Kindness in an Age of Decline

What Late Roman Britain Can Teach Us About Living Faithfully Today

At what point, during a civilisation’s fall, do the people realise what’s happening? No one woke on the morning after Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman Emperor in the West, was forced to abdicate and said, “Rome has fallen! I wonder what comes next?” Civilisations generally don’t collapse in a single night. More often, decline is lived over the span of lives — an ebbing of customs, institutions, and shared norms. People adapt, often without recognising what’s happening, until what once seemed permanent is gone.

In late fourth-century Britain, did families look at their crumbling walls, dry fountains, and fading institutions and wonder if the end was near? The evidence suggests a slow unravelling. Bathhouses, once symbols of prosperity, were turned into workshops. The bustling streets of cities fell silent after the legions withdrew. At Caerwent, massive walls were raised against raiders, betraying how precarious life had become. Decline wasn’t an event but a season that stretched across decades and felt in daily anxieties and small disappointments.

In such a season, survival depended less on imperial decrees than on the fabric of ordinary life. Families, farms, and villages became the true centres of resilience. Some undoubtedly clung to the fading vestiges of Rome — villa owners living among symbols of past grandeur like Miss Havisham in her wedding gown. Most were preoccupied with enduring another winter: coaxing food from the soil, guarding children from danger, clinging to the rags of hope.

The sources we have — a few texts, scattered coins, excavated sites — tell us little about how decline felt at the level of daily life. Histories preserve the movements of emperors and armies, but they’re silent about what it was like to adapt to shrinking farms and abandoned towns. How did those people keep communities intact when their traditions began to fade? How did they think of themselves once Rome no longer defined their world?

Here in mid-Wales, where I now live, the land itself bears witness to that precarious age. At the end of the eighteenth century, workmen uncovered the remains of a Roman bathhouse in what’s now a quiet field. Excavators found fragments of mosaic floors, the hypocausts that once carried heat beneath them, and outlines of rooms where Romano-British folks once gathered to bathe and talk. Today nothing is visible above ground. Sheep graze where water once steamed. Stones that once framed walls were long ago carted off to build cottages or field boundaries.

The grandeur of villas and the comforts of Rome haven’t endured. Nor have the memories of those who once lived there. To dwell in Wales, amid its hillforts and Roman ruins, is to live among forgotten stories.

In A Pilgrimage of Paradoxes, I reflected on this sense of fragility:

I think the hillforts are what most capture my imagination. Some of them are in incredibly remote places, now sheltering sodden sheep instead of valiant warriors. Most of them are nothing to look at anymore and have long since been robbed of anything that might tell archaeologists much about their history. But they’ve excavated enough to know that some of these sites were occupied for hundreds of years. That simply astounds me. These barren sites gradually melting back into rock and turf and now hardly noticeable to anyone except the discerning observer were once inhabited far longer than the United States has existed. Some mark over a thousand years of history now forever forgotten. Think of the lives lived, the loves shared, the hopes expressed, the gods worshipped, the stories retold, and the deaths mourned that now leave no trace whatsoever. Those places once housed long-enduring communities as rich in memory, customs, and politics as our own that now have totally and irrevocably vanished. Stand in a hillfort pondering its long-forgotten history and you quickly realise how ephemeral so much of civilisation is. In places like Pen-y-crug, Twyn y Gaer, and Crug Hywel, hillforts near where I now live, thick-time has long ago been swallowed up by the timelessness of the landscape.

This impermanence — of lives once rich in memory now lost to silence — lies at the heart of my new novel, Tillers of the Soil, published on 1 November by Sacristy Press. It’s set in late fourth-century Britain, among a family who endure uncertainty not through victories or decrees, but through the humbler virtues of fidelity, neighbourliness, small acts of kindness. It’s my attempt to explore through fiction the sentiment I quoted above.

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Wendell Berry has long reminded us of the importance of these things. In novels such as Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter, and in so many of his essays, he shows that flourishing rests on patient stewardship of land and community rather than on wealth or power. Kindness, for Berry, isn’t an optional virtue. It’s the condition by which households endure, fields remain fertile, and traditions are handed on.

“Kindness is not a word much at home in current political and religious speech, but it is a rich word and a necessary one. There is good reason to think that we cannot live without it.”

James Rebanks, farming in the Lake District, echoes this in The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral. Continuity in farming, he shows, depends not on economics or policy (which often undermine good farming and local culture) but on the daily neighbourliness of families and neighbours. A lamb rescued, a dry-stone wall repaired, a field tended with care: such gestures preserve both landscape and livelihood. Rebanks is frank about decline — soil erosion, the loss of memory, the fragility of rural life — yet insists that small gestures of care redeem the land.

Robert Macfarlane approaches from another angle, through language and landscape. In Landmarks and Underland, he explores how words, stories, and places themselves are vessels of care. To recover a forgotten word for a stream, a hill, or a sudden change in weather is a kindness to memory. It resists erasure. It helps us remain in continuity with those who came before.

Together, these writers remind us that kindness isn’t weakness but strength. It isn’t peripheral but central — the ground from which resilience grows when the world around us is collapsing.

I mention these three authors because I their writings resonate with the late Roman world I’ve tried to capture in Tillers of the Soil. I wanted to explore their themes fictionally, but in a world on the verge of such total collapse that it’s almost impossible to translate fidelity to one’s roots into a legacy handed down to one’s descendants.

By the fourth century, Rome’s grandeur was fading. Roads were growing dangerous. Raids were threatening safety. Money was quickly losing its worth. When things broke, it became harder to replace them. Yet what endured were ties of kinship and neighbourliness, the tending of fields, the telling of stories that preserved memory—even if as folklore and legends.

Kindness in that world was strength in the small: families taking in orphaned children, households caring for labourers in hard times, neighbours offering food and shelter to the displaced. Such acts couldn’t halt Rome’s retreat, but they created the conditions in which people could endure with dignity.

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Depressingly, Tillers of the Soil has a resonance with our times that it didn’t quite have when I began to write it. Many now feel like we’re living in a time that’s marked by decline. Institutions once thought unshakeable now seem brittle. The norms and order of our world feel pressured to the point of breaking. Public trust weakens. Shared purpose dissipates. In such a climate, it’s tempting to look for sweeping solutions or grand leaders. Yet perhaps the deeper lesson of history — and of Berry, Rebanks, and Macfarlane — is that resilience comes from fidelity to each other rather than through strong leaders and political dominance. Perhaps the good in our world is preserved less by high politics or culture wars than by simple neighbourliness.

That takes kindness. To be kind in such a time is to resist cynicism. It’s to care for the neighbour beside us, to honour the stories we tell each other, to tend the land beneath our feet. Kindness won’t stop decline, but it teaches us how to inhabit it faithfully. And in so doing, we plant seeds that may yet grow into futures we can’t yet imagine.

Towards the end of my novel, the paterfamilias Armoricus speaks to his son about the importance of old stories. “That’s the wonder of it,” he replies to his young son’s question about how new stories arise:

“New stories grow from the old ones, just as the crops we plant grow from the seeds we save. Where do you think the seeds come from, hmm? Without the old stories, there would be no new ones. And when people retell the old tales in their own way, the stories live on. They branch out, like trees in a forest, each unique but all rooted in the same soil.”

That was true for the tillers of the soil in late Roman Britain. It may be just as true for us today.

Tillers of the Soil is available for pre-order now. My hope is that, for readers who love history, landscape, and the fragile strength of community, it might offer not only a glimpse into the past but also a hopeful word for our unsettled times.

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