Were The Dark Ages Really That Dark? | King Arthur's Britain | Chronicle 

Dark Ages were so dark in the 5th century the sun was darkened and we almost slid back into ice age again.

You mean crap then?!

Your right on track there.....

That's how i understood it too.

Amanda McCallum your absolutely right,

Correct

Wrong… “The 'Dark Ages' were between the 5th and 14th centuries, lasting 900 years. The timeline falls between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. It has been called the 'Dark Ages' because many suggest that this period saw little scientific and cultural advancement.” Not due to its lack of recorded history, that was simply a result.

@@kevwhufc8640 Not at all correct

Much more helpful ,Kimberley, best wishes from the wirral, site of the great battle of Brunanburh/Bromborough 937AD,Wirral,namechecked albeit in Welsh in the medieval poem of sir Gawain and the green knight...E

Do you mean, more or less - - “Late Antiquity” = From around the end of the 4th Century to the “Early Medieval”, and - “Early Medieval” = From “Late Antiquity” to around the end of the 11th Century?

I refer to the dark ages as The Sexy Time.

No matter what term you use I'm pretty sure it was a pretty crappy time to live for most people.

One certainly never hears of it again until the Crusades.

I've recently read that Tin was an important component in the making of Bronze. That the Bronze Age ended because of a shortage of Tin. A little simplistic perhaps, but still shows there was a market for Tin.

@@WanderinPat more than just a market, tin those days was what oil is today! Weapons, tools, even coins were made of bronze and bronze needed tin to get it.

The local legend is that Jesus came to England as a child with his uncle Joseph of aramethia, who was a merchant.

so i guess being clever is a relatively new thing

@@internetexplorer7303 I am sorry if I offended. I meant I didn't realize word games go back that far. I know they go back into England's culture to the Anglo-Saxons. I have read them in the original Old English, but I didn't realize they were even older. I am sorry, I did such a poor job at expressing that.

@@historybuff7491 you explained yourself well. Someone is just taking the mic

@@historybuff7491 it's okay dude. people will always be petty, just move on.

@@internetexplorer7303 Pleb

Quite agree, recommend the Max Adams book,the King in the North about King/Saint Oswald who Tolkein based Aragorn on....cheers /slainte...E

The Irish were busy saving civilization..

There’s a great book on this: How the Irish Saved Civilization.

@@eamonnclabby7067 Interesting - in the Bible, the "King of the North" is DAN, Assyria.

The most appropriate take-away.

And they were Black!!!!

​@@steveo4099 no, Tyrone, you were not kangs

@@ryanparker4996 😄 🤣 😄

They were not entirely ignorant before the Romans came.

@@casteretpollux Nope, they were not.. But they werent Nearly as advanced as the Romans .

@@fetus2280 It's hard to imagine what pre-literate societies were like. We know that very advanced knowledge of the movements of the planets and stars was developed. People had to rely on memory and learning by listening and by rote. I've met illiterate people who hold hundreds of song lyrics and tunes in their heads and huge amounts of information on travel routes and the location of specific resources that most of us would have to look up in a written record. Of course the advantage is with those with literacy and written records. The druids knowledge was lost as it was kept arcane and they were eliminated by military power and their science replaced by religion.

@@casteretpollux Exactly. Celts were excellent craftspeople. Stone age inhabitants built stone circles that were used as calendars with accuracy. It gets a little tiresome when we come across people that say ancient cultures could not possibly have built Stonehenge, Pyramids etc.

@@gryph01 Stone age inhabitants were not Celts.

Yes the term dark ages is wrong and people should not using it.

I dunno, ever heard of the 536 AD event? If Procopius was right, the dark ages were REALLY dark, especially for Rome, in that year.

@@meilinchan7314 but not elsewhere in africa, asia and near east the time was one of flourishing growth and change certainly not "dark"

there's nothing wrong with the term Dark Ages....this guy just has a hard on in EVERY Video about "IT'S NOT WHAT YOU WERE TAUGHT IT WAS" YAWN

@@darrylknight2675 i just call it "medieval times"

True. But in this show he has more than 3 days to shoot the show.

Ya he is the best!!

This show is bogus.

@@goodtoGoNow1956 no, you

@@CaptainAMAZINGGG This show is bogus

Exactly. It’s not “misnamed” it’s that people’s preconceptions about the name are inaccurate. I was always taught that it was called dark because we don’t know much about it. But I also think that it greatly serves the evolution agenda to paint the earlier generations as less intellectual/reasonable than present times and that might be part of why that view of the era has become so standardized.

This perception is incorrect, it's just not generally very exciting for the average person because surviving texts are largely legal or clerical. Even if we go with the very England-centric "Dark Ages" term (which scholars often dispute specifically because it focuses on England and ignores the rest of the world; the Eastern Roman [Byzantine] Empire was trucking along just fine, and that's not even getting into the Arabian Peninsula or Asia), we have texts ranging from ~600-900 CE from prominent legal or religious leaders like Ethelbert, King Alfred, Theodore the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Bede, and we need only to cross over to the European mainland to find a multitude of other texts from authors during the reign of Charlemagne in the 8th and 9th centuries, Jordanes writing about the Goths in the 6th century, Gregory of Tours writing about the Franks also in the 6th century, there's a Saint's Life text written in the 7th century, Pope Gregory's Dialogues are from the late 6th-early 7th century, and even the most famous Old English poem, Beowulf, is attested to some time between the 8th and 11th centuries. It's not an overwhelming abundance of textual material, especially in comparison to what we're used to from the modern day or even just following the invention of the printing press, many of the source texts are fragmented or anonymous ledgers or lists of laws, or commonly disseminated liturgical texts. But we don't call the ancient Sumerians part of a "dark age", even though we know far less about them than we do of Europe in the early middle ages.

Homer was born in 750 BC, how is greek dark ages produced him?

Kimberly Perrotis - Well said.

@@alexkorneev6469 because greek had high civilizations centuries before homer, like the mycenean culture in bronze age , where the troyan wars are happening and minoan cultures and by the time of homer the greek civilizations had declined but was reborn in times of classical greece around 500bc and from than on the greek had about 2000 years of high civilization until the fall of constantinople and end of the roman empire then the west got reborn with the renaissance at around 1500ad and the greek had their dark ages which ended after their independence in 1821

Seeing as how there's no actual proof that Homer even existed, your analogy falls a bit flat. Beyond that, there's no mention of an Arthur or Artutius anywhere in the records, and he only ever appeared in literally sources around three hundred years after he supposedly lived. It is far more likely that Robin Hood was real than it is that Arthur ever was. Regardless of whether these men actually lived or not, the literature and lore surrounding them has impacted western society in a significant way. They needn't have been real for their stories to have had a very real effect on much of how we perceived morality and honor, which is far more important that whether or not they ever drew breath.

@@SkunkApe407 They may be archetypes

Yes you're right about that, my point exactly. I kept wondering the entire time while watching this (overall very interesting) documentary, why a flourishing post Roman British society with such a high degree of literacy didn't produce any notable writing, except for some poems on a stone slab and the writings of a single Christian Saint!?

That isn't true at all. We have an abundant of things in storage. They are Just waiting to be studied. In most cases we aren't allowed to study them because those which we have delved into process our way of thinking to be wrong. For example: a great many things prove we didn't come out of Africa but traveled into it. We even have massive DNA studies done by the US military that they won't make public. Some of us are allowed to view compartmentalized bits of the DNA, but not all of it all at once. Because the story of our humanity and how long civilizations have been here would be changed forever. These things need to come out slowly.

Also, if people couldn't read no one would have been writing books.

@@phillipstroll7385 If these studies are hidden from the public, how could you know it all? Did you look them up on Shittypedia? Why would they even hide such major discovery from the public? How could you say that we are not ready for the new information?

@@Kegan1993 I have two PhD's and a JD. Parts are made available for us.

Thank you! and stay tuned ❤

Make a video : Dark Ages

👏🏻🧑🏻‍🦳

typical, nasty RU-vid comment

I hope youre not having a snipe at Time Team

Because I think in almost 200 years after Rome left, we know of about 10 actual individuals who were from that era - we were and are literally 'in the dark' as to what actually happened post Rome.

Because most of Europe went dark after the fall of Rome. The British Isles seems to have been an exception.

Because it was backward.

@@sgtbuckwheat The ignorance and backwardness was not supposed. It was real

Because the forces that should not be do not want us to know the effect that the Messiah had upon mankind.

Because not all documentaries are done by Francis Pryor ;) :p who is AN ABSOLUTE GEM, and so full of life and vigour! As someone with issues paying attention and assimilating information, I effortlessly take in what francis puts down, every time. He's one of my favourite archaeologists, and favourite people tbh. He is lovely. I so appreciate him. :3

How was it only Britain talks about Dark ages, other European countries did fine back then.

@@PanglossDr because you only know British history. It's hard not to call a period "dark", when the maritime trade is made impossible and volcanic eruptions bring failing crops and famine.

@@Alarix246 What makes you think I only know British history, you are completely wrong.

@@PanglossDr Them other European countries were fighting for control of Britain at that time

@@UICeinnselaig the philistines wanted to destroy the Hebrew Israelites (Jacob, not Esau)

Well, if by barbarians you meant vikings, they were no more barbarians then the native population

Yes. This documentary bugs me. So wrong.

More to come!

Thank you!

Good luck with your research!

Kind of like Covid19

Omg :')

Philistines, Edomites, Amorites, Moabites and Canaanites all hate the Hebrew, who they seek to extinguish but simply cannot. Reading the Bible helps.

More like, how barbarians defeated a damn Empire lmao

Or actually they weren’t barbarians. That’s just what the Romans called everyone who wasn’t Roman

@@venomm4563 I never said they were barbarians. The mud refers to the Roman empire

There is not contemporary documentation of Arthur. Writings about him were centuries later.

England was the first Christian country, the first churches were in the 1st century

Alot of them. It's believed the original English are now the welsh, and the English are of Roman decent.

Gildas writes about the departure of the Romans from Britain The British rebellion against Rome how the British raised an army and marched on Rome The destruction of Britain by the Romans after the rebellion The invasion of Britain by the Scots The building of Hadrians wall by the British and not the Romans The jutes , Saxons , Angles how they were invited to defend the island from the invading Scots Gildas is worth a read

its trash

I believe the narrator is a little bit biased too. The claim that post Roman Britain was the cradle of Western civilization is pretty bold if you ask me. That also applies for the suggestion that the Anglo Saxon invasion never happened as such in the first place. Furthermore I can't help myself to have the feeling that he conveniently tries to establish a connection between some sort of a post Roman British identity and a modern day British identity (imposed by the English though).

Gammon and proud 👍🇬🇧💕

Your ideas don't seem to be supported by the evidence. Strong communities, trade routes, educational system--maybe the framework was all there pre-410 with Rome, but it is against human nature not to go on doing things more or less as they have done, gradually changing but even then evolving forward

@@karaamundson3964 Just because one claims that an invasion didn't happen because the idea of an of invasion doesn't fit ones beliefs or because one has a very narrow minded definition of an invasion to begin with, doesn't justify to rewrite history based upon very little evidence, which seems hardly enough to prove it. Things didn't change from one day to another. However, they definitely have changed in the longer term. Without the support of the Roman Empire life as it was under Roman rule couldn't be sustained, and therefore it was inevitable that things would have changed over time, and so they did. And after a brief period of time new invaders gradually took control over the country. That's all we know so far.

Decay you say, From where i stand "Dark Ages" seem particularly bright. 1) Magna carta which forms the foundation of democracy was written during the "dark ages". 2) Dark ages saw the largest agricultural boom in europe before combine harvester arrived. 3) Most of the monuments like Basilica de Notre'dame were built during "dark ages". 4) Universities such as oxford and Cambridge which form the bedrock of modern scientific thought were established during "dark ages". 5) Steel was discovered in west during "dark ages". 6) Western armies developed plated armour, the best armour during its time during "dark ages". 7) Romanesque and Medieval Gothic Art developed during "Dark Ages". 8) Charlmagne was made the first Holy Roman Emperor during "Dark Ages". 9) All major kingdoms and empires accepted the guidance of the Roman Catholic Church. 10) During dark ages, the Roman catholic chutch was the largest religious authority in the world, where even kings were disciplined for misbehaviour. 11) Late "Dark Ages" saw succesful repeal of Islam from Spain, Portugal and succesful defence of Greece and Hungary. 12) Templars developed modern banking during late "Dark Ages".

The Catholics later preserved a lot of 'pagan', alchemical and occult knowledge until the reformation

Technology has turned old evidence into new fact.

Cahill writes about the Irish Celts, but Ireland is almost completely missing from this channel. English exceptionalism, perhaps?

I agree, to a point. Western Europe had a decline in written records. Technology development continued elsewhere. Eastern Roman Emlire (Byzantine), the Levant, Muslim nations continued to use Roman records and improve on them. Germania tribes had exposure to Rome and it's technology. The question that should be examined is whether they felt the need to use Roman technology.

You are misusing the term “narrative.” Narratives of history are composed of facts. Imposing a narrative is how all history has always been told and learned because history is a series of interconnected events. Having said that, our perception of history is not accurate. The word perception allows for the concept of error. Writing and technology declined but that doesn’t mean that everyone sat around depressed doing nothing. There is beautiful art and storytelling that came from this time period that demonstrated not all was gloom and doom as term “Dark Ages” implies and has often been taught. The point is the term is too wide a paintbrush and many historians and scholars have been arguing for decades a move away from that term.

@@ronaldchevalier9804 thank you.

The people actually watched Roman structures deteriorate -- helped destroy the in some cases -- all while having no clue at all about how they were actually constructed and so, unable to replace them. If that is not backward, what is? It is like a "dystopian future" seen in the past. This documentary is trash.

I agree with your point.