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 also been concerned in the story.  Our fathers that begat us have come to their own at last.  As Acton put it, ‘The great historian now takes his meals in the kitchen.’

This book is chiefly concerned with the kitchens of History, and the first which we shall visit is a country estate at the beginning of the ninth century.  It so happens that we know a surprising amount about such an estate, partly because Charlemagne himself issued a set of orders instructing the Royal stewards how to manage his own lands, telling them everything it was necessary for them to know, down to the vegetables which they were to plant in the garden.  But our chief source of knowledge is a wonderful estate book which Irminon, the Abbot of St Germain des Pres near Paris, drew up so that the abbey might know exactly what lands belonged to it and who lived on those lands, very much as William I drew up an estate book of his whole kingdom and called it Domesday Book.  In this estate book is set down the name of every little estate (or fisc as it was called) belonging to the abbey, with a description of the land which was worked under its steward to its own profit, and the land which was held by tenants, and the names of those tenants and of their wives and of their children, and the exact services and rents, down to a plank and an egg, which they had to do for their land.  We know today the name of almost every man, woman, and child who was living on those little fiscs in the time of Charlemagne, and a great deal about their daily lives.