Every country has used, and uses, the past for its own ends. Sometimes the use is conscious, sometimes it is unconscious. It can be official or unofficial, public or private, all at the same time. Some periods of history come to have particular significance at certain moments. The early middle ages as the period that saw the break–up of the Roman Empire can and has been presented as the moment in which the modern states of western Europe first took some shape – the idea is indeed explicitly central to Ferdinand Lot's three volumes on les invasions germaniques and les invasions barbares. France has been seen as developing directly from the kingdom of the Franks, Spain from that of the Visigoths; the origins of England have been found in the settlements of Anglo–Saxons; rather different, but equally central to the debates about national development, is the role allocated to the Lombards. Germany is different yet again, because the Germanic tribes of the early middle ages established no large state in what has come to be seen as their homeland. On the other hand, there has long been a debate as to whether those tribes were or were not the major catalysts of the changes that engulfed the Roman World in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries. In addition, for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, historians argued as to whether or not the origins of feudalism lay in the social institutions brought into the Roman world by the Germanic peoples. And in many parts of Europe for much of the early modern and modern periods feudalism was not just a concept used to categorize the past, it was an issue of contemporary politics.

The basic development of interpretations of the early middle ages, and the contexts in which those interpretations evolved, is relatively easily set out. Some parts of it are well known, other parts less so. What follows is an unbalanced account – unbalanced because I will do no more than touch on some of the big issues that are familiar, and need relatively little rehearsal, whereas I will pause at greater length on some lesser, but nevertheless important, aspects of the story that are not generally appreciated.