A DARK AGE BEACON
AT THE BEGINNING OF the fifth century A.D., the people of the province of Britannia found themselves living outside the borders of the Roman Empire for the first time in more than 350 years. The previous centuries had been prosperous ones for the citizens of Rome’s most northwesterly territory, but their circumstances would soon change radically. The diverse population, made up of native Celtic Britons, the offspring of Roman soldiers, and immigrants from elsewhere in the empire, faced an uncertain future. The collapse of Roman Britain ushered in a period known in the popular imagination as the Dark Ages. It’s an era commonly thought to have been characterized by economic breakdown, cultural deterioration, and mass invasion by pagan Germanic peoples such as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. After the dissolution of a central Roman ruling body, Britain began to fracture politically into several small kingdoms. Few written sources date to the time, making it one of the least documented and least understood periods in British history.
Hundreds of years later, medieval writers who chronicled early British history portrayed post-Roman Britain as a mystical time of warlords and epic battles, of monsters, dragons, and wizards. It was also the age of King Arthur,Cornwall at Tintagel Castle, a place inextricably intertwined with Arthurian legend, have revealed new evidence about life in post-Roman Britain that seems to contradict the traditional Dark Age narrative. Archaeologists now believe that here, in one of the most remote places in England, a settlement unlike any other thrived from the fifth through eighth centuries. As the new story of Tintagel shows, this era in Britain’s history was anything but dark.
