I'm Patrick Weiman, and this is the Fall of Rome.

In the year 446, the inhabitants of Britain, beset on all sides by marauding barbarians,

sent a pleading letter to the Roman general Iatius.

Quote, to Iatius, Thrice consul, come the groans of the Britons.

The barbarians drive us into the sea.

The sea drives us back on the barbarians.

Between them two kinds of death faces, we are either slaughtered or drowned.

The Irish came from across the sea to the west.

The Picts came south through and around Hadrian's formerly Great Wall, and the Saxons came

from the North Sea coast of the continent.

They plundered and burned, pillaged and raped, killed and took captives.

Without the Roman army to defend them, the Britons were helpless to beat back the attacks

of these marauders.

Within a generation, most of what remained of Roman Britain was lost and gone forever.

In the first episode of this show, I emphasized the importance of taking a regional approach.

The Fall of the Roman Empire happened in much different ways and different places.

Some regions barely experienced anything we would call a disruption until the year 500

or even later, while others were barely recognizable in comparison to their former

selves by that day.

No province of the former Western Roman Empire went down faster or harder than Britain,

and no region was more fundamentally or more deeply transformed by the processes that

we are calling the Fall of the Roman Empire.

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