Peter Heather

The local landowners make their peace with Gothic power.

This is the Visigothic kingdom.

We have a letter collection from the first generation of that kingdom, and a lot of those landowners are still there.

That's right.

But there are land confiscations.

This has been much debated in the last scholarly generation.

And there was one very popular line of argument when I was doing my finals back in 1981.

Large book coming out two months before I did finals.

Thank you so much.

Which has argued that they didn't get actual land.

They got tax revenues.

But actually, the evidence for that is really ropey.

And it's quite clear that you get land expropriations, particularly in the Burgundian kingdom, a little bit in the Visigothic kingdom, and so on.

These people have fought quite hard to be here.

They've suffered from the Huns.

They've fought Roman armies.

They expect a payoff, and they want landed capital.

Yes, absolutely.

The unravelling of the imperial system would have felt different in different places.

And certainly in Northern Gaul and in Britain, the archaeology and actually the historical evidence, although it's not great from Britain, makes it very clear that you're looking at something much more apocalyptic.