The Barbarian invasions

Abstract

This chapter reviews some of the principal issues which currently engage the attention of historians working on the barbarians and their place in the processes known cumulatively as the 'Fall of Rome'. It shows that, contrary to commonly held views, Britain cannot be viewed separately from the continent, as something of an aberration or special case: the Anglo-Saxons were no more different from the Franks than the Franks were from the Ostrogoths or the Vandals, and maybe less so. By 500 AD all the Roman provinces of the West had become barbarian kingdoms: the Franks and Burundians in Gaul, the Ostrogoths in Italy, the Sueves and the Visigoths in Spain, the Vandals in North Africa, the Anglo-Saxons and the Britons in Britain. Romans paid taxes, so becoming a barbarian could bring with it tax exemption. In the post-Roman legal codes the barbarian element of the population was often given legal privilege, one reason to adopt a barbarian ethnic identity.

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