Uncorking the past

I have been thinking about the Dark Ages. This has nothing to do with Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn. A friend of mine, Chase Coffin-Roggeveen, has a doctoral thesis in mind about the increasing use of wine for liturgical purposes during the English Dark Ages. Like all scholars who address that period, he has to wrestle with slender sources. Those who do not leave documents tend to be written out of history: think of the Wends. There are revisionists, such as Sally Harvey, who contrast the surviving beauties of Saxon civilisation — consider the manuscripts — with the Normans’ brutality. There is an obvious three-hour essay question: ‘How dark were the Dark Ages?’

Chase is well qualified to address such topics. As his name might suggest, he has family links with Nantucket. Seagirt, sea-tossed, with none of the Lib-Dem meretriciousness of Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket has a bleak ethos, wrested out of subsistence fishing, whaling and God.