And the slow deterioration of Roman infrastructure such as aqueducts likely had an effect on quality of life in cities, Gautier says.
Populations of major cities like Rome and Constantinople shrank in this period. But Gautier believes rural life may have actually improved, especially in the largely bucolic British Isles. During the Roman period, farmers would have had to pay regular taxes to support the empire and local cities. But as administration fell apart, the tax burden likely diminished.
But Ward-Perkins says that archaeological evidence does suggest some scarcity of resources and goods for common people. As for the claims that societies took a step back in terms of science and understanding during this period?
Europe itself did maintain some practical technology, such as watermills. In terms of learning, Isidore of Seville, an archbishop and scholar, created an encyclopedia of classical knowledge, much of which would have been otherwise lost, in his massive Etymologiae.
The relative isolation of the British Isles also allowed people there to develop unique styles of jewelry and ornate masks, Ward-Perkins says. Some of these can be found today in the archaeological excavation of graves of Sutton Hoo in eastern Anglia, which included a Viking ship burial. While the Dark Ages may have started with the fall of the Roman Empire, the Medieval period, around the end of the 8th century, begins to see the rise of such leaders as Charlemagne in France, whose reign united much of Europe and brought continuity under the auspices of the Holy Roman Empire.
Although most scholars would agree that the so-called Dark Ages represent a distinct period throughout most of Europe, many of the assumptions that first made that term popular are no longer valid.
Even the most persistent idea that the period represents one of violence, misery and backwards thinking has been largely disproven. The last great pagan king, Penda of Mercia, was slain in battle in Monasticism — protected with royal patronage — gave the technology of the written word to the rulers of Britain, granting them efficient new tools: law codes, legal documents, written lineages, chronicles.
For the western and northern parts of Britain — those which had lain outside or only loosely within the Roman empire, and which had much longer traditions of Christianity — the obscurity persists for longer. But the little evidence we have suggests that these regions were also slowly drawn into a world that no longer looked so explicitly to the antique past for expressions of authority.
But what about the preceding years? How are they best described? The other is that to level accusations of obscurity at this period is to unfairly single it out and exoticise its supposed mystery. I have no great sympathy for either of these arguments. That this was accompanied by civil war and a long period of chronic instability is almost certain.
For the people who lived through this and were affected by it, these must have been grim days indeed. More troubling are the unthinking assumptions that underlie this criticism. And one of the least controversial things that can be said about the years between c and c is that they are indeed obscured by a marked lack of evidence. Yes, people in that time did and wrought wondrous things. But few of them are known to us — far fewer than in most other historical periods.
The Dark Ages may not be darker in this sense than the long ages of prehistory, but they are very dark indeed in comparison with the periods that precede and follow them. In any case, the existing alternative terms are all pretty dismal. Certainly there was migration in the centuries between c and c, and perhaps an unusually large amount though that is debatable. But a lot of other social and economic changes were going on at the same time, many of them arguably more important to the future shape of Britain and Europe than migration.
This label attempts to carve out a time span that straddles the collapse of the Roman empire in the west by reference to the changed but enduring classical civilisation of the Mediterranean. And so, unless we really want to torture ourselves with lengthy circumlocutions or default to the dry and unwieldy recital of dates, we find ourselves back in the Dark Ages.
Not because it is a perfect term, but because it suffers from fewer faults than the alternatives and is, when taken as a description of the available evidence, pretty accurate. Finally, it has one other important quality in its favour: the power to inspire the imagination. But for me, the many mysteries of obscured periods have an allure unmatched by the most voluminous archive. The struggle to understand scattered and difficult sources, the possibility of genuine discovery in a world where nothing can be taken for granted, represent an endless quest where everything is on the table to be interpreted afresh, and the deepest secrets still lie locked within the earth.
The idea of the Dark Ages spoke to me and still does, and it seems unfair to deny its allure to others — to those who might be drawn in by the shadowed corners of history, willing to take a journey in the dark to see what treasures might be found. The early Middle Age kingdoms thus lived in a very interconnected world and from this sprung many cultural, religious and economic developments.
Developments in learning and literature did not disappear during the Early Middle Ages. In fact, it appears it was quite the opposite: literature and learning was highly valued and encouraged in many Early Middle Age kingdoms. Across the Channel in England, around manuscripts survive dating to before These manuscripts focus on a wide array of topics: religious texts, medicinal remedies, estate management, scientific discoveries, travels to the continent, prose texts and verse texts to name a few.
Monasteries were centres of production for most of these manuscripts during the Early Middle Ages. They were created by either priests, abbots, archbishops, monks, nuns or abbesses. It is notable that women had a significant role in literature and learning at this time.
An eighth century abbess of Minster-in-Thanet called Eadburh taught and produced poetry in her own verse, while an English nun called Hygeburg recorded a pilgrimage to Jerusalem made by a West-Saxon monk called Willibald at the beginning of the eighth century.
Many well-off women who were not members of a religious community also had well-documented interests in literature, such as Queen Emma of Normandy, the wife of King Cnut. It appears literature and learning did suffer upon the arrival of the Vikings during the ninth century something which King Alfred the Great famously bemoaned. But this lull was temporary and it was followed by a resurgence in learning.
The painstaking work required to create these manuscripts meant that they were highly-cherished by the elite class in Early Middle Age Christian Europe; owning literature became a symbol of power and wealth.
In fact, it was a time where literature was encouraged and highly-valued, especially by the upper-echelons of Early Middle Age society.
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