From Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England

I chased down the reference to dustsceáwung in Mitchell and Robinson's A Guide to Old English. I should have remembered that it was in the introduction to the poem The Ruin, my favourite elegy and one of my favourite poems full stop. Anyway, I can't put it any better than Mitchell and Robinson, so I'll just quote them here:

'Where are those who lived before us?' In every age and culture people have raised this haunting question, especially when prompted to such thoughts by an ancient ruin or some other relic of the past. In both their poetry and their prose the Anglo-Saxons were very given to reflection on former civilizations and the people who built them, so much so that their language had a word for such meditation: dūstscēawung 'contemplation of the dust'. This theme occurs often as an incidental motif in the longer works (e.g. The Wanderer ll. 73-110 and Beowulf ll. 2255-66), but The Ruin is an entire poem devoted to the depiction of an ancient ghost town and to the thoughts which the scene evokes.

The Ruin and dustsceáwung are actually quite appropriate for what I intended to discuss in my last post but will introduce here, the transition from Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England, or at least writing about the research on it.

So I'm struggling with chapter 1 of my thesis at the moment. I don't have a separate introduction so in this chapter I need to explain the aims of my thesis, list the research questions I am pursuing, summarise the current state of research on my topic, describe how my particular research impacts it, and explain how I'm going to do it. Sounds easy, doesn't it? The problem is that the state of research I have to summarise concerns the end of Roman Britain, and by association, the end of the Roman Empire. I don't think there's another topic in historical research that has undergone as much research as these topics. The catch is, I'm not really interested in the end of Roman Britain or the end of the Roman Empire. Well I am actually, and I have a lot to say about them, but they are not the main subject of my research. However, the interpretation of the general issues impacts my research, and vice versa. What I need to do is explain that the prevalent historiographical interpretation of Britain after the Roman period assumed that Christianity was abandoned or nearly disappeared. And thus, no one considered the idea of researching saints' cults in Britain, because they assumed there would have been none. I find it difficult though because the end of Roman Britain is a package deal. Not only do you get the Romans leaving Britain, but you also get the Anglo-Saxon invasion, the destruction and ruin of towns and the abandonment of Christianity. You can't talk about one without referring to these others.

I don't subscribe to this particular interpretation of a sudden and dramatic end to Roman Britain. I don't think it fell faster and harder than other western provinces in the Roman Empire. Nor do I think that the Anglo-Saxon invasion caused Britain to be isolated from the continent. There a lot of reasons why this particular view emerged, and although this view has been questioned and challenged for some time it still persists. In challenging it myself, I feel a little like Don Quixote, charging at windmills. Or am I just gazing at dust.