Page:A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages.djvu/13

 To the LADY LONDESBOROUGH. Bi^3i€31^)i^^liC^^^li^^^^^^^^li€^^l!^ll^^^3TCIiC^'^^3^^^^^^li'^l!€lT^^'^^^^^^Bi^^?iC^3i^^ Dear Lady Londesborough, The obje6t of the following pages is to fupply what appeared to be a want in our popular literature. We have hiftories of England, and hiftories of the Middle Ages, but none of them give us a fufficient pifture of the domeftic manners and fentiments of our forefathers at different periods, a knowledge of which, I need hardly infill, is necefiary to enable us to appreciate rightly the motives with which people a6ted, and the fpirit which guided them. The fubje6t, too, mufl; have an interell for many claffes of readers, who will be glad to learn fomething of the manners of former days, if it were only to fee the contrafl: with thofe of our own time, and to difcover in them the origin of many of the characterillics of modern fociety. Copious and valuable books have been publillied in our language on the hiftory of coftume, on that of domeftic architecture, on military antiquities, on the hiftory of religious rites and ceremonies, and on other kindred fubjefts, which enable the artift to clothe his perfonages corredly ; but thefe would form, after all, but the disjointed Ikeleton of a pifture, without that further, and perhaps more important, fort of information which is furnilhed in the following pages, and which will enable him to give life to his compofition. I have not attempted to compofe a very learned or very elaborate book. The fubjeft is an immenfely wide one as regards the materials, during a large portion of the period which I include ; and to treat it completely would require the clofe ftudy of the whole mafs of the mediaeval literature of Weftern Europe, edited or inedited, and of the whole mafs of the monuments of mediaeval art. But my aim has been to bring together a futhcient number