Scavenging Iron from the Ruins of Roman Britain

Reconstruction of Roman Richborough, c 120 AD

The most fascinating academic article I have read so far this year is a 2012 piece by Robin Fleming titled "Recycling in Britain after the Fall of Rome's Metal Economy." (More on how much I admire Fleming here.) 

Fleming begins by noting that the period between the collapse of Roman Britain and the rise of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is poorly understood. This is partly because the literary sources are sparse and bad, partly because of the lack of communication between historians of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and scholars of Roman Britain, and partly because of the lack of communication between archaeologists and historians. ("But if Roman and Anglo-Saxon historians inhabit different planets, historians and archaeologists live in different galaxies.")

Fleming believes that the withdrawal of Roman authority in Britain in the early 400s was a catastrophic event for the inhabitants:

A careful reading of the evidence further shows that most people during the first three or four generations after Rome's fall were profoundly poor, a fundamental fact that has disappeared from historical memory both because we historians too often limit our investigations to early medieval texts, and because most of us are not fully aware of the level of material prosperity found in Britain before Rome's fall. 

Consider metal. Archaeologists estimate that in the second and third centuries, Roman Britain produced more than 2,200 tons of freshly smelted iron annually. Evidence for this is abundant, including huge mounds of smelting waste. Copper and lead were also common in the empire:

One consequence of Rome's extraordinary capacity to produce metal was that local markets throughout the empire, including Britain, were awash with inexpensive, readily available, ready-to-smith metal as well as finished metal goods; and this, in turn, made people more productive and more prosperous than they would have been with out it, enabling them to live more comfortable lives.

Romans did not have access to any forgotten technologies. Their metal works were productive because they operated at large scale and had access to thousands of skilled, specialist workers who focused their efforts on a single step in a complex commercial structure; from chacoal burners to finishing smiths, all were experts in their craft, and the merchant organizers efficiently moved the product from one stage to the next. The results of this collaboration can easily be seen in the archaeological record. Roman sites are just full of metal stuff. One example:

At the short-lived, first-century Roman fort at Inchtuthil, in Scotland, a cache of several tons of well-made nails — almost a million in all — has been found; the nails were fabricated in a variety of standard sizes and hardnesses (the longer ones containing more carbon steel, because they needed to withstand more hammering than shorter nails).

But then Rome fell apart:

Beginning in the later fourth century, however, as the Romano-British economy began to unravel and as Britain's many dozens of small towns — places centrally involved in iron-related activities — failed, the production and availability of freshly smelted metal first faltered and then, by and large, ceased. 

To replace all that smelted metal, and what they had acquired via trade, the smiths of Britain turned to scavenging. At the Roman-period ironworking sites of Southwark and Ickham (Kent), deposits from the late 300s are full of "metal odds and ends," some of them centuries old, that had clearly been scavenged for recycling. By 420 activity at these sites had ceased altogether. Because of the industry's collapse, iron became much rarer:

In Britain what we see during the last couple of decades of the fourth century is the disappearance of traditional and crucial everyday objects which used nails, including hobnail boots and coffins; and I would argue that for the people who grew up with these things, rainy days and funerals were a lot grimmer without them.

Iron-making did not disappear from Britain, but it was dramatically reduced in scale. While Roman-period smelting sides can readily be identified by the enormous slag heaps they left behind, "the handful of fifth- and sixth-century places in Britain with evidence for iron smelting typically produce only a few kilograms of smelting slag." The difference was made up by switching to other materials, such as wooden pegs, and by recycling. Fleming finds evidence of recycing everywhere; for example, archaeologists sifting through the stone rubble left by the temple complex at Bath found that all the lead clamps that once held the stones together had been hacked out before the building collapsed around 450 AD. There is even some evidence of mining rubbish dumps for metal.

And there is much evidence that people were finding and using Roman-period metal artifacts:

For example, Stanley West excavated an impressive number of Roman metalwork artefacts at the early medieval settlement at West Stow, in Suffolk — bronze spoons, bracelets, finger rings, ear scoops and a steelyard. . . . These items look to have been scavenged from abandoned Roman sites in the neighbourhood and brought home for reuse as found or after some minor modification.

This is just a small sample of the evidence Fleming has put together, and I find it completely convincing.

How long did this metal famine last? Fleming finds evidence for increased iron smelting in the 600s, but even then people were still collecting and re-using Roman scrap; reuse of Roman brass and bronze seems to have gone on into the 800s. Iron smelting was being carried out on a commercial scale at several sites by the mid 700s, and there was a thriving industry by 1000. Fleming doesn't take the story any farther, but so far as I know Britain did not really equal Roman metal production until the late 1600s at the earliest, and maybe not until the 1750s. Talk to modern woodworkers and they will tell you that "traditional" woodworking is all about avoiding metal fasteners and putting wood together with dovetailing or wooden pegs rather than screws or nails. But this tradition arose after the fall of Rome; much of the wooden furniture found at Pompeii and Herculaneum was nailed together.

I believe that the collapse of the Roman economy impoverished much of Europe, and that violence, disorder, and so on kept the continent from recovering until after AD 1000. I believe that if you want to understand the extraordinary confidence of Europeans in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, expressed most powerfully in their cathedrals, you have to remember that they lived in a time of economic resurgence. The people whose ancestors had scavenged in Roman ruins found that they could now build for themselves and make for themselves, and this burst of both money and self-confidence launched their civilization out onto the world.