The ‘Dark Ages’? Nonsense! The Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Vikings brought mayhem to Britain between AD 410 and 1066, but after plenty of raiding and pillaging, warring and torturing, they all settled down (a bit) and learned to live together (most of the time). This brought about a brilliant new age in England’s history when the English people became one nation under one king (just in time for the Normans to upset it all again). All that turbulence and turmoil gave us a written language of our own, laws that made everything a bit fairer and lots and lots of treasure. In fact, there was so much beautifully-crafted treasure with lots of sparkly stones that maybe it should have been called the ‘Bright Ages’.