So we take our leave of them.  Going ... going ... gone!  Gone altogether?  Perhaps not.  Hundreds of years of barbarism were to elapse before a new society arose capable of matching or even excelling Rome in material wealth, in arts, in sciences, and in gentler modes of existence—­the douceur de la vie.  We cannot say what date marked the moment of final recovery, or who were the men who were to represent advancing civilization as fully as Ausonius or Gregory of Tours represented civilization in retreat:  Dante, Shakespeare, Capernicus, Newton?  But for many centuries, perhaps a whole millennium, before western Europe scaled the heights on which these men now stood, it had been gradually raising itself from the depths of post-Roman decline.  The ascent was not only slow but also discontinuous, yet it was sufficient to establish within a few centuries of Gregory of Tours a social order different from Rome and less glorious to behold across a thousand years of history, but nevertheless sufficiently exalted to draw the interest, and even to command the admiration of other still later ages.  In that culture and in that social order much of what Ausonius and Sidonius and even Fortunatus represented was brought to life again, albeit in a form they would not always have recognized as their own.  To this extent, at least, they were not only the epigones of Rome but the true precursors of the Middle Ages.

CHAPTER II

THE PEASANT BODO

LIFE ON A COUNTRY ESTATE IN THE TIME OF CHARLEMAGNE

Three slender things that best support the world:  the slender stream of milk from the cow’s dug into the pail; the slender blade of green corn upon the ground; the slender thread over the hand of a skilled woman.

Three sounds of increase:  the lowing of a cow in milk; the din of a smithy; the swish of a plough.

—­From The Triads of Ireland (9th century)

Economic history, as we know it, is the newest of all the branches of history.  Up to the middle of the last century the chief interest of the historian and of the public alike lay in political and constitutional history, in political events, wars, dynasties, and in political institutions and their development.  Substantially, therefore, history concerned itself with the ruling classes.  ’Let us now praise famous men,’ was the historian’s motto.  He forgot to add ’and our fathers that begat us’.  He did not care to probe the obscure lives and activities of the great mass of humanity, upon whose slow toil was built up the prosperity of the world and who were the hidden foundation of the political and constitutional edifice reared by the famous men he praised.  To speak of ordinary people would have been beneath the dignity of history.  Carlyle struck a significant note of revolt:  ’The thing I want to see,’ he said, ’is not Red-book lists and Court Calendars and Parliamentary