d found the head of a policeman. Suppose it had
been taken, modern helmet and all, out of some snapshot in the _Daily
Sketch_ of the arrest of Mrs. Pankhurst. I think we may go so far as to
say that the readers would have refused to accept it as a lifelike
portrait of Charles I. They would have formed the opinion that there
must be some mistake. Yet the time that elapsed between Stephen and Mary
was much longer than the time that has elapsed between Charles and
ourselves. The revolution in human society between the first of the
Crusades and the last of the Tudors was immeasurably more colossal and
complete than any change between Charles and ourselves. And, above all,
that revolution should be the first thing and the final thing in
anything calling itself a popular history. For it is the story of how
our populace gained great things, but to-day has lost everything.

Now I will modestly maintain that I know more about English history than
this; and that I have as much right to make a popular summary of it as
the gentleman who made the crusader and the halberdier change hats. But
the curious and arresting thing about the neglect, one might say the
omission, of mediaeval civilization in such histories as this, lies in
the fact I have already noted. It is exactly the popular story that is
left out of the popular history. For instance, even a working man, a
carpenter or cooper or bricklayer, has been taught about the Great
Charter, as something like the Great Auk, save that its almost monstrous
solitude came from being before its time instead of after. He was not
taught that the whole stuff of the Middle Ages was stiff with the
parchment of charters; that society was once a system of charters, and
of a kind much more interesting to him. The carpenter heard of one
charter given to barons, and chiefly in the interest of barons; the
carpenter did not hear of any of the charters given to carpenters, to
coopers, to all the people like himself. Or, to take another instance,
the boy and girl reading the stock simplified histories of the schools
practically never heard of such a thing as a burgher, until he appears
in a shirt with a noose round his neck. They certainly do not imagine
anything of what he meant in the Middle Ages. And Victorian shopkeepers
did not conceive themselves as taking part in any such romance as the
adventure of Courtrai, where the mediaeval shopkeepers more than won
their spurs--for they won the spurs of thei