The Project Gutenberg EBook of Medieval People, by Eileen Edna Power

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Title: Medieval People

Author: Eileen Edna Power

Release Date: August 9, 2004 [EBook #13144]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Medieval People

by

EILEEN POWER
M.A., D.Lit.

_Late Reader in History in the University of
London and sometime Fellow and Lecturer of
Girton College, Cambridge_

'I counsel thee, shut not thy heart nor thy library'

CHARLES LAMB

_First published, 1924

Published in 1963

Eighth Printing, 1969_
_To
my colleagues and students
at Girton College, Cambridge

1913-20_

For if heuene be on this erthe . and ese to any soule,
It is in cloistere or in scole . by many skilles I fynde;
For in cloistre cometh no man . to chide ne to fizte,
But alle is buxomnesse there and bokes . to rede and to lerne,
In scole there is scorne . but if a clerke wil lerne,
And grete loue and lykynge . for eche of hem loueth other.

--LANGLAND, _Piers Plowman_

_Author's Preface_

Social history sometimes suffers from the reproach that it is vague and
general, unable to compete with the attractions of political history
either for the student or for the general reader, because of its lack of
outstanding personalities. In point of fact there is often as much
material for reconstructing the life of some quite ordinary person as
there is for writing a history of Robert of Normandy or of Philippa of
Hainault; and the lives of ordinary people so reconstructed are, if less
spectacular, certainly not less interesting. I believe that social
history lends itself particularly to what may be called a personal
treatment, and that the past may be made to live again for the general
reader more effectively by personifying it than by presenting it in the
form of learned treatises on the development of the manor or on medieval
trade, essential as these are to the specialist. For history, after all,
is valuable only in so far as it lives, and Maeterlinck's cry, 'There
are no dead', should always