Roman Britain

This is a Late Roman mosaic of a peacock, probably from north Africa. When the Roman state withdrew its armies and state apparatus from Britain in the late fourth century, the peacocks that had dotted the wealthy estates of the Roman aristocracy went away as well. But we would be grossly mislead to imagine that the changes to Britain’s flora and fauna after the Empire’s withdrawal were limited to the rarified tastes of the Roman elite.

The Roman government had brought extraordinary changes to Britain’s ecology. Two of the biggest dealt with plants: the extraordinary intensification of cereal cultivation, and the establishment of horticulture — small plots of garden space with a wide variety of plant life.

When the Romans got established, they didn’t just cater to their richest generals with wine, fallow deer, rabbits, and pheasants. Many Roman imports entered the peasant diets as well, such as chickens, apple trees, and poppy seeds. Whole landscapes and even the timetable of how humans organized their lives radically changed after the Romans came.

And when they left, which happened a lot faster than they entered, the world of the British shifted even more radically due to the swiftness of the change. Gone was an economy structured around food surplus and exports. Horticulture all but disappeared, but foraging took on a new importance. Strawberry seeds, hazelnuts, and wild greens like dandelions have been found in the cess (fecal remains) of those living after the Roman collapse. Animals dependant on lots of human attention disappeared (fallow deer, pheasants). The chickens, however, managed to stay — and so too did apple trees.

Centuries later, as the European economies of the Middle Ages began to recover, many of these species and farming practices returned.