I really know nothing
about the Midlands in the Middle Ages; I am disgracefully ignorant of
the social condition of the South and West; but the early history of
East Anglia, and especially of Norfolk, has for long possessed a
fascination for me; and though I am slow to arrive at conclusions,
and have a deep distrust of those historians who, for every pair of
facts, construct a Trinity of Theories, I feel sure of my ground on
some matters, because I have done my best to use all such evidence as
has come my way.]
* * * * * * *
Few things have struck me more forcibly since I have cast in my lot
among country people, than the strange ignorance which they exhibit
of the _history of themselves_. I do not allude to those
unpleasant secrets which we should be very sorry indeed for our next-
door neighbours to be acquainted with, nor to any such matters as our
experience or memories of actual facts could bring to our minds; I
mean something very much more than that. Men and women are not only
the beings they appear to be at any one moment of their lives, they
are not single separate atoms like grains of sand. Rather they are
like branches or leaves of some great tree, from which they have
sprung and on which they have grown, whose life in the past has come
at last to them in the present, and without whose deep anchorage in
the soil, and its ages of vigour and vitality, not a bud or a spray
that is so fresh and healthful now would have had any existence.
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