In Defence of the Dark Ages

Why it’s okay to say bad things were bad

We live in an exciting time for fans of early medieval history.

For decades the period between the fall of the Roman empire in Britain and the rise of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (roughly 410–600AD) has been especially murky. It is almost the last great, unknown frontier in British history — certainly the most well known and talked about.

But over the last ten years or so, we’ve seen big developments largely driven by archaeology. It now seems there was no great Anglo-Saxon invasion at all, and that the Romano-Brits were not slaughtered and replaced on a large scale. What seems to have happened instead is a cultural shift: into the void left by the Roman exit, Germanic culture stepped.

The people of what would become England began trading more with Germany and Scandinavia than with the continent; there was a long but steady flow of migration from those regions, and in a process that is still a mystery to us, the language changed from Latin and Brythonic to a Germanic amalgamation that we call Old English. The population, however, remained largely the same.

So there was no massacre after all.

Alongside these revelations, however, has come a belief that we shouldn’t call it the ‘Dark Ages’ anymore. The proponents argue it casts an unfair light on a period where we know people were engaged in incredibly elaborate (and complicated) metallurgy, and were producing beautiful…