William Morris has been seen as a man who divided himself among the fine and literary arts, crafts, and social concerns including the preservation of historic churches, but this characterization does not ring true. In fact, Morris united all these interests in a life that integrated art and beauty with the everyday and useful and with laboring so as to produce an environment in which it was as beautiful as it was practical to live. He believed that the house and the book as they had been in medieval times were central to human existence. In Some Thoughts on the Ornamented Mss. of the Middle Ages (1934), published from Morris's manuscript of an unfinished essay at the Huntington Library, he said,

If I were asked to say what is at once the most important production of Art and the thing most to be longed for, I should answer, A...