Soil care (roots)

I have an area in my garden which has a few rather weedy herbaceous plants, on which nothing that I
attempted to sow (nothing extravagant, just Alyssum, parsley etc.) would grow, and most of it didn't
even seem to germinate, but in pots in the same area they did.
So of course I dug up a square metre of soil and found that it is absolutely choked with roots, so
that the volume of fibrous root which I took out was almost equivalent to the volume of the soil! I
imagine the previous owners just never dug it over, so we could be talking 30 years of roots!
I have been told that this dead root material makes the soil far more acidic, and was clearly stopping
any development of plant life.
I am wondering whether to sieve the soil because it is so choked. Do I need to be so conscientious
about removing existing roots? Even if I spend an hour on one small square, every time I pull up a new
forkful of soil there is new root material to remove, and at this rate it will take until Christmas to
dig it over as I'm doing at the moment!
Any ideas or experience of this sort of thing?


Anthony
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