the Roman Empire gave up on England. Troops were
withdrawn; those left were not paid, and as the Roman
state crumbled, administrators were expelled by the local
population. By AD 450 all these trappings of economic
prosperity were gone. Money vanished from circulation.
Urban areas were abandoned, and buildings stripped of
stone. The roads were overgrown with weeds. The only
type of pottery fabricated was crude and handmade, not
manufactured. People forgot how to use mortar, and
literacy declined substantially. Roofs were made of
branches, not tiles. Nobody wrote from Vindolanda
anymore.
A f t e r AD 411, England experienced an economic
collapse and became a poor backwater—and not for the
first time. In the previous chapter we saw how the Neolithic
Revolution started in the Middle East around 9500 BC .
While the inhabitants of Jericho and Abu Hureyra were
living in small towns and farming, the inhabitants of England
were still hunting and gathering, and would do so for at
least another 5,500 years. Even then the English didn’t
invent farming or herding; these were brought from the
outside by migrants who had been spreading across
Europe from the Middle East for thousands of years. As the
inhabitants of England caught up with these major
innovations, those in the Middle East were inventing cities,
writing, and pottery. By 3500 BC , large cities such as Uruk
and Ur emerged in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq. Uruk may
have had a population of fourteen thousand in 3500 BC , and
forty thousand soon afterward. The potter’s wheel was
invented in Mesopotamia at about the same time as was
wheeled transportation. The Egyptian capital of Memphis
emerged as a large city soon thereafter. Writing appeared
independently in both regions. While the Egyptians were
building the great pyramids of Giza around 2500 BC , the
English constructed their most famous ancient monument,
the stone circle at Stonehenge. Not bad by English
standards, but not even large enough to have housed one
of the ceremonial boats buried at the foot of King Khufu’s
pyramid. England continued to lag behind and to borrow
from the Middle East and the rest of Europe up to and
including the Roman period.
Despite such an inauspicious history, it was in England