How much did life change for ordinary people when Rome fell?
Life was hard and anyone who tells you otherwise is full of shit. That being said people adapted as they always do. The new barbarian kings did their best to provide some security and economic productivity. Some were more successful in this than others. Dark Age Italy remained a fairly wealthy developed place while Britain turned into a complete war torn shithole. Gaul was somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. One interesting thing that often doesn’t get discussed is how existing buildings were repurposed to be useful in this new medieval world. The physical Roman cities still existed and the locals got very creative with them. Pic rel
Depends entirely on who you mean by 'ordinary people'. Prior to the fall of Rome 80% of the Roman Empire's citizens lived in small farming villages. For those people, life went on pretty much as it had before and during the Roman Empire, except with a smaller tax burden (good) and less access to goods from the Eastern Mediterranean (bad). These people had never lived in villas or cities. They had always lived in simple houses, either rectangular or round and made out of either natural stone, reused bricks or wattle and daub over a wooden frame. Their villages consisted of a number of clustered farmsteads, each inhabited by a single (extended) family, surrounded by farmland or managed woodlands and waterways. Things for them continued much as they had.For the other 20%, life either ended or got better. Roman cities were awful, so deaths always greatly exceeded births. In Rome itself, most of the population suffered from chronic malaria. One-sided diets caused malnutrition and stunted growth for a significant percentage of the population. People like stories of Roman slaves being allowed a great deal of autonomy and being able to buy their freedom, but most slaves were used up until the point of death (if male, especially in the mines) or used for a few years forced prostitution (women and children) until they too died of exhaustion, mistreatment and disease. The people who fled the cities in time became healthier and longer-lived after the cities fell apart. The people who did not flee the cities in time were killed or enslaved during the Migration Period and likely have no living descendants today.
>>18589362it didn't really, you just paid taxes to a german guy instead of a roman. all the legal systems and structures stayed the same (except for in britain).you have to wait until like the 700s for things to change and become distinctly non-roman.
Little until Justinian unleashed his barbaric pillagers upon the land
>>18589392>Dark Age Italy remained a fairly wealthy developed place while Britain turned into a complete war torn shithole.I think that's the wrong way to view things. Post-Roman Italy suffered from apocalyptic conditions just as much as Britain did, if not more, particularly over the course of the 6th century. They were constantly invaded from all sides; first by the Goths (who formed a martial elite over nearly all of Italy), then by the Byzantines (who captured southern Italy with a lot of bloodshed and deprivation for the local population), and finally by the Lombards, who had the most staying power and basically resettled the northern third of the country while asserting control over the middle third. In the middle of all of that, they also got the Justinian Plague, which killed more than a quarter of Italy's remaining population. So if you were a healthy, strong, lucky man born on a farm near Rome in 500 AD, you'd spend your childhood under the rule of an Ostrogothic warlord. If you avoided offending the warlord's henchmen (who had a penchant for corruption, theft and violence), you'd have to deal with a Byzantine invasion in your 30s, which caused massive population movements and economic disruption. While that was going on - it lasted for years - there was also a plague that wiped out about a third of everyone you knew. But you were healthy, strong and lucky; you avoided the plague entirely and managed to land on your feet when the Byzantines established control over the area surrounding Rome. As you were getting old, approaching the venerable age of 70, there was news from the north: another Germanic tribe were rampaging through Italy, calling themselves the Lombards. Their warlord declared himself King, and as you died in your sleep at age 80 your family would be paying annual tithes to a German warlord who answered to another German warlord who called himself the Duke of Tuscia.
>>18589392Another thing to consider is that Britain, for most of its inhabitants, wasn't terribly different until Anglo-Saxon settlement began in earnest. See the first part of >>18589405. In Britain, this was more pronounced than almost anywhere else. Particularly in western Britain, the areas that would later become Cornwall, Wales and Cumbria, the Roman occupation was very superficial. Most people lived much as they had before the Romans showed up, and even trade using Roman coins didn't become nearly as widespread as it was in southeastern Britain or mainland Europe. So for people there, not a whole lot changed.It was apocalyptic for those in eastern Britain when the Anglo-Saxons began to settle in large numbers, though. They were pretty much driven out, killed or enslaved, to the point where there are almost no Brythonic/Romano-British male lineages left east of about the Southampton-Leeds line.
>>18589392>Life was hard and anyone who tells you otherwise is full of shit.Only for city dwellers.For the overwhelmingly majority of people working as simple peasants on farms life actually improved as the paid less taxes to the new governments.
>>18589362Everything went to such shit, the alimentation was so bad animals actually became smaller. There are papers that prove this look it up.
>>18589453Taxes are only one aspect of it. Warfare was constant, education broke down, and infrastructure wasn’t maintained. Those farmers often relied on water diverted from aqueducts. Those same aqueducts were a favorite target of marauding armies. They took their goods to market on Roman roads that slowly crumbed into muddy pits as they went hundreds of years without repairs. It would not have been a pleasant time to live in until Charlemagne came along and things began to improve a bit.
>>18589572>Warfare was constant,Not any less constant than in the late roman empire it was actually more peaceful depending on the region>education broke down,The peasants never had any formal education in the first place.>infrastructure wasn’t maintained.The peasants already maintained all their own stuff and those paved roads were just replaced with dirt roads that worked fine And very few farmers were actually reliant on aqueducts to provide water for their crops.
>>18589616>Warfare wasn’t constant in the migration periodDo I even need to respond to this comment? Come onAs to the other retarded shit you just said the estimated literacy rate in the Roman Empires varies but many scholars cite a figure of around 15%. This includes the rural population and is obviously higher then it was in the early medieval period >durr why are paved roads and running water better then muddy trails and dirty streams>very few farmers relied on aqueducts Completely false
>>18589630>Do I even need to respond to this comment? Come onYes you do because he's right, romabooism is a disease
>>18589411*German guy who speaks Latin, dresses like a Roman general and whose only distinctive feature is that he believes in some heretical form of christianity
>>18589652You are claiming that the dark ages didn’t have constant warfare. Fuck off with this dog shit b8.
>>18589572>Warfare was constantWarfare was constant in the Roman era, too. If you look at the last century of the Western Roman Empire, there was a rebellion by Magnus Maximus in 383 AD, a civil war in 392-394 AD, a war with the Goths in 395-398 AD, a rebellion in Africa in 398 AD, a multi-party civil war in 407-415 AD, another war with the Goths in 416-418 AD, a revolt in Hispania in 419-421 AD, a war with the Vandals in 422 AD, another civil war in 423-425 AD, another war with the Goths in 425-426 AD, another civil war in 427-429 AD, a war with the Franks in 428 AD, a war with the Vandals that saw the loss of Africa in 429-435 AD, another war with the Goths in 430 AD, a rebellion just outside of Italy in 430-431 AD, another war with the Franks in 431-432 AD, another civil war in 432 AD, a war against the Burgundians in 435-436 AD, a major rebellion in Gaul in 435-441 AD, another war with the Goths in 436-439 AD, another war with the Vandals in 439-442 that saw the Romans lose control of Carthage, the lynching of an Emperor in 455 AD, another war with the Goths in 456 AD, a Vandal invasion of Sicily in 456 AD, another civil war in 456 AD, another civil war in 461 AD, another war with the Vandals in 461-468 AD, more wars with the Goths in 462-463 and 468-471 AD and another war with the Goths in 473-475 AD.All of these wars would have involved several groups of thousands of armed men traveling hundreds of miles, camping in or near towns during winter, constantly pillaging for food and valuables, raping for pleasure and killing and burning the towns of all who tried to resist. If anything, outside of northern Italy and eastern Britain, the fall of the Roman Empire likely saw a reduction in the level of violence committed against noncombatants during wartime. Smaller warbands, after all, can carry less plunder, and local warlords had a personal interest in keeping productive villages and farmsteads going instead of letting them get plundered and burned.
>>18589630>>18589616 is right, though. Education was only a concern for clergy and the urban upper middle class (particularly those involved in clerical/administrative work) and nobility; this already excluded most of the population during the Late Roman era. Also, as I pointed out in >>18589405, most people in the Roman Empire lived much as they had for centuries and were not regular users of Roman infrastructure. Aquaducts were meant primarily to deliver water from sources at higher elevations to basins/reservoirs inside cities; they were not used for irrigation by a vast, vast majority of farmers, as most farmers (1) could not afford the fees associated with drawing water from an aquaduct and (2) were nowhere near any aquaducts.
Archeological evidence clearly shows that life expectancy increased and (after the initial disruption of food imports) diets improved in much of post-Roman Europe.https://www.shh.mpg.de/1851461/agricultural-practices-in-italy-after-the-fall-of-romehttps://archaeology.org/news/2026/04/30/skeleton-study-reveals-life-on-the-frontier-after-the-fall-of-rome/Basically, during the empire, most food was produced on massive slave-worked farms in North Africa and a few other regions, and shipped to the rest of the empire, where it was sold by grain merchants or distributed for free as the grain dole. Sure, having safe trade routes was good for artisans but they were a small minority, most people were small-scale farmers who struggled to compete with imported grain at their local markets.When the empire collapsed, it meant the end of grain importation. For farmers in Europe, this was good news, as they now had a better market for their produce. No wonder that in the erly middle-ages, you start seeing the first real innovations in farming technology in centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carruca This was because 1. local farmers had more resources 2. there was as an increased demand so they started working more fields and figured out how to farm more effectively.Aditionnaly, diets improved because people less reliant on grain (most of the imported food was grain since it doesn't spoil while it is being transported) and started eating more vegetables and pulses.
>>1858969715% of the population was educated. This is more than urban elites>most peasants didn’t use Roman infrastructure Roads and aqueducts dipshit>The Romans constructed aqueducts throughout their Republic and later Empire, to bring water from outside sources into cities and towns>Aqueduct water supplied public baths, latrines, fountains, and private households; it also supported mining operations, milling, farms, and gardenshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueductYour are gay and your revisionist arguments are shit
