Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/162

 N turning from the general course of Norman history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to examine Norman life and culture in this period, we encounter the difficulties inherent in any attempt to cut a cross-section of human society in an age which was not conscious of being a society and has left us for the description of itself only raw materials of a fragmentary and uneven sort. The chroniclers confine themselves almost entirely to external events, the charters deal chiefly with land and boundaries and rights over the land, much of the literature is theological commentary or rhetorical commonplace which reflects nothing of the age in which it was written; what is lacking in all is the concrete detail of daily life from which alone social and economic conditions and even government itself can be understood. And when we have pieced together as best we may some notions of Normandy in this period, our knowledge of the parallel conditions in other regions is often so inadequate that we cannot be certain how far our results are characteristic of Normandy, how far typical of the time, or, because of the scattered nature of our material, how far they may be merely individual and isolated. Much of the social history of the Middle Ages