PROLOGUE
A FAIRE FELDE FUL OF FOLKE
THE writing of a book on medieval life necessitates the
scrutiny, assembly, and arrangement of innumerable docu-
ments and pieces of evidence, from which, by slow degrees,
some coherent pictures emerge. In this way a writer is enabled
to build up a series of studies, each revealing some facet of his
subject. But, while this enables him to put these various aspects
into focus the more clearly, it is apt to divert him from what many
will hold to be his chief duty—to see life steadily and see it
whole, and to present this vision to his readers. Such a vision,
however, is even more difficult to communicate than it is to
receive. It is comparatively easy to assemble detailed accounts
of various sides of the peasant's life, but each of these accounts
must deal with the mass, so that the individual tends to recede
into the background. Yet it is as an individual human being,
living his normal life, that he is of interest.
Thomas Hardy's poem, In Time of" The Breaking of Nations ",
tells us of his fundamental place in<the scheme of things:
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
This is the man our ideal picture would show us. Short of this,
in an attempt to show what I believe to have been his normal life,
I make bold at the outset of this book to draw an imaginary
picture of one such man during a few days of the year. In doing
so, I have not chosen one of the most well-to-do of the manorial
peasants, nor do I forget that many lacked even the rudimentary