If we attempt to realize with any distinctness the life of the Middle Ages in this country, we are at first baffled by the fact that, while our fundamental human nature, with its passions and weakness, its heroism and its aspirations, remains much the same throughout recorded time, the material framework and the habits of society, the knowledge of nature and the philosophy of belief and conduct, all of which influence our judgment and colour the language in which we express it, have changed enormously. We find it very difficult to grasp the real reasons why men created the institutions under which they lived and clung to them when they seemed to have decayed, to understand why their point of view was so different from our own, or, indeed, to realize at all that the people, who dressed and lodged and bought and sold, and at times acted so differently from ourselves, were men and women like ourselves and, generally, at least, as practical and as keen-witted as we are.

Indeed, the modern English people, ultimately as a result of that orgy of destructive licence which is called the Reformation, and immediately as a mental effect of the unstable and irrational social conditions which have grown out of that revolt, seems to have lost all sense of historic time, as (and, perhaps, because) it has lost most of its popular traditions. To the average modem Englishman fifty years back is ancient history, while five hundred years ago, if he attempts to think of such a distant period at all, is a dim period in which queer, primitive people acted in queer ways from sheer ignorance and barbarism.