The Dark Ages: Worst PR move in history?
Astute observation or exaggerated farce? The Wunderkammer condenses almost 700 years of complex history so you don’t have to do all that reading.
In 383 AD the Romans had decided they’d have enough. Britain was cold, it was wet and the fucking Scots would just not leave them alone, even after they built that big wall. The usurper to the throne, Magnus Maximus, withdrew troops from Northern and Western Britain that year, and it was the beginning of the end.
Around this time, the Roman Empire was beginning to realise that it could no longer defend itself from internal threats, rocked as it was by civil wars, political instability and economic troubles; and to make matters worse, the rise of Germanic tribes in Western Europe posed external threats too. With its forces spread thin, and Britain ultimately just a soggy grey island on the edge of the empire, it was time to throw in the towel. After Magnus Maximus’ troop withdrawal soft launch, the Roman’s exited Britain in dribs and drabs, probably still hoping they would regain enough force to retake Britain when the situation stabilised. In 402 Emperor Constantine III removed all able Roman Soldiers to France; then in 410, taking the hint, the Romano-British expelled Roman magistrates from Britain. Roman Emperor Honorious could not spare forces to retake the island while fighting a full-scale war on the continent with the Visigoths, and ceded governance to local authorities on a temporary basis. This temporary measure turned out to be pretty permanent.
Imperial power in the wind, Roman Britain has officially come to an end. In many ways it had ended years before, as Britain's geographic distance from the sunny Mediterranean made it an excellent place for pretenders and usurpers to imperial power to cosy up and gain support away from prying Roman eyes. This was the first time however that Britain was truly on its own.
Following the Roman’s Irish exit, urban life was in sharp decline. Infrastructure was collapsing as maintenance was abandoned, and without a centralised authority there was a mad scramble for power which led to the splintering of Britain into many warring Kingdoms. And if that wasn’t enough, now that Britain was theoretically ‘up for grabs’, Denmark was considering putting in an offer…
The period after the end of Roman rule up until the Norman Conquest of 1066 (probably the only event in the history of the world that could claim to be best remembered from a tapestry) is mired in fraught political alliances, wars, bloodshed, and kings with names which are difficult to read or pronounce. Welcome to the Dark Ages.
Records from this period are difficult to find and hard to interpret. Some are propagandist, others were written long after what they describe, still more are probably just boring. What we can ascertain however, is that before ancient Brits could even kick back and enjoy it, crack open an amphora of wine, sing a little Celine Dion, they were confronted by the real set back of the loss of Imperial gravitas: vulnerability.
First in line to claim their free new island were the Irish raiders and Picts from Scotland, presumably because they were the closest and first to hear the news. Then came the Angles, Saxons and Jutes from Northern Europe, settlers who made themselves so at home that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has become our most notorious nickname. This period around 500 AD is also about the period of time that rumours of a certain Once and Future King has been traced back to. Someone squatting unexpectedly in your back garden is reason enough to invent a legend I suppose. The turmoil caused by various tribes jostling for space and land would certainly lead to fervent wishes for stability and unity, especially for the average Briton who had no truck with that kind of nonsense.
What King Arthur couldn’t protect the ancient Britons from however was the threat from the north. In 793 AD the Scandanavians arrived. One quick trip to raid St Cuthbert’s monastery then turned into a love affair with pillaging British settlements that lasted almost for 300 years. There was a brief period of respite in 878 AD when King Alfred of Wessex defeated the Viking army at Edington and humbled the Viking ruler Guthrum into a treaty, called the Danelaw. This was broken in in 980’s however when the temptation of British silver became too much for the Vikings to resist, and under mega-disaster King Æthelred ‘Unraed’, peace turned to raids, which turned to full on invasions.
These on again, off again raids only ceased for good in 1066 when professional Frenchman William the Conqueror defeated the last great Viking Chieftain, Norwegian king Harald Hadraade at Stamford Bridge, not to be confused with the Saxon Harold Godwinson, who got poked in the eye at Hastings. This double-bill of French military victory led to the end of Viking terror, a disparate England and the Dark Ages themselves, but sadly it did not make The Gallery of Great Battles at Versailles Palace, so maybe it wasn’t that special after all.
So why is this period of history remembered for being darker than the colour grading of a Netflix Original series? This epithet is mostly due to a supposed period of decline in culture and science. Perhaps the Britons and their rolodex of invading forces were too busy fighting about who gets to wear the big shiny hat to indulge in writing prose, building monuments or figuring out how to prevent people from dying before the age of 35?
Certainly, in the face of the Roman’s reputation in the court of public opinion, the early Medieval age suffers by comparison. We associate Romans with aqueducts for clean water supply, underfloor heating, welfare benefits, roads and a functioning postal service (Insert easy-win Tory Britain joke here). In comparison, Medieval peasants lived in wooden huts and wore unfashionable dirty tunics and stupid leather hats, or something.
In reality, early Britons had been Roman for roughly 350 years by the time the empire withdrew, and it was a hard habit to kick. Though maintenance standards certainly went down, evidence suggests Roman infrastructure was still used, roads in particular. Much of early modern London was still outlined partly by Roman walls in the 18th century, infrastructure had clearly lasted to some extent. It was probably the sheer number of invaders that really changed British tradition from Roman to Anglo-Saxon, the original lifestyle influencers.
In fact, the first uses of the term ‘Dark Ages’ came about from scholars who compare this period to Ancient Greece and Rome, which were and are often considered the pinnacle of civilisation, even though they didn't have the internet and therefore couldn't play Flappy Bird. Roman entertainment was often more heavily based in fights to the death against wild beasts than we might be comfortable with today, and if your preferred form of lighting when electricity is unavailable setting flames on Christians dipped in oil, how civilised can you be? (Don't answer that).
The post-Roman, pre-Norman interlude in Britain saw its fair share of bloodshed, raiding and Danish or Germanic diction, but it was also a time where the church truly began to gain in power (why did you think there were so many monasteries for the Vikings to raid?), agricultural practise prospered, and even the likes of algebra were advanced in the East. It was in this time that former Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne standardised writing: introducing punctuation, spacing between words, and upper and lower case type as a given. Some of these changes may not thrill, but they are still building blocks towards life as we know it today.
Perhaps only a people like the Romans would think of luxuries like underfloor heating much earlier than seems entirely reasonable, but we can’t discount the little things. After all, without word spacing and punctuation, how would you have made it through this?