Paul Cooper
speaker
254 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 5 Jun
Paul Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The baths silted up.
We get a sense of the complete falling apart of the house of cards that is a society.
People stopped mining iron ore.
They stopped smelting iron.
They stopped hammering it into nails.
And this meant that people now had no hobnails in their shoes.
And people began to scavenge in the Romanized cities for things like nails that were left behind.
Yeah, and no horseshoes means you don't want to ride your horse on the stone roads that the Romans had built.
So the roads slowly begin to overgrow as well.
People go back to using paths and tracks.
So people stopped making the large pots that you would use to cook a stew, which meant that people began eating roasted meat rather than stews.
The Romanized kitchen gardens that had grown things like parsley and coriander were no longer around, and these crops disappeared from the British diet.
Yeah.
And, you know, for a while in Romanized cities like London, you get a kind of enclave of Romanized citizens still almost going through the motions of living this Romanized life.
But around them, the city is depopulating.
Yeah.
We get a fascinating layer of something called dark earth appearing in the archaeological record, which historians believe is the remains of kind of like wasteland sites where previously there'd been a building.
Once the roof falls in, the walls collapse, brambles and ivy and elder and so on take roots in those sites, leaving a layer of mulch which becomes that dark earth.
So it shows that parts of the previously densely populated city were becoming overgrown, full of vegetation.
It must have been quite an eerie sight to walk through the streets of somewhere like London or Colchester and see, you know, that it was becoming a ghost town.
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