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 People had come out, Eileen Power collected notes and made plans for several essays to be included in an enlarged edition of the book.  Of these essays only one, “The Precursors”, had been written out in full before she died; and it has now been added to the present edition.  In its published form it is not in every respect identical with the author’s original text.

The essay was taking shape as Munich came and went and as the war itself was drawing near.  No historian writing at that time about Rome menaced by the barbarians—­and least of all an historian as sensitive to the extra-mural world as Eileen Power was—­could have helped noting the similarities between the Roman Empire in the fifth or sixth centuries and Europe in the nineteen-thirties.  In the end, having finished the essay, she decided to withold it from publication for the time being and to present it instead to a friendly audience as a tract for the times.  This she did at a meeting of the Cambridge History Club in the winter of 1938:  and for that occasion she replaced the opening and concluding pages of the original essay with passages, or rather notes for passages, more suited to the purpose.