Okay, welcome to the British History Podcast, my name is Jamie, and this is episode 146,

the concentration of power and wealth.

So today I'm going to be talking in largely broad strokes, and that's because I want to

give you a forest view of what we've been talking about over the last couple seasons.

See the thing is that something strange has been happening in our story.

And to explain that, I'm going to briefly touch upon the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons

simply because I want you to see how much things have changed.

So as you might remember, when we began on season two, we saw Roman Britannia in collapse

and the introduction of a new cultural group that was a mix of farmers and mercenaries.

And we call them the Anglo-Saxons.

And these people were frighteningly poor.

The Romanos British were not living the high life, at least not like they were under

Constantine, and some of them certainly were in dire straits.

And we do see plenty of evidence of public spaces being left to decay and others being

deliberately toward down.

And we also saw a shift from the heavily industrialized lifestyles where a single town might

only produce one particular product to a more kind of localized economy.

And we also saw rise in defensive structures, likely in response to raids that came along

with the destabilization that the region was going through.

So yeah, the Romano-British were not doing super well, but even compared to those people,

the Anglo-Saxons were really in a rough spot.

And as an interesting contrast, not all of the Romano-British were doing terribly.

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