Abstract When did the Early Middle Ages begin? When did they end? Is this just the usual euphemism for the Dark Ages? Were the Dark Ages dark in point of evidence or in point of humanity? Or both? Will this lecture be at best the lecturer whistling to keep his courage in a dark tunnel, peering for light at the end of it? These must be the questions, if not on the lips of the polite, at least in their minds. Let me start with the beginning and end. Many would say that the beginning lay in monasticism and ascetic movements, which seemed to reverse the civic values of antiquity, and in the west they might point to the island monastery of Lérins and the composition around 55o of the Rule of St Benedict. These answers would be very valid. But as I have decided to be particularly concerned with how Christianity interacted with the secular world, which was above all the world of the newly settled Germanic peoples in the early medieval west, I should like to offer another answer.