The term "Dark Ages" is not used by historians any more. And it's doubly odd because these rules, from Charlemagne's times, were the very cause of the "Carolingian renaissance" of the eighth and ninth centuries.
Is there a good source where I can read more about this or can you elaborate a bit? Why don’t they use the term and what term is preferred instead?
Edit: Oddly enough, the Wikipedia article[1] includes a few sentences/references about how and why the term is no longer considered accurate by historians (it “mischaracterises the Middle Ages as a time of violence and backwardness“) yet Wikipedia continues to use the term “Dark Ages” as the article title.
> yet Wikipedia continues to use the term “Dark Ages” as the article title.
The article is about the history of the term "Dark Ages", why shouldn't that be the the title? If you go by link counts, there are 741 links to the Dark Ages page but 2582 to the Early Middle Ages instead.
> Why don’t they use the term and what term is preferred instead?
"Dark Ages" is itself somewhat ambiguous. In its original incarnation, it referred to the entirety of the time between the "Fall of Rome" (itself hard to specify) and the Renaissance, as its early users saw Rome as the pinnacle of human civilization and looked down on everything following the end of Rome as unimportant, at least until they themselves were bringing back the splendor of Roman civilization. Later scholars were instead nostalgic for the High or Late Medieval civilization, so instead they narrowed the term to exclude their favored era, resulting in it referring to only the Early Middle Ages (to ~1000). Some people go further still and exclude the Carolingian Renaissance from the Dark Ages, pushing its end date further still to 800--there's no neat alternative term for this range, but Age of Migrations covers much of the themes.
In any case, periodization of that time period of European history is immensely challenging. The decline of the Roman Empire brings with it a decline in the written record and our knowledge of events in the period diminishes drastically, only recovering with the Carolingian Renaissance. Furthermore, the Roman Empire doesn't fall in an easy cataclysmic moment (there's no Battle of Hastings here), but instead disintegrates at different rates in different parts of Europe, with the final vestige only falling in 1475 (Principality of Theorodo). Meanwhile, there are several overlapping themes going on: the rise of Post-Roman kingdoms (such as the Franks and the Lombards), a mass migration of peoples (including the Anglo-Saxons and various Slavic groups), the Viking Age, the birth of Islam, the Great Schism between Eastern and Western Christianity (and other schisms within those sects!). For the boundary between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern, you can point to "about 1500" and note that several major changes happen about the same time (including total conversion to gunpowder weapons, Protestant Reformation, discovery of the New World, and the Fall of Constantinople)--that doesn't exist between Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Though seriously, thanks for writing this up. This is a great explanation of how periodization says more about the "periodizer" than it represents some sort of objective truth about history, magically divorced from the political reality of successive historical writers. Debunking bad history is important... in this field (CS) I've definitely met my share of so-called "STEMacists" whose mental model of history sometimes seems to be derived from Deus Vult memes... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The key gunpowder weapon I'm talking about here is the arquebus, which simultaneously incorporated three critically important innovations: the long barrel, the matchlock trigger [1], and the shoulder stock. The first weapons having all of these simultaneously starts to crop up around 1480-ish in Iberia. Effectively, these weapons are the earliest weapons that operate rather similarly to the modern military rifle.
Prior to gunpowder weapons, the primary infantry weapons are going to be some variant of pike or a warbow or crossbow (if you're an archer). Earlier hand-held gunpowder weapons than the arquebus exist, but they are more unwieldy weapons and as a result don't supplant the dominant infantry weapons. But when arquebuses show up, armies change fast. By about 1520, every European army is using them. I don't have firm stats on the rest of the world, but by the early 1600s, pretty much every conflict--including indigenous peoples attempting to resist European colonizers--involves both sides using gunpowder weapons. Pikes weren't rendered obsolete until the development of the bayonet in the 17th century, but the infantry units needed to mix pikemen and arquebusiers to be competitive, basically modern combined-arms doctrine but happening 500 years ago.
[1] In this case, a "match" is a burning piece of rope that is used to ignite the primer. The key innovation here is that a mechanism is used to hold the match so that it can be inserted into the primer by moving a trigger.
"Dark Ages" is arguably applicable to the time around 500-800, although the other problem is that there's also another commonly referred-to time period known as the Dark Ages, the Greek Dark Ages, from around 1100 BC - 750 BC.
I can recommend Norman Cantor's Civilization of the Middle Ages for a really great review of the different views of what happened during and after the deterioration of the Western Roman Empire. They range from "a time of violence and backwardness" to "a lot of people may not have noticed." It's really a great book overall and easier to read than you might expect.
He also wrote Inventing the Middle Ages which sounds like it might be more focused on your question but I haven't read it so I don't know.
I haven't read it and am no expert, but from the summary it seems like Huizinga believes that the increasingly elaborate customs of the aristocracy in the late Middle Ages was a coping mechanism to deal with the intense violence of the period.
Cantor says almost the opposite, that they developed these customs as a marker of their high status and a way to exclude others after they had outlived their original role as the fighting class once cavalry charges were no longer a dominant tactic. This is one of the rare moments in Civilization where the specifics of weapons and warfare are discussed, anyone looking for information on crossbows and lances will be dissappointed.
The article simply uses the term in the title so it can discuss it.
Historians prefer the Middle Ages or the Medieval Period. Since this is relatively Europe-centric, historians are trying to go in the direction of "global Medieval studies", to form connections among various regions of the world.
Our periodization is largely Eurocentric. The very long lineage of metallic/tool-based terms like the Bronze Age run into the obvious problem that bronze arrived in different regions at different times.
If the people looking to learning about this subject have the “dark ages” misconception, is it so bad to make it easy to find via search and then explaining the nuances of the misnomer?
Yes the point of using "Dark Ages" was to point out the dissonance between the detailed instructions on how to manage an estate and the idea that this was a period of total chaos & disorder
This doesn't match my experience at all, so can you expand on it? All of my medievalist friends all hate the term and both of the Wickham books in my possession have disclaimers about it in the intro.
> 1. It is our wish that those of our estates which we have established to minister to our needs shall serve our purposes entirely and not those of other men.
It seems like anti-moonlighting clauses are as old as time.
> 9. It is our wish that each steward shall keep in his district measures for modii and sextaria, and vessels containing eight sextaria, and also baskets of the same capacity as we have in our palace.
For those curious as to the meaning of this one, sextaria is a unit of liquid measure (a pint) and modii is a unit of dry measure (approximately a peck).
So basically they are aiming to have a standard set of measures, which would be important for commerce or tithes of materials such as crops.
I wonder to what extent this is like a statement of corporate leadership principles or actual instructions and tasks that would need to get done. As in, if I were a steward would I skim this, roll my eyes, tuck it away somewhere and get back to work, or would I run out and start counting geese to make sure I was in compliance?
Prison in this time period wasn't really a punishment thing, it's what you did when you were trying to ransom someone you captured in battle mostly.
Punishments would have mostly been fines, with some corporal punishment and of course capital punishment.
No, peasants had rights which varied immensely depending on their exact status and where they were. Still the aristocracy couldn't just kill them or take their stuff, and one of the primary responsibilities of the aristocracy or other landholders was adjudicating disputes between peasants. So if we were two free peasants who got in a fight, we might end up in court with the lord or their representative deciding between us, with one or both of us possibly facing fines.
I don't think that is a good metric, in a couple different ways.
First you can't universalize the tax rate of serfs like that, and serfs don't represent all peasants/lower classes. We are talking about hundreds of years across a huge area. Different social classes also paid different taxes, a villein's obligation to their lord in a village would be different than a free peasants. Much of what a peasant paid was also in kind, either in the form of crops or work for their lords estate.
The "history" in the linked article in uncited, so I am not sure where the author is getting that figure from but at best it represents the lives of a specific group of people, not some statement across centuries and countries.
> they shall accept no gifts from them, neither a horse nor an ox, nor a cow, nor a pig, nor a sheep, nor a piglet, nor a lamb, nor anything other than bottles of wine, vegetables, fruit, chickens and eggs.
Remarkably similar to most corporate anti-corruption policies of today. I've generally seen wording "No gifts over $50". So a bottle of wine is fine as a gesture but anything that's expensive enough that it likely influences decision making isn't allowed.
I find it fascinating how much further that society went toward looking like a corporation. It's almost as if everyone born was an employee by default, and the referenced "freemen" were the exception, being non-employees. And this document could be an acquisition contract where the acquired CEO tried to keep his company intact under the new owner (hence the words about not allowing the new owner to reassign people to different jobs).
I'm not joking, and I know basics of history and feudalism, but I always found the definitions too abstract to grasp intuitively. Sure there is always the evil feudal lord oppressing the poor peasants. It's too hard for me to grok how that society worked, so I find it helpful to find modern structures that are close to isomorphic to feudalism for better intuitive understanding. "Ah it's like a company but each piece of land and everyone on it is automatically in it." That's a lot easier to see.
So I'm seeing that this is from the 8th century, but they make reference to corn and pumpkins, which were imports from North America. What's up with that?
"Corn" in UK English has historically meant cultivable grains in general, not "maize" specifically as in North America.
Also, "pumpkin" is a standard English translation for the Latin and Greek terms that, if you want to be pedantic, were just "gourd". See e.g. The Pumpkinification of Claudius [0]
I think it’s a mistranslation. OF. popon -> pompon -> pompion, meaning a large melon or (later) pumpkin. I guess it was translated as pumpkin rather than melon.
Corn just means grain. The shift to being equivalent to "maize" is later, and I think not universal in English-speaking dialects (and obviously only happened after the Columbian exchange).
Pigs would have been expected to forage in the forests,
for “mast” - acorns from oaks and other trees
- and anything else a pig might eat. Oak trees tend to produce a small amount
of acorns in most years, and much more in a “mast year”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_(botany) .
Before refrigeration, meat animals might be kept alive
as long as there was stored fodder to feed them, or
slaughtered when the weather turned colder, or
slaughtered when time and other tasks allowed for
preserving meat by salting or sausage-making.
So, think of this as an end-of-harvest status report
on when the crown court can expect to start getting
sides of bacon delivered, and how many of them.
