Last week, when someone told me they were working on a project about the early medieval origins of the English language, my eyes lit up. “I love the Dark Ages!” I said. “Ah well, that’s normal,” he replied. “You reach your 40s, you develop a fascination with the Dark Ages.”
It is a source of great sadness to me that this seems not, alas, to be true. There has been endless public discussion of whether some men are obsessed with the Roman Empire (plus a fair bit of private discussion with my mates, which suggests that some of us are). There’s been relatively little such discussion of the Anglo-Saxon invasions or the Heptarchy. And while some normal, well-adjusted men may compare themselves to Julius Caesar, no one ever compares themselves to Gildas, the monk who (probably) wrote On the Ruin of Britain. This is a shame, as someone who mastered that tone could make an absolute killing writing op-eds for the Daily Mail.
At any rate, while my growing interest in Rome and its fall has been mirrored among other men who can no longer get out of a chair without grunting, my parallel interest in the mysteries of what happened on this island after that fall seems more unusual. On some level, I assume, this is a response to bereavement: having lost a partner, a future and a life, stories of a civilisation being rebuilt following a catastrophic collapse resonate, somehow. If this isn’t just me, do let me know. Perhaps we can form a support group.
I can already feel furious emails being typed, so I should probably note that many historians hate the label “the Dark Ages”. It’s Eurocentric (much of the world, including the former Roman world, was doing just fine in those centuries, actually). It implies a value judgement (about the cultural achievements of the period, and about the relative value of light and dark colours). At times, it’s also been extended to cover the entire millennium or so from the fall of the Western Empire in the fifth century to the arrival of the Renaissance around the 15th. Better, critics say, to use less loaded terms like “early medieval” or “post-classical”.
But “dark” may quite reasonably refer less to the era itself than to our ability to see it. We know that the Romans pulled out of Britain some time around 410. We know St Augustine arrived in Canterbury on a mission of conversion circa 597. Of the 187 years between, though – a period long enough to separate us from the earliest work of Dickens and the coronation of Queen Victoria – we know almost nothing. It’s all very well saying that there was nothing dark about what was going on in the eastern Mediterranean in that period. But in Britain the phrase “dark age” seems entirely apt.
That, I think, is part of this era’s appeal. There’s something haunting about the idea that we had urban civilisation, with sewers and central heating and so on, then lost those things for over a thousand years, and have only a dim sense of how that happened. The aforementioned Gildas is not only hysterical, but also demonstrably wrong, erroneously identifying the second century Hadrian’s Wall as a fifth century defence against the Picts. Yet he remains one of our most important sources, by virtue of being one of our only sources. It’s like trying to reconstruct our own time from a single, furious Peter Hitchens column.
So much even of what we think we know of these centuries may simply be wrong. I mentioned the Anglo-Saxon invasions and the Heptarchy, the era of seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which gradually coalesced, after several decades of being smacked around by Vikings, into England. But invasions of any scale have proved hard to find in the archaeological record, and there may never have been a period of precisely seven clearly delineated kingdoms. Our main source for much of this is Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. But he was far removed from the sub-Roman period as we are from the early Georgians. He may not actually have known what he was talking about either.
We may never know why the cities of Roman Britain declined; whether the Anglo-Saxon arrivals were big or small, the product of peaceful migration or violent invasion. But one thing we do know is that economic and diplomatic relationships that had been there for centuries collapsed, and the result was that institutions people had taken for granted began to fall apart. Look around, and try not to have nightmares.
[See more: Why we’re stuck in Ancient Rome]
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