be the historian's motto. It is the idea
that history is about dead people, or, worse still, about movements and
conditions which seem but vaguely related to the labours and passions of
flesh and blood, which has driven history from bookshelves where the
historical novel still finds a welcome place.

In the following series of sketches I have tried to illustrate at the
same time various aspects of social life in the Middle Ages and various
classes of historical material. Thus Bodo illustrates peasant life, and
an early phase of a typical medieval estate; Marco Polo, Venetian trade
with the East; Madame Eglentyne, monastic life; the Menagier's wife,
domestic life in a middle-class home, and medieval ideas about women;
Thomas Betson, the wool trade, and the activities of the great English
trading company of Merchants of the Staple; and Thomas Paycocke, the
cloth industry in East Anglia. They are all quite ordinary people and
unknown to fame, with the exception of Marco Polo. The types of
historical evidence illustrated are the estate book of a manorial lord,
the chronicle and traveller's tale, the bishop's register, the didactic
treatise in household management, the collection of family letters, and
houses, brasses, and wills. At the end of the book I have added a
bibliography of the sources which form the raw material for my
reconstructions, and a few additional notes and references. I hope that
this modest attempt to bring to life again some of 'our fathers that
begat us', may perhaps interest for an hour or two the general reader,
or the teacher, who wishes to make more concrete by personification some
of the general facts of medieval social and economic history.

My thanks are due to my publishers, Messrs. Methuen and Co., for
allowing me to incorporate in Chapter VI the greater part of a chapter
in my book 'The Paycockes of Coggeshall', and to the Cambridge
University Press for similarly allowing me to repeat in Chapter III a
few sentences from my study of 'Medieval English Nunneries'. I have also
to thank my friends Miss M.G. Jones and Miss H.M.R. Murray of Girton
College, Cambridge, for various suggestions and criticisms, and my
sister Miss Rhoda Power for making the index.

_May 1924_ EILEEN POWER
_London School of Economics and Political Science
University of London_

_Preface to the Tenth Edition_

For years after the first edition of _Medieval Peop