Richard Henry Tawney was a man of deep Christian beliefs and powerful emotions, and nowhere can we gain as full a view of his mind and temperament, of the limitations of his ideas as well as their strengths, as in the Commonplace Book or diary which he kept at Manchester from 1912 to 1914. This document is a unique record of the assumptions which supported Tawney's life long work as a socialist and as a scholar. The pattern of his historical interests and, in embryonic form, the outline of many of the arguments which he later developed in his three most influential books, The Acquisitive...