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Ok, we’ve been getting pretty deep into the weeds and have been getting farther and farther from a coherent story. On the one hand, the culture is the story, but on the other hand it’s hard to get attached to a story if you forget who we are talking about and the people involved. So I thought that now would be a good time to tell a story about a community that was living in the early post-Roman era. After all, I’ve been spending a lot of time telling you how things weren’t as bad as you imagine so I might have given you the impression things were fine. They weren’t. Especially in the early parts, people were sickly, their lives were bleak, and it was a scary and violent time to be alive. That isn’t to say that people in the Roman era, especially the poor, were healthy and happy… it looks like they were also in pretty dire straights when compared to their Iron Age kin. But I think it’s important to put some of this stuff into context and remember that, while things weren’t necessarily as awful and culturally devoid as people might imagine, things were still pretty rough. Especially in the early parts.
