whose publication the pioneers were the editors of the German Monumenta, to the poems published in series such as those of the Early English Text Society and the ordinary records of governments and courts made available to us by institutions such as the Public Record Office. There is now far more medieval writing easily available to us in print than any scholar could absorb in several lifetimes.

But, equally and perhaps more importantly, the medieval world has been opened up to us by changes of taste and in the direction of our researches. Our understanding of the medieval village and its lord, of medieval courts and tenures, has been developed by a semi-anthropological approach springing from the work of scholars such as F. W. Maitland, which makes a heroic attempt to grasp the different assumptions of a primitive society. Our knowledge of the theology and philosophy of medieval universities has been transformed by the prodigious labours of religious enthusiasts in the tradition of Heinrich Denifle and Franz Ehrle. The picture which we can present of the world of the migrations is now based not only on a few scanty annals but also on innumerable archaeological excavations which enable us to map a mass of artefacts and of dwelling-sites. The economic historians have given us, only in quite recent years, a new demographic history of the Middle Ages which brings to light the enormous expansion of population which filled the countryside and stimulated industry and commerce between 1000 and 1300, and the prolonged decline which followed the famine of 1315 and the Black Death of 1348. There have been massive efforts of research which have shed floods of light on many previously obscure aspects of the medieval world, for example the Byzantine Empire, the crusades, the early Franciscans, Italian commerce, the Hussites. It is possible now to present the history of medieval Europe with an understanding and a precision which would have been impossible in the nineteenth century.

The plan which has been followed in this book is to write the history of Europe in chapters which preserve the division between the Mediterranean basin and northern Europe beyond the Alps and the Pyrenees. This is not, of course, an ideal

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