to have suffered earlier and more completely the dissolution of the western empire than did her neighbours

In the late fourth century the Roman empire and its civilisation held intact . Mistress of the known world , Rome still had immense resources and the prestige of the civilisation which had dominated the Mediterranean basin and much of Europe for half a millennium . Yet by the middle of the fifth century most of her European and African possessions were effectively under the control of barbarian peoples , and Rome 's attempts to reassert her authority were becoming increasingly futile (Blagg 1983 . Britain was no exception in the late fourth century she was still a diocese of the empire with the administration , the economy and the society fashioned by three hundred years of Roman rule still firmly in place . But by the middle of the fifth century Britain was no longer ruled from Rome , and all the apparatus of Roman civilisation and values was in pieces

At the beginning of this period Britain was an unexceptionable part of the Roman empire , but by the end of it Roman rule was a thing of the past . In place of a widespread and centralised Roman culture there was a multiplicity of localised territories , some of them Celtic , some of them Anglo-Saxon . In place of the plethora of settlements , structures and objects which characterised the Roman period in Britain , there was a lack both of quality...