Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: VII.] THE LORDS OF ARDRES. 159 THE LORDS OF ARDRES. Monumenta Germaniae Historica inde ab anno Christi quingentesimo usque ad annum millesimum et quin- genteandimum. Edidit Societas Aperiendis Fontibus rerum Germanicarum medii aevi. Scriptorum Tomus xxiv. (Gesta Episcoporum, Abbatum, Comitum, saeculi xii. et xiii.) Hanno verae. 1S79. The diligent student of mediaeval history will be struck by nothing more than by the amazing variety of the materials with which he has to deal. Setting aside documents strictly so called, and thinking for the moment only of narrative writings, he has to deal with every form of narrative, from the driest annals to the most detailed local and personal records. Here he finds a meagre reckoning of years, in which the entry of a death, a battle, a storm, the building of a church or the taking of a town, alternates with the entries of' Annus. Annus. Annus'—the years under which there was nothing to set down at all. He next lights on a life, a local or family history, minute sometimes even to grotesqueness, setting before us in lifelike style all the doings of this or that prince or bishop or abbot. The main value of such a record is that, in setting forth all these personal doings, it sets forth something of much greater importance, the ways of thinking and acting which the hero of the tale shared with other men of his own time. Now and then indeed it may show, what ismore precious still, notices of ways of thinking and acting in which a marked man here and there differed from other men of his own time. More instructive again from a certain point of view are the records of professed hagi- ology, the lives of saints, the collections of miraculous cures and deliverances. They have an use which those who wrote them certainly never reckoned on. It bel... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.