The Dark Ages?

What we know about events in the Middle Ages depends upon a surprisingly narrow source base. We need to imagine a stage with ninety per cent permanently in darkness. An occasional spotlight flickers upon this corner or that, suddenly revealing details and colours that we might not otherwise imagine existed. A vague half-light enables us to discern some broader outlines, a few darker and lighter shadows. For the most part, however, we depend upon inference and imagination to establish what is there. It is no coincidence that those trained as medieval historians have occupied a disproportionately significant role in both MI6 and the CIA, precisely because the medievalist’s training ensures that the bare minimum of detail is employed to the maximum effect in intelligence gathering. For the Middle Ages, a very large part of our intelligence emerges from one key source. Our spy network on the past is dominated by churchmen, which is to say by monastic chroniclers and the occasional bishop or parish priest, setting down their accounts of past events, virtually all of them men, most of them with a particular line to toe in respect to their own monastery or locality and their wider allegiance to the Church. Such men wrote not so much to illuminate the broader stage, to flatter kings, or to celebrate secular society, but for quite other purposes, above all to demonstrate the unfolding of God’s plan for mankind, with the Church or churches as God’s principal instrument.