Download PDF | M. M. Postan - Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy-Cambridge University Press (1973).
312 Pages
PREFACE
The present volume brings together a number of my papers and articles on various topics of medieval economic and social history, mainly devoted to the problems of English agriculture and rural society. The purpose of this collection, like that of most other collections of the kind, is not only to salvage from oblivion some treasured monuments of one's past endeavours, but to bring together in a convenient form essays and articles which I believe are still being read or should be read by scholars and students.
The immodest assumption that these essays in fact deserve to be read and are in fact read led me to exclude from the collection a few articles, papers and reviews which have in my opinion lost (if they ever possessed) their usefulness to latter-day readers. I hope the essays in this volume may still find their readers. This does not however imply that every fact and idea in the essays has stood the test of time. I believe that the main propositions which they have helped to establish and the historical argument behind them, still stand fully established; but on a number of detailed points I have changed my mind or improved my information and can no longer subscribe to their precise rendering in the original text.
Thus the essay which has been cited and debated more than any other in this collection - that on the Chronology of Labour Services - contains statements on, for example, the relation between the size of demesne and the demand for labour services, or the extent and duration of the manorial boom of the thirteenth century, which I would have phrased differently had I been writing the essay now, and have in fact phrased differently in my more recent publications.
For this and other reasons I was sorely tempted to bring the essays up-to-date in both fact and opinion, but except in one instance I have resisted the temptation and chosen to present the essays in their original form. The only exception is my paper on the Economic Foundations of Medieval Society. This paper was read to the International Historical Congress in Paris in 1950, but· was rewritten and expanded a year later for publication in the Jahrbucher fur Nationalokonomie. The German version is the one I have chosen to reproduce here, but it was necessary for me to alter several important passages which, rendered literally from the German, would have been somewhat inaccessible to English readers.
The persons and institutions who in various ways helped me to assemble and to prepare for publication this collection of essays are too many to be listed here by name but I must single out for special thanks the various members of the editorial staff of the Cambridge University Press, more particularly Mrs Patricia Skinner, Mrs Christine Linehan and Miss Anne Boyd for the efficiency and patience with which they handled this collection and treated their author.
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