The Historic Dark Ages
In many respects this period seemed a relapse into barbarism, and the interval from the fifth to the eleventh century is sometimes called specifically the Dark Ages. But in a juster view it was the germinating season: the seeds of modern civilization, cast into the soil, were quickening in new institutions and new nations; so that when we see modern society in the fifteenth and sixteenth nations; so that when we see modern society in the fifteenths and sixteenth centuries assuming the fixed shape which it still wears, we must remember that it grew into that shape in the antecedent thousand years.