It’s usually defined as the period between the fall of Rome in the fifth century and the new dawn of the Italian Renaissance in the fourteenth – those ‘days of old, when knights were bold/And barons held their sway’ in the words of the old Victorian parlour tune, A Warrior Bold. The reality of the Middle Ages was rather different – not least because its earlier part is inadequately recorded, hence the term sometimes applied to the fifth to tenth centuries, or thereabouts: the Dark Ages.