litical events, wars, dynasties, and in political
institutions and their development. Substantially, therefore, history
concerned itself with the ruling classes. 'Let us now praise famous
men,' was the historian's motto. He forgot to add 'and our fathers that
begat us'. He did not care to probe the obscure lives and activities of
the great mass of humanity, upon whose slow toil was built up the
prosperity of the world and who were the hidden foundation of the
political and constitutional edifice reared by the famous men he
praised. To speak of ordinary people would have been beneath the dignity
of history. Carlyle struck a significant note of revolt: 'The thing I
want to see,' he said, 'is not Red-book lists and Court Calendars and
Parliamentary Registers, but the Life of Man in England: what men did,
thought, suffered, enjoyed.... Mournful, in truth, it is to behold what
the business called "History" in these so enlightened and illuminated
times still continues to be. Can you gather from it, read till your eyes
go out, any dimmest shadow of an answer to that great question: How men
lived and had their being; were it but economically, as, what wages they
got and what they bought with these? Unhappily you cannot.... History,
as it stands all bound up in gilt volumes, is but a shade more
instructive than the wooden volumes of a backgammon-board.'

Carlyle was a voice crying in the wilderness. Today the new history,
whose way he prepared, has come. The present age differs from the
centuries before it in its vivid realization of that much-neglected
person the man in the street; or (as it was more often in the earliest
ages) the man with the hoe. Today the historian is interested in the
social life of the past and not only in the wars and intrigues of
princes. To the modern writer, the fourteenth century, for instance, is
not merely the century of the Hundred Years' War and of the Black Prince
and Edward III; more significantly it is for him the era of the slow
decay of villeinage in England, a fact more epoch-making, in the long
run, than the struggle over our French provinces. We still praise famous
men, for he would be a poor historian who could spare one of the great
figures who have shed glory or romance upon the page of history; but we
praise them with due recognition of the fact that not only great
individuals, but people as a whole, unnamed and undistinguished masses
of people, now sleeping in unknown graves, have als