Title:  Medieval People

Author:  Eileen Edna Power

Release Date:  August 9, 2004 [EBook #13144]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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Medieval People

by

Eileen power
M.A., D.Lit.

Late Reader in History in the University of London and sometime Fellow and Lecturer of Girton College, Cambridge

‘I counsel thee, shut not thy heart nor thy library’

CHARLES LAMB

First published, 1924

Published in 1963

Eighth Printing, 1969_ To my colleagues and students at Girton College, Cambridge

1913-20_

For if heuene be on this erthe . and ese to any soule,
It is in cloistere or in scole . by many skilles I fynde;
For in cloistre cometh no man . to chide ne to fizte,
But alle is buxomnesse there and bokes . to rede and to lerne,
In scole there is scorne . but if a clerke wil lerne,
And grete loue and lykynge . for eche of hem loueth other.

—­Langland, Piers Plowman

Author’s Preface

Social history sometimes suffers from the reproach that it is vague and general, unable to compete with the attractions of political history either for the student or for the general reader, because of its lack of outstanding personalities.  In point of fact there is often as much material for reconstructing the life of some quite ordinary person as there is for writing a history of Robert of Normandy or of Philippa of Hainault; and the lives of ordinary people so reconstructed are, if less spectacular, certainly not less interesting.  I believe that social history lends itself particularly to what may be called a personal treatment, and that the past may be made to live again for the general reader more effectively by personifying it than by presenting it in the form of learned treatises on the development of the manor or on medieval trade, essential as these are to the specialist.  For history, after all, is valuable only in so far as it lives, and Maeterlinck’s cry, ’There are no dead’, should always be the historian’s motto.  It is the idea that history is about dead people, or, worse still, about movements and conditions which seem but vaguely related to the labours and passions of flesh and blood, which has driven history from bookshelves where the historical novel still finds a welcome place.