Cambridge economic history of Europe from the decline of the Roman Empire

Volume !
The agrarian life of the middle ages

There should have been two sets of initials at the end of this Preface, but the more important set is not there. My colleague and very dear friend Eileen Power had just finished some editorial work on the last chapter and the bibliographies when she was struck down in an instant of time, not by that which may strike anyone to-day but by utterly unexpected disease. With her this work loses the editor upon whom, as a medievalist, the main responsibility for the first three volumes rested.

Our design was this. We did not set out to tell the economic history of the world but of Europe, or of the world only as it impinges on Europe. We decided that the world was too vast and its local histories too discrete for convenient handling; that parts of its economic story are too ill-known for scientific handling; and that other parts-especially the internal history of the Americas-though well-known are best left to other than English editors. The starting point was fixed in the later centuries of the Roman Empire because, although the economic references and sections in the recently completed Cambridge Ancient History might no doubt be usefully expanded, that enterprise had not been carried right through when this was planned, and so it seemed foolish to try to expand what, being recent-even in parts still un written and the work of the best scholars available, could not, in its essence, be improved upon at once. We have, however, in the long Chapters I and vi, welcomed the wide sweep in time and place which their themes demand and their authors are so competent to design.

It is fortunate that this volume was planned by Eileen Power as a complete whole. Whatever delays there may be in following it up, and it seems likely that they will be most serious, it can stand as we have learnt to say if need be for years, if need be alone'. The second, some few chapters of which are already written, is to be urban, industrial and commercial; the third is to deal with credit and finance, public and private, coinage, prices, the economics of the late medieval nation state and medieval economic thinking. Of modern volumes it is too early to write; but the guiding notions will be the same. In this one we have the foundations of medieval economic life, and what in many places was almost the complete superstructure too-the earth, the crops, the peasant's toil; how villages and fields were occupied and laid out; how and with what cattle and implements they were tilled; what the society was that they maintained.