Michael Wood’s ‘In Search of the Dark Ages’, focuses on England.  According to Atheist and Protestant propaganda, all was dark, miserable, deformed and ugly in the Christian West, when the White-slave-built Roman empire rightly and finally perished, until the magical explosion of ‘science’, ‘art’ and ‘medicine’ in 1520, generated from the ‘Reformation’. 

This benighted and illiterate view of reality in turn gives rise to the myth of the Moslem golden age – a cult whose empire much impressed the Protestants, later Atheists and the Romantic and ‘Humanist’ movements.  This inimical, ridiculous and dangerous rewriting of history has now led to a society who firmly believes that the Church which funded invention, technology, art, science, mathematics and naturalism, was the enemy of progress.  The Muslim cult which did not invent anything including algebra and the astrolabe; the progenitors of the modern world along with Protestants.  Without the Catholic Church there is no civilisation.  Paganism in any form – Roman, Greek, Muslim, Nazi, does not lead to ‘progress’ but to stasis, slavery and self-destruction.

In Michael Wood’s very good book on the ‘Dark Ages’ in England he dismisses the claim that they were dark, with ‘dark’, usually viewed in the modern lens as dense, stupid, uncivilised, barbaric, without culture, refinement, art, education, ‘science’ and society.  Sutton Hoo archaeology reveals the 6^th century to be one of great wealth, trade, art and rebuilding, not just of war and invasion.  The golden court of Athelstan in the early 10^th century rivalled that of another great Christian court in the 9^th century that of Charlemagne in France.  Sundry inventions led to the ‘agricultural revolution’ of the 9^th century, regarded as important in human development as the Industrial Revolution of the 18^th century which was also formed, built and invented by Christians. 

The Church in England was gifted with land from the Normans and before them the Anglo-Saxon King Alfred and his successors Edward and Athelstan who was the first true King of England.  The land became studded with impressive structures many of which housed public schools, hospices, hospitals, clinics and of course scriptoriums which kept alive the ancient teachings and knowledge and associated libraries – many burnt by pagans such as the Vikings, and later on Protestants and Atheists.  A fact you won’t hear much of in academia today.  The first universities were developed around monastic institutions.  It is rather curious that modern eyeglass wearing academics are so dismissive of the medieval Church.  Eyeglasses were invented by Catholics in the 11^th century.  Universities in the 12^th.  I suppose they don’t understand irony.

Politically, the entire modern conception of democracy, ‘rights’ and responsibilities, division of powers, Parliament, freedom, private property ownership, and the use of law over violence to resolve grievances, emanates from the Medieval period.  There is no disputing this.  In England, this is clearly stated as far back as 1086 in the Norman’s ‘Domesday book’, or a record of every asset in England:

“…in Domesday Book. In fact the survey of 1086 was in the Old English and Carolingian traditions, and the mechanisms which made it possible were in existence by 940. Recent work on Domesday Book has shown that the Conqueror’s surveyors relied not only on the sworn testimony of the local juries but on written material, ‘ancient rolls in the royal treasury still preserved with the [Domesday] survey of all England’ as a twelfth-century historian put it. These ‘Winchester rolls’ may have gone back as far as Athelstan’s day.”

In other words, the well-built Anglo-Saxon state had the attributes of a modern state, making a collection of assets and wealth possible.  In no other country in Europe was this attempted.  The Normans were able to assemble the Domesday book because the country was so well organised, socially and politically.  It was not ‘dark’ and uneducated or moronic.  But highly logical, social, developed and advanced.

“Politically, it has been said, the Normans were masters of their world. But the foundations of their England were Anglo-Saxon. Just as Domesday Book can be seen as a product of the Old English system of local government and the Old English royal administration, so the England it portrays is Anglo-Saxon England, the society built up on the ruins of Rome over 500 years and decisively shaped by Offa, Alfred, Athelstan and the others. It was, for its time, a remarkably unified country (at least south of the Humber) with a vernacular literature unmatched in Europe, a standardised form of Old English, and sophisticated machinery of government, chancery, coinage and law.”

The end result of the Medieval ages is the creation of the Modern.  Without the Catholic Church there is no modern world.  None.  Greece, Rome, Islam – all slave empires which did not produce the quota of inventions, ideas and structures which led from the ancient to the Modern. 

“It had created, too, under royal patronage, a great Christian Latin culture whose artists included the anonymous masters of the wonderful books from eighth-century Northumbria or late tenth-century Winchester and Ramsey. In Bede it not only produced the greatest historian of the Middle Ages, but the thinker who perhaps more than any other gave form to the identity of the English people, the gens Anglorum. This idea we can trace through Alfred’s preface to the Pastoral Care, Althelstan’s laws, and the Anglo-Saxon chronicler of Ethelred’s day with his identification with the English people as a whole, eall Angel cynn.”

In today’s un-Enlightened world, truth is a thought crime.  The pagan empires including Islam and to a lesser extent Rome, retarded and corrupted civilisation.  Only the Church, in the most difficult eras imaginable, beset by social collapse (Rome failing); the invasions of the Huns, Magyars, Moslems and Vikings; stood fast and strong against the tide of uncivilised barbarism, creating magnificence that astounds the modern tourist today.  It is not an accident that the Blast Furnace was invented in Christian Europe in the 11^th and 12^th centuries.  No other civilisation provided the belief, the certainty, the rationality, the confidence to develop such technology.  Tearing that culture down, depreciating it, mocking it, ignoring it, flailing it, will mean the end of Western Civilisation.