In March 2021, The Telegraph reported that the UK government Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) had been instructed by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson to create ‘a rewilding “task force” to gauge appetite for returning lynx and wolves to England’ (Horton 2021). Although DEFRA soon published a refutation of this claim, the response of the chief executive of the Tenant Farmers Association, George Dunn, was decisive:

This description of a landscape roamed by reintroduced large carnivores as a ‘medieval wasteland’ bespeaks a fear that to return wolves and lynx to Britain would constitute a step backwards, reneging on centuries of progress during which the landscape has been improved and ‘civilised’ by the removal of these species.

This fear is bound up with the familiar description of the (early) medieval period as the ‘Dark Ages’, an era ‘so called because it has been considered a time of relative lack of intellectual and cultural enlightenment’ (OED s.v. dark ages). While usage of this phrase is perhaps so common that the import of the words comprising it go unquestioned, the term's subtextual ‘battle-cry, “[its] denunciation of … the culture of the Middle Ages”’ (Mommsen 1942, 227) remains deeply embedded in cultural conceptions of this period, such that the adjective ‘medieval’ is often used to describe anything deemed ‘backwards’, ‘bad’, or ‘evil’ (Robinson 1984, 752–3).