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.