This article attempts to bridge those various historiographical, disciplinary and evidentiary gaps, in order to tell one of the major but forgotten stories of this time and place: the collapse of Rome's metal economy in Britain and the related and subsequent deskilling and impoverishment of people living in its eastern half. I describe the ways people went about procuring metal in the generations both before and after the ancient economy's implosion in Britain. I then go on to investigate changes in metal production which began to take hold in England in the sixth and seventh centuries, and argue that access to freshly smelted metal and the ability to produce it helped drive important economic and social transformations, including the development of a steeply hierarchical society which came to take hold in Britain's Anglo-Saxon culture zone in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries. In short, metal supply sits at the heart of two important stories that can help us to understand the years between 350 and 600 --- the calamitous material impoverishment of post-collapse Britain, and the gradual re-establishment of a hierarchical society which began to take place within a century or so of the collapse.
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