Sort each piece of evidence by whether it supports CONTINUITY across the fifth century or a genuine material COLLAPSE.
Groups: Continuity · Material collapse
- Kings issue written law codes in Latin
- Roman landowning families keep their estates and their titles
- Roofs revert to thatch and stone building almost stops
- Coin circulation contracts sharply outside the Mediterranean
- Bishops keep functioning as city administrators
Hints
- One column is drawn from documents, the other from excavation.
- Ward-Perkins built his case from pots, coins and roof tiles; the continuity case is built from law and office-holding.
Show the answer
Continuity: Kings issue written law codes in Latin, Bishops keep functioning as city administrators, Roman landowning families keep their estates and their titles
Material collapse: Coin circulation contracts sharply outside the Mediterranean, Roofs revert to thatch and stone building almost stops
The two columns come from different archives, which is exactly why the debate persists. Written sources are produced by the people whose institutions survived, so they show continuity; excavation samples everyone, so it shows the fall in living standards. Neither is lying, and a good answer names the evidence base before naming a verdict.
Practise Late Antiquity and the Germanic Kingdoms
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History II is free to start.
More questions on Late Antiquity and the Germanic Kingdoms
- Arrange these turning points in the western empire’s dissolution, earliest first.
- Odoacer deposed the last western emperor in 476 and sent the imperial insignia to Constantinople rather than…
- Germanic settlements arose through negotiated accommodation rather than wholesale external destruction. What…
- The Germanic successor kingdoms discarded Roman law and Roman administration and governed by custom alone.
- Complete the account of the religious division between the Germanic kingdoms and their subjects.
- In which year was Romulus Augustulus deposed, the date conventionally given for the fall of the western Roman…
- Which claims about the "fall versus transformation" debate are defensible on the evidence?
- Match each Germanic kingdom to the territory it came to hold.
- At Adrianople in 378 the eastern emperor Valens was killed by Gothic forces the empire had itself admitted…
- Clovis converted to Nicene rather than Arian Christianity, unlike almost every other Germanic king of his…
- Arrange the stages by which a Germanic war-band typically became a territorial kingdom.