Life in the Middle Ages will appeal to readers who want to get behind the generalizations of historians by reference to the raw material.

Few men could lay better claim than Chaucer to this happy accident of birth with which Matthew Arnold endows his Scholar Gipsy, if we refrain from pressing too literally the poet's fancy of a Golden Age. Chaucer's times seemed sordid enough to many good and great men who lived in them; but few ages of the world have been better suited to nourish such a genius, or can afford a more delightful travelling-ground for us of the 20th century.

Reprint of the 1907 ed., with a new introd. by Edward Peters.