patrick.net

I like the Freemasons. Many of the founders were Masons.

Also, all the wrong people hate them.

Finally, 500-1000 were Dark as Fuck, that's readily provable by the collapse of Commerce, Settlement Patterns, loss of literacy and technical knowledge, Organization, etc. that only slowly recovered, mostly during the "High Middle Ages". 1/3 the population disappeared in the century after the sack of Rome. Near total disappearance of coinage from everyday life; you can find Roman coins all around Hadrian's wall, the very far end of the Roman Empire, Legionaries were making small purchases of bread, beer, and bedtime fun with copper and bronze coins.

When you go from UNwalled cities of over 100k to a buncha little tiny villages on a hill protected by usually a wooden castle (which is why most don't survive, and most of the famous 'castles' of Europe are actually Renaissance and beyond Follies never meant for Defense or were long since converted into prestige centers), chances are, things have deteriorated.

So much was lost that Romano-Britons made shittier, less advanced pottery than the pre-Roman Britons under the Druids. A very ordinary kraton (big wine storage pot) was buried with an 700s era Anglo-Saxon king, the kind of pot a slave or servant could have broken in Roman times without a beating, it had been so common. Shellfish and Tile Roofs for Slaves in Umbria, the central mountains of Italy during Roman times, driven all the way up on maintained roads and regular delivery; no shellfish and thatch roofs for almost everybody after 500 and not again for many, many centuries later.

The Merovingians were all kinds of F'd up, too.

Whenever people say "Dark Ages were great, they made toys" and the toys are from like 1300s Germany. The Dark Ages are 500-1000 and they sucked, but of course things improved towards the end.

Nor is it an "Enlightenment Plot to undermine the Time Period", 1300s writers like Petrarch referred to the time as a "Dark Age" long before the Enlightenment or even the Reformation

There IS a lot of bullshit about burning Classical Literature (99% of which is lost, and that's just the things we know are lost due to references in surviving material, snippets and fragments, and lists of books), but there are some truths about priority changes. There's a lost work by Archimedes about a steam novelty machine that was scratched off and copied over by a saint's life, found with laser analysis of old documents.

There is also bullshit the other way, like Monks "Inventing" wind and water mills known and used not only by the Romans but as far back as the Babylonians, and employed en masse, especially waterworks powered by Romans moving water via aqueduct and tunnel many miles to power overshots running grain mills (Barbegal). We wouldn't see the kind of engineering employed on this kind a scale (like those of the Romans in Gaul or Iberian Silver Mines) until the Victorian Era.

Which, by the way, is confirmed by Ice Core samples (mass smelting of Galena hit a peak, prior to the Modern era, in Roman times)

TL;DR: There was definitely a Dark Age ~500-1000, and Clodivingus was not happy where he was, damnit.

https://t.me/DeepDives/48475