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Essay on How "Dark" Really was the Fifth Century in Britain?
A dark age is a time without management, without trade, and without any sense of society. It is a time of everyone for him or herself. During a dark age, mere survival is the only apprehension. No one has the leisure for any higher activity, including keeping records. That is why a dark age is dark. Its principal feature is that we know nothing of what took place in it. A dark age is a melting pot when the old, corrupt and exhausted institutions of a failed society are finally broken down and destroyed. Something new and better suited to human needs can then be built up in their place.
The Dark Ages is the popular name for the centuries that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire in Western Europe. This was by no means the first Dark Age. Such episodes are common throughout history, and have occurred on every continent. In western and northern Britain, around the western seas, the end of Roman power saw the reassertion of ancient patterns, i.e. continuity of linguistic and cultural trends reaching back to before the Iron Age. Yet in the long term, the continuous development of a shifting mosaic of societies gradually tended (as elsewhere in Europe) towards larger states. Thus, for example, the far north-western, Irish-ruled kingdom of Dalriada merged in the ninth century with the Pictish kingdom to form Scotland.
The story of early Britain has traditionally been told in terms of waves of invaders displacing or annihilating their predecessors. Archaeology suggests that this picture is fundamentally wrong. For over 10,000 years people have been moving into and out of Britain, sometimes in substantial numbers, yet there has always been a basic continuity of population. Before Roman times, 'Britain' was just a geographical entity and had no political meaning and no single cultural identity......
