AUTHOR'S PREFACE
THIS essay aims at building a little further upon the
foundations laid by Maitland and Vinogradoff. Both,
^ being lawyers and philosophers, naturally stressed the
legal and abstract point of view. They pierced through the
differences to get at the similarities; they were often forced to
ignore the actual in order to establish the theoretical. Again and
again they ask, "Is this man free, or is he not free?"—a most
important question, and we owe them an incalculable debt for
their pioneer labours in clearing away much rubbish which the
centuries had accumulated about the discussions of peasant
status. Yet their preoccupation with this capital question neces-
sarily involved a rigid adherence to strictly legal considerations,
and hence the obvious economic differences often involved were
frequently outside their investigations. They knew, of course,
that a free man with but a few acres of his own was considerably
^orse off in everything but status than an unfree man, holding
his thirty acres or more; but, in general, the bias of their studies
caused them to insist on the man's legal freedom, and to ignore
his possible economic slavery.
And this, I believe, has had a»great influence on the study of
medieval peasant life. It has seemed to allow less acute observers
to concentrate on legal status, and the natural balance has been
disturbed. Our present knowledge of the legal position far
outweighs our vaguer conception of the economic and social life
in those thousands of English villages and hamlets scattered up
and down the countryside. This is the disproportion which I
am striving to reduce in the following pages. But, it must be
remembered, that vast as are the accumulated records of the
Middle Ages in England, they are not particularly favourable to
the social historian—more especially to the historian of the
illiterate masses who formed some eighty to ninety per cent, of
the population of England between 1150 and 1400. "The short
and simple annals of the poor" are wellnigh non-existent, and
we are forced to piece together our picture from materials that