End of the Lode
ON • the surface the paperback boom shows little sign of dying down. Every month there is a wider choice of brightly coloured goodies in the bookshops to tempt and bewilder the in- decisive consumer. Yet one suspects that behind the scenes the publishers cannot be altogether happy. Now that so many of their best money- makers are already in paperback, the difficulty of maintaining a regular supply of new titles must be beginning to disturb them. While it is obviously too early to predict the end of the gold-rush, the latest selection of historical paper- backs suggests that the vein may be running thin.
The big prize to come out of this season's diggings is undoubtedly F. W. Maitland's Domesday Book and Beyond (Fontana Library, 8s. 6d.), a classic which has been out of print for many years. Although not the sort of book which gets picked out by the book-of-the-month clubs, it is one of the great works of English historical scholarship.. Published as long ago as 1897, it still provides probably the best introduc- tion to the study of medieval English social history. Naturally many of its conclusions have been challenged and some of them have been successfully demolished, but' scholars are still arguing over the questions Maitland raised.
Even so, it would not necessarily be worth re- issuing if it were just another monograph, how- ever masterly, on a particular epoch of English history. What gives it its lasting value is the way in which Maitland sets about his problems. It is a model of historical writing, a triumph of analytical mind over inert documentary matter. Few books give one a better idea of what the study of history is about or of the way in which it should be carried on. What Maitland does is to take the , evidence of Domesday Book and subject it to ruthless analysis. By asking a series of exhaustive and probing ques- tions he makes it reveal an astonishing amount of information about the state of England both before and after the Conquest. Far from being a dull record of landholdings in a certain year, Domesday Book emerges as a document of fascinating complexity, full of concealed clues about a complicated society, in process of being revolutionised but still far from fitting into the neat pattern of later feudal lawyers and the even neater patterns of still later historians. One comes away with a new awareness of the possi- bilities of historical discovery.
A minor classic, too, in its own way, though of quite a different kind, is G. G. Coulton's Medieval Panorama (Fontana Library, two volumes, 9s. 6d. each). Coulton is the complete antithesis of Maitland as a scholar. If Maitland was the analytical historian par excellence, for Coulton the charm of history lay in the facts themselves; for him each detail was intrinsically important because it enabled him to recover the atmosphere of the past. Inasmuch as it . is his least. polemical work, Medieval Panorama is perhaps his best book. As its title suggests, it is a survey of mediaeval life in all its aspects, from village to ghetto, with particular emphasis on the Church, and ranging in time from St. Augustine to Sir Thomas More. The distillation of his life- long study of the sources, it is an encyclopxdia of entertaining information—the ideal introduc- tion for anyone who wants the flavour of medieval history without the problems.
For those whose tastes are more esoteric there is an abridged edition of The Black Death, by Johannes Nohl (Unwin Books, 6s.)—a history of the Plague in western Europe, drawn largely from contemporary accounts. As a historian Nohl belongs in the Coulton rather than the Maitland tradition: he is a compiler rather than an analyst, though by comparison with Coulton his conclusions are somewhat uncritical. His figures—one can hardly call them statistics—can only be described as dubious, while he is in- clined to see the influence of the plague in every development of late mediaeval society. However, he does not intrude himself often: most of the time he is content to leave it to the victims of the plague to tell the story themselves, and a macabre story it is, sparing us none of the horrors of the plague itself and of the moral and social disintegration which it induced. The word 'macabre,' incidentally, is said to be de- rived from a Scotsman called Maccaber who instituted a highly popular Dance of Death in Paris during the plague of 1524.
A welcome entrant into the paperback field this autumn is Macmillan's. Having discovered that winds of change operate in publishing as well as the world at large, they have launched a new series in bright red covers to be known, rather endearingly, as `Papermacs.' The first volume is Sir Lewis Namier's Structure of Politics at the Accession of George Ill (25s.), probably the most influential historical work to appear in England in the last forty years and a choice which augurs well for the future of the series. Also in this first batch are The England of Elizabeth, by A. L. Rowse (18s.), and A Short History of the Labour Party, by Henry Pelting (10s. 6d.).
Other recent historical paperbacks include Frank Thistlethwaite's excellent introduction to American history, The Great Experiment (Cam- bridge, 12s. 6d.), and B. H. Sumner's more eccentric Survey of Russian History (Methuen
University Paperbacks, 12s. 6d.). A more ques- tionable addition to the Methuen series is Arthur Birnie's Economic History of the British Isles (University Paperbacks, 12s. 6d.), an out-of-date textbook which, apart from the addition of a brief concluding chapter on post-war develop- ments and the discreet alteration of a few tenses in the chapter before, appears to have received no revision since it first came out in 1935. It is the reappearance of books such as this which makes one wonder whether publishers may not be beginning to run out of titles—or is it only out of imagination?
JAMES CARGILL THOMPSON
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