Professor Rob Collins

Because basically he'd be opening the back door, as it were, for potential threat and invasion, which is then going to undermine his authority.

So it's actually in Constantine III's self-interest to make sure that that frontier is secure.

So I think there are between the evidence of the lack of coins and also just thinking in terms of, you know, what does a usurper want?

Power in a stable basis of followers.

Then there's a logic to not denuding Hadrian's law of its soldiers.

At the same time,

Maybe he's tried to appoint a Dux Britanniarum who is a political appointee and loyal to him, or maybe he's happy with that Dux.

These are the unknowns, the things we don't know.

It would be great if we found some sort of journal of the Dux Britanniarum, Dear Diary, 408, Christmas Day, no letter from Constantine III.

We don't have any of that sort of source.

But there's nothing that shows, archeologically, some sort of immediate collapse in the fifth century.

And this is where I think it's really important with the archaeological evidence to acknowledge, you know, different interpretations, how different people might interpret different evidence.

And the underlying challenge of that is dating.

How do we date change over time?

What do we see as the rapid collapse and falling apart of a building?

What do we see as a longer term decline?

And so there are, you can imagine different processes.

So if we think, uh, if we kind of do a thought exercise and think about, right, well, let's say the army is stripped from Hadrian's wall in Northern Britain and all the forts are kind of maybe not necessarily abandoned.

There might still be people living around, but the soldiers are taken away.

What does that mean?