Continuity and Discontinuity in the Post-Roman Economy

In Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 , Chris Wickham provides a compelling analysis of the impact of the fragmentation of the Roman Empire on state structures, social relations and economic systems. Those social classes and regional economies that were the most profoundly integrated into the trans-regional imperial framework suffered the greatest degree of dislocation. In most regions the period 400–800 was associated with a localization and weakening of aristocratic power and a relative increase in peasant autonomy. In the archaeological record this process is discernible through the evidence for a simplification of patterns of production and exchange, as more sophisticated exchange networks, Wickham argues, were typically catalysed and sustained by aristocratic demand. This article suggests, however, that Wickham has perhaps understated the importance of demographic factors in the shifting balance of power between peasants and aristocrats, and, in certain instances, overstates the degree of discontinuity between the late Roman period and the early medieval in terms of agrarian relations of production.