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In Britain, I believe only four documents were written in the 200 years following the departure of the legions in 410. (Two were by St. Patrick, and the other t
by geye1234 1y ago
In Britain, I believe only four documents were written in the 200 years following the departure of the legions in 410. (Two were by St. Patrick, and the other two elude me.)
- pqtyw 1y ago*that survived There were likely many (e.g. maybe even 100s) times more documents written that didn't. Considering the survival rates of books (so if we entirely ignore various non-litterar documents) written in the Roman Empire during its more stable periods that wouldn't be far fetched at all. e.g. we know that Carthage or other Phoenicians cities, Etruscans etc. were highly literate, the fact that effectively all written content from those civilizations was destroyed or lost doesn't change that much. There was effectively a bottleneck in early medieval Europe if a given text survived until the Carolingian period or 900-1000 AD the likelihood of it surviving was reasonably high.
- geye1234 1y agoYou are correct, I should have added that.