RECYCLING IN BRITAIN AFTER THE FALL OF ROME'S METAL ECONOMY

Fleming attempts to bridge those various historiographical, disciplinary and evidentiary gaps, in order to tell one of the major but forgotten stories of this time and place: the collapse of Rome's metal economy in Britain and the related and subsequent deskilling and impoverishment of people living in its eastern half. He describes the ways people went about procuring metal in the generations both before and after the ancient economy's implosion in Britain. Further, he investigates changes in metal production which began to take hold in England in the sixth and seventh centuries, and argues that access to freshly smelted metal and the ability to produce it helped drive important economic and social transformations, including the development of a steeply hierarchical society which came to take hold in Britain's Anglo-Saxon culture zone in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries.