Laudator Temporis Acti

Tom Shippey, Beowulf and the North before the Vikings (Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2022), p. 26:

Modern historians do not like the term “Dark Ages” for the post-Roman centuries. Oxford University Press has even banned its authors from using the phrase, presumably because it seems disrespectful. There are two good reasons for keeping it, however. One is that it’s dark to us. We know very little about the post-Roman period in western Europe: one of the first casualties of the failure of empire was widespread literacy.

The other is that it must have felt pretty dark for many people, as the result of—to quote Professor Ward-Perkins of Oxford’s book The Fall of Rome—“a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries.”⁹ Many voices will be raised immediately, pointing for instance to the discoveries at Sutton Hoo, and saying, “how can you say such a thing? Look at all that lovely jewellery!” Ward-Perkins’s point, however, is that civilization does not depend on an ability to produce aristocratic luxury items, but on low-cost, high-utility items like pots, tiles, nails, and, of course, coins—all of them familiar in the Roman world but scarce, poor-quality, or non-existent in places like Britain for centuries after.

9 Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 87.