You know the Biblical saying about beating swords into ploughshares? Well, refashioning iron was a thing throughout history. The best sorts of iron tools were often not just made from steel (you would want that for the sharpest edges) but from a combination of iron alloys. And getting all of this together needed the sort of big enterprises that historically have been undertaken by the Rich and Powerful.
In Britain after 400 CE, the Rich and Powerful were rapidly disappearing as the Roman state collapsed. Archaeologists can trace the flattening of the social hierarchies by looking at what people possessed by way of iron tools.
And here’s the history that emerges: iron production hit a nadir — an example is that no more iron nails were made, so things like doors and houses had to be put together in other ways. A few people did still work with metals, but the iron creations of the fifth century were not from patterns like professionals used. Rather, they were homogeneous blobs that included a lot of lead.
And why so much lead?, you no doubt are asking yourselves. It’s because when you reshape iron, you use lead to do it. The British were forced to recycle Roman scraps because they didn’t have the knowledge, the markets, the forests (to provide charcoal for smelting), or the hierarchical command of labor to make high-quality iron products.
By the sixth century, however, some groups of people had got their hands on better stuff — at first, it came from continental Europe, but eventually, there were enough Rich and Powerful in Britain to create both ploughshares and swords of the higher caliber — and they used the latter to keep their new positions of power.
Source(s): Robin Fleming, _The Material Fall of Roman Britain_, UPenn Press, 2021, chapter 6. Image is of the Gilling Sword, from Yorkshire England, dating to about 900. It is made of very fancy iron. Image wikipedia.
