viii AUTHOR'S PREFACE
were never meant to serve such a purpose. A modern enquirer,
confined to the documents in a big country solicitor's office,
would gain a very one-sided view of contemporary English
countryside life. And so with the Middle Ages: we have, it is true,
a mass of documentary material but how much of it we would
willingly abandon for the letters of a thirteenth-century family,
who had kept their correspondence as carefully as did the
Pastons two centuries later? How many cartularies, or Assize
rolls, or compoti or Manor rolls would we not barter for one brief
diary of a peasant of the fourteenth century set dowfi as faith-
fully as the seventeenth-century diarists recorded their adventures
in life and affairs?
Deprived of these, our task is infinitely more difficult, and we
can only proceed by the examination of innumerable documents
of the most various descriptions, from which we may hope to
pick out a phrase or incident, here and there, which will help
to lighten some dark corner of the medieval scene. The compara-
tively safe waters of legal status and the like, so well charted for
us by Maitland, VinogradofF, and others, must be left for the
open seas, where the bald legstf phrases of court roll and terrier
on the one hand, and snatches of ballads, or biased fabliaux, or^
exparte pleas on the other, represent our poor sailing directions.
And even such directions as these would have been infinitely
harder to come by had I not been able to rely on the aid of others
to help me in my search. The Bibliography will sufficiently
indicate the main sources from which my evidence has been
drawn. Manuscript materials abound: the only difficulty is how
to use them. The masses of documents available at the Public
Record Office, for example, have yielded up bill a fraction of
their secrets: a lifetime spent among them would only scratch
the surface. Both there, and at the British Museum, expert help,
so generously given by the officials, enabled me to do much that
would otherwise have been impossible. Here, in Cambridge,
my indebtedness is overwhelming: the staff of the University
Library (and in particular Mr H. L. Pink, in charge of the
Anderson Room); many College Librarians (especially Mr H. M.
Adams of Trinity); the Secretary of the University Press, the
University Printer and their assistants, as well as many friends
and scholars, have all come to my aid on many occasions. Among