Is it possible to write about the fall of the West Roman Empire without making it a lesson about your own day? Since at least Gibbon, that’s been the reason for covering the final centuries of Rome’s pre-eminence, and Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Fall of the West is no exception.

What does make Goldsworthy’s work different is that he attempts to tell the story of the empire in the third, fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, then draw the conclusions, rather than allow the explanation to infuse through the whole text, as was the case in one book I’ve recently reviewed, where the overconsumption of energy was the theory of choice.

Goldsworth has thus produced a rather old-fashioned narrative history – emperor follows emperor, usurper knocks out usurper, and the swirl around. That has its strengths – if you want to get the latest historical thinking on, say, the “end of Roman” Britain, Goldsworthy is drawing on the latest archaeology and thinking.

He’s clearer than many in setting out the structure of late 4th-century Roman Britain, “a diocese under a vicarius based in London and responsible to the praetorian prefect. The diocese was subdivided into either four or five provinces…The Comes Britanniae commanded a force of comitatenses consisting of three infantry and six cavalry units…The Dux Britanniarum commanded units of limitanei, mostly stationed in the north and including the garrisons of some named forts on Hadrian’s Wall. Finally, there was the ‘Count of the Sexon Shore’ controlling limitanei based around the east and south coasts.”

On the vexed subject of the “Saxon invasion” (did it happen? did it involve significant numbers? were the existing populations pushed aside?) he’s sensibly agnostic, noting that the academic fashion has swung, probably too far, towards denial. He challenges recent interpretations of “mixed” Saxon and Briitish cemeteries, noting “considerable caution needs to be used before assuming that a particular object automatically denotes someone of a particular race. Brooches were both functional and valuable. ..In the end brooches and belt buckles were there to hold up clothes more than to express identity.”

This section is relatively analytical – and addresses one of those questions that history can’t help worrying at – but the careful narrative approach in other sections can get rather monotonous and repetitive.

To take just a couple of pages: In March 238 the proconsul of Africa was proclaimed emperor, in resistance to the newish Maximus , who was too preoccupied in the west to deal with an attack by Ardashir a couple of years before. The Senate in Rome rejoiced, and accepted the usurper, but within weeks the governor of the neighbouring province had defeated his son and co-emperor in battle, and Gordian hanged himself. But the Senate couldn’t go backwards, so selected two of their number, Balbinus and Pupienus, as co-emperors, and they were immediately forced to co-opt a third, Gordian’s young grandson, aged just 13. Maximus got bogged down in fighting, then his troops killed him, but they didn’t fancy the two senators either, and soon killed them too, leaving the teenager as titular head of the empire, to be married to the daughter of his Praetorian Prefect Caius Timesitheus, effective ruler. He died at age 19, either at the hands of the Persians, or his own troops after a defeat by the eastern enemy.

It might make a good board game, but it is hard to get interested in this fast-moving, if shortlived, cast of characters, about which we learn little. So while as a reference this is a handy book, it wouldn’t be the best thing to take on a long train trip when seeking an engaging read.

So what of its grand theory? Well as you might expect from a narrative historian chiefly concerned with political history, it concerns political structures. Goldsworthy argued that the marginalisation of the senatorial class in the third century meant that the possible range of emperors, or usurpers, was greatly widened, and emperors had to fear practically anyone who got some sort of influence over some troops.
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Most cultures around the world have a Noah’s ark-style story – of a great inundation that consumes the whole planet. One rare exception is the eastern parts of the British Isles. Which is odd, because the archaeologists have recently established that just off the east coast of England there was a great lost land, an area greater than the existing UK, you might even call it a culture, which disappeared completely beneath the waves only around 6,000 years before today. One explanation for this loss might be that the repeated invasions of the east coast in the historical period disrupted regional myth cycles, in contrast to the continuity of Celtic cultures of the west coast.

But one effect of this historical disruption is clear: it makes Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland particularly fascinating and gripping – slightly odd really, when you consider that this has the dry-sounding subtitle of “Research Report No 160 Council of British Archaeology”.

You’d have, however, to be a very dry sort indeed, not to be captured by the tale of the gradual unfolding of knowledge of an entire lost world in Europe – a world that the geological surveys of oil companies and pipe-laying firms has enabled the experts to map, and the archaeologists to reconstruct. Some of the seismic data is a bit on the technical side; some of the images (and the council deserves credit for producing such a finely and voluminously illustrated as well as accessible monograph) are only for the expert to really judge, but they do bring alive this story of a lost – and possibly one day recoverable – culture.

The name Doggerland comes from the Dogger Bank, a relatively shallow area in the North Sea from which fishermen have for decades been dredging artefacts – including some finely carved tools and weapons.

Europe’s Lost World takes the unusual step for something labelled a “research report” of following the gradual unfolding of knowledge of Doggerland, starting with the work early in the 20th century of Clement Reid, who in a little book called Submerged Forests identified the potential archaeological value of buried lands: “In them the successive stages are separated and isolated instead of being mingled.”

The report then goes on to look at what is known from the land of the sites of the period – the Mesolithic, the intermediate culture that it says has traditionally been neglected between the deep mysteries of the Paleolithic and the excitement of great change into farming of the Neolithic. The authors here make a now fashionable claim that at least some of the peoples of the time were considerably less nomadic, and built grander structures, than has traditionally been thought.

They look in detail at the site of Thatcham in Berkshire, centred around a hut about 6m in diameter. (It is impossible now due to erosion to know whether this was solitary or part of the group.) “All the evidence suggested that the house had been maintained and rebuilt on several occasions by a family group, perhaps six or eight people, and that it served several generations of hunters… burnt bone fragments included wild pig, fox and, possibly, a domestic dog. Marine shellfish, particularly dog whelks, were also present on the site.”
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