“The roots of western culture do not lie in Greco-Roman antiquity”
HE SUPERVISOR OF MY POSTGRADUATE WORK years ago was Michael Wallace-Hadrill, a pioneering scholar of early western Europe, of the Merovingians and the Carolingian Renaissance, as it became known in the 1960s. His best-known book was , in which he emphasised that the real roots of the west are to be found in the barbarian tribes and their elites in the post-Roman period:
