ered, concentrated the whole attention of men of intellect on form
rather than on matter. The things they learned in their schools had no
relation to the things that were going on in the world outside and bred
in them the fatal illusion that tomorrow would be as yesterday, that
everything was the same, whereas everything was different.

So we take our leave of them. Going ... going ... gone! Gone altogether?
Perhaps not. Hundreds of years of barbarism were to elapse before a new
society arose capable of matching or even excelling Rome in material
wealth, in arts, in sciences, and in gentler modes of existence--the
_douceur de la vie_. We cannot say what date marked the moment of final
recovery, or who were the men who were to represent advancing
civilization as fully as Ausonius or Gregory of Tours represented
civilization in retreat: Dante, Shakespeare, Capernicus, Newton? But for
many centuries, perhaps a whole millennium, before western Europe scaled
the heights on which these men now stood, it had been gradually raising
itself from the depths of post-Roman decline. The ascent was not only
slow but also discontinuous, yet it was sufficient to establish within a
few centuries of Gregory of Tours a social order different from Rome and
less glorious to behold across a thousand years of history, but
nevertheless sufficiently exalted to draw the interest, and even to
command the admiration of other still later ages. In that culture and in
that social order much of what Ausonius and Sidonius and even Fortunatus
represented was brought to life again, albeit in a form they would not
always have recognized as their own. To this extent, at least, they were
not only the epigones of Rome but the true precursors of the
Middle Ages.

CHAPTER II

THE PEASANT BODO

LIFE ON A COUNTRY ESTATE IN THE TIME OF CHARLEMAGNE

Three slender things that best support the world: the slender stream of
milk from the cow's dug into the pail; the slender blade of green corn
upon the ground; the slender thread over the hand of a skilled woman.

Three sounds of increase: the lowing of a cow in milk; the din of a
smithy; the swish of a plough.

--From _The Triads of Ireland_ (9th century)

Economic history, as we know it, is the newest of all the branches of
history. Up to the middle of the last century the chief interest of the
historian and of the public alike lay in political and constitutional
history, in po