3 ms·

Isn't it less documented than the following time, and therefore containing more surprises as we keep literally digging into the past?

• jkingsbery 6y ago
  So, for example: what I learned in school is "the time between 500-1500 (roughly) did not have a lot of written records" and that was the end of story. Since reading on my own, I've found: * Really, the time where there weren't any written records were mostly concentrated to 500-750 or so. Even though I had learned about Charlegmagne in school, I hadn't really learned much about all he did to encourage reading and writing (obviously, to the extent that it was possible given the cost of vellum at the time). The amount of written records were also not uniform geographically. As the original article says, Scandinavians wrote less than people in souther Europe. * There actually are decent-for-pre-modern records of England from the time around the Vikings. The story in school was mostly "Things were great under the Roman empire, then things fell off a cliff and stayed that way for 1000 years." In reality though, there are the Domesday Book or the writings of Venerable Bede (just to mention two examples) that record events of the time. Of course, there wasn't the printing press so it is technically true that things were less documented, I think this is just less so than commonly believed.