The concept of “the Dark Ages” is central to several key elements in much anti-religious polemic. Confused and confusing memes aside, when queried about when exactly “the Dark Ages” were, most people who favour this term as a polemical tool use it as a synonym for the Middle Ages. Confronted with evidence like this and much more besides, those who want to defend the “Dark Ages” conception abandon the “bailey” part of their position and retreat to their “motte” – they concede that not all of the Middle Ages were “dark”, but note most of these examples come from the Later Middle Ages. So they redraw the boundaries of these “Dark Ages” as referring not to the Middle Ages as a whole, but to the Early Medieval Period. Unsurprisingly, those who want to preserve the idea of “the Dark Ages” – at least for the earlier part of the Middle Ages – hold up the Catastrophists as wholly correct.