Barbarian Europe & the Emergence of an English Identity

IN PREPARATION

Pen & Sword Books
Illustrations & Cover design by the author.

The Dark Ages’ is a label widely used to define the period of Western European history following Roman withdrawal from Britain in the fifth century until a time beyond the Norman Invasion of England in 1066. But it is somewhat of a misnomer. This unfortunate appellation dates back to the 1330s, when Francesco Petrarca, a Tuscan scholar, better known simply as Petrarch, defined the people of that age as being ‘…surrounded by darkness and dense gloom’. Thereby, the term ‘Dark Ages’ can be laid firmly at his doorstep. More properly the period should be referred to as the ‘Early Middle Ages’. The Dark Ages term stuck because of the scarcity of documentary evidence and the lack of any substantial archaeological remains.
The history of the period was not exactly dark, but it was indeed obscure. Apart from a few contemporary accounts like the Gallic Chronicles, writers like the historians Cassiodorus, Ammianus Marcellinus and Priscus, as well as later commentators like Bede and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, almost all were penned or compiled in Latin by monks and religious clerics in enclosed monasteries and abbeys. Even then, many of the Chronicles that were compiled by well-meaning clerics during this period were based on earlier writings, often decades or even centuries after the events to which they purported to be witnesses had occurred.Their veracity can be easily called into question.