I don’t know if it is still the case, but there was a time in London when the ring of a doorbell on Saturday morning could only mean the Jehovah’s Witnesses and another copy of Watchtower. They all made for some pretty dotty reading in those days, but there was one article that has stuck in the memory – a piece that asked, and predictably answered, the question: ‘How Great was Charlemagne?’ The article concluded: ‘Though then known as Charles the Great, he was great neither in God’s eyes nor in the eyes of those whose standards are set by God’s Word.’

If it is not an attractive judgment, it is one that needs thinking about, because if anyone is equipped to enter into the mind of 8th- and 9th-century Man it is very possibly the Jehovah’s Witness. There are certainly aspects of the Carolingian age that seem only too familiar, but neither Putin nor even the imminent destruction of humanity at the hands of AI can inch most of us close to a world when Gog and Magog were on the horizon, the Last Days looming and the retributive hand of God seen in every plague, famine or Arab victory.

The Dark Ages might not have been quite as dark as was once thought, but they really were very, very strange. It was a period in which the corpse of the mighty Charles ‘the Hammer’ Martel might be found incinerated by a dragon in his St Denis sepulchre; a time of signs, warnings, omens and prophetic dreams. James Palmer writes of one such dream that came – or did not come – to the Emperor Charlemagne:

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