This chapter reviews some of the principal issues which currently engage the attention of historians working on the barbarians and their place in the processes known cumulatively as the 'Fall of Rome'. It shows that, contrary to commonly held views, Britain cannot be viewed separately from the continent, as something of an aberration or special case: the Anglo-Saxons were no more different from the Franks than the Franks were from the Ostrogoths or the Vandals, and maybe less so. By 500 AD all the Roman provinces of the West had become barbarian kingdoms: the Franks and Burundians in Gaul, the Ostrogoths in Italy, the Sueves and the Visigoths in Spain, the Vandals in North Africa, the Anglo-Saxons and the Britons in Britain. Romans paid taxes, so becoming a barbarian could bring with it tax exemption. In the post-Roman legal codes the barbarian element of the population was often given legal privilege, one reason to adopt a barbarian ethnic identity.

The majority of the Tervingi decided to abandon dieir homelands, and under the leadership of Alavivus and Fritigern petitioned to cross die Danube and enter the Roman empire. With this crossing, and die officially approved settlement of die Tervingian Goths in the Balkans in 376, the narrative of the barbarian invasions and settlements can be said to have begun. This period of invasion can usefully be distinguished within die larger history of barbarian migration and assimilation into the Roman world. An edict appended to the Liber Constitutionum reveals a subsequent set of allocations, probably made in the 520s, in which land was divided equally between Romans and barbarians. Early information on the first settlements, therefore, is very slight. Since the empire of Valentinian III was shored up by die barbarians, it was possible to drink that little had changed since the days of Theodosius I.