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Light on the dark ages.(Britain in the Middle Ages: An Archaeological History)(Book review)
Britain in the Middle Ages: An Archaeological History, by Francis Pryor; Harper Perennial, 2006, $24.99.
IT WAS THE WORST of times--life was said to be nasty, brutish and short. Even the words, such as medieval, let alone dark ages, are taken to mean any awful sort of society, squalid, ignorant, oppressive and dull. According to some it lasted from the dawn of mankind until the end of the Menzies Era.
And it was the best of times, of devoted craftsmen building soaring cathedrals, unquestioning, irradiating and seamless Catholic faith, jolly millers, a co-operative, organic society where all ranks worked together for the greater good until the horrors of the Reformation and then capitalism split it asunder.
Or--surprise, surprise--it might have been a lot like any other time. This last is the undramatic picture of the Middle Ages depicted in Francis Pryor's Britain in the Middle Ages, which follows on his earlier books Britain BC and (early) AD (reviewed in Quadrant in April 2006).
The amazingly intensive archaeological work of the past fifty and especially the last twenty or so years has brought to life and better understanding this period of nearly 1000 years, replacing centuries of guesswork and ideological hopefulness.
What were the Middle Ages? The definition I was taught at school seems as good as any--the millennium between the fall of Rome and Columbus crossing the blue in 1492. Others Eurocentrically put the end as the invention of printing a few decades before Columbus. Pryor opts for the more specifically English dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in the 1550s.
Conventionally the Middle Ages have been divided into the early period, the so-called "Dark Ages" and the later period beginning in the eleventh century, in the Anglo-Saxon world specifically with the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Pryor's big point, however, is to bring the Dark Ages back from obscurity to become much more a normal part of British history:
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Source: HighBeam Research, Light on the dark ages.(Britain in the Middle Ages: An Archaeological...