Medieval People

First published in 1924, this book reconstructs the working lives of six people in the European Middle Ages from account rolls, letters, and other ordinary documents rather than from kings' chronicles. Eileen Power follows a Carolingian peasant on a Frankish manor, the Venetian traveller Marco Polo, a fourteenth-century English prioress, a Paris household manager instructing a young wife, and two late-medieval English clothiers and merchants. Each chapter sets one figure in the routines of manor, convent, workshop, or trade. The aim is to show how food, cloth, piety, and money were handled below the rank of princes. The book is social history through biography.

Bound in cream parchment paper blocked on covers with gilded colour pictures. Dark blue slipcase and endpapers.