The Rise and Decline of the Medieval Community

Abstract

The accumulation of specialized work and the publication of more texts calls for the constant modification of current conceptions of the history of medieval England. Of the means of achieving this readjustment the most satisfactory is probably the lecture, which affords scope for the individual interpretation of development over a wide field and yet does not lose its flexibility or arrogate to itself an authoritative character to which, owing to its very nature, no general survey can rightly lay claim. It is not suggested that the twentieth-century medievalist should ignore the printing-press altogether, but there is much to be said for concentrating on the printing of such works-in the main, editions of texts-as may possibly be of some value to future generations of scholars. To the demand for ‘brighter’ history it is we11 to turn a deaf ear, but the exigencies of time to some extent justify the publication of re-interpretations by those competent to undertake them, whether such text-books assume the form of the co-operative work with almost every chapter from a different pen, the many-volumed history with an expert in charge of each century or so, or a general survey of one or other of the compartments into which history is commonly divided. Of these the last might be deemed the least satisfactory, for the treatment of ‘constitutional’, ‘economic’ or ‘ecclesiastical’ history as a self-contained entity may seem a vicious and outworn practice, leading inevitably to distortion.