The substance of the present volume was delivered as a course of lectures at the invitation of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth; and my first word must be one of grateful recognition for this privilege, and for the generous welcome which I there received.

The book itself has grown out of an original plan of three or four introductory chapters for the second volume of Five Centuries of Religion. It is impossible fully to understand St Francis without measuring the extent to which his gospel was a revolt against the capitalism of the older Orders. And, apart from this, we can never estimate the religion of any age or society without observing its attitude towards the poor. But this observation must be twofold; rich and poor react upon each other; to understand the monk as landlord, we must realize something of peasant life in general; and thus my preliminary sketch has grown to a size which demands separate publication. Yet it remains, in substance, an introductory essay, designed to break ground in this field and to redress an unequal balance in medieval historiography. Sooner or later, we must outgrow what may almost be called the present monopoly of constitutional theory and social theory; sooner or later, we must struggle to discover not only what men were organized to do six centuries ago, and not only what the academic publicists of that age prescribed for them to do, but what they actually did and suffered; and, by the way, what they themselves actually thought of the civil and ecclesiastical constitutions, or the social theories, under which they had to live.