by Nick Corcos

Archaeologists may not generally appreciate that even as late as the medieval period, the countryside was littered with the highly visible remains of ruined Roman buildings. See Higgitt, J, 1973, "The Roman Background to Medieval England", Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd ser., 36, 1-15. For a more recent and wide-ranging survey from the same perspective, see Greenhalgh, M, 1989, The survival of Roman antiquities in the Middle Ages, London: Duckworth. One view, not universally accepted, holds that the overwhelming majority of Anglo-Saxon stone churches in England were constructed using material 'recycled' from ruined Roman buildings; see Eaton, T, 2000, Plundering the Past: Roman Stonework in Medieval Britain, Stroud: Tempus.

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