decay of villeinage in England, a fact more epoch-making, in the long
run, than the struggle over our French provinces. We still praise famous
men, for he would be a poor historian who could spare one of the great
figures who have shed glory or romance upon the page of history; but we
praise them with due recognition of the fact that not only great
individuals, but people as a whole, unnamed and undistinguished masses
of people, now sleeping in unknown graves, have also been concerned in
the story. Our fathers that begat us have come to their own at last. As
Acton put it, 'The great historian now takes his meals in the kitchen.'

This book is chiefly concerned with the kitchens of History, and the
first which we shall visit is a country estate at the beginning of the
ninth century. It so happens that we know a surprising amount about such
an estate, partly because Charlemagne himself issued a set of orders
instructing the Royal stewards how to manage his own lands, telling them
everything it was necessary for them to know, down to the vegetables
which they were to plant in the garden. But our chief source of
knowledge is a wonderful estate book which Irminon, the Abbot of St
Germain des Prés near Paris, drew up so that the abbey might know
exactly what lands belonged to it and who lived on those lands, very
much as William I drew up an estate book of his whole kingdom and
called it _Domesday Book_. In this estate book is set down the name of
every little estate (or _fisc_ as it was called) belonging to the abbey,
with a description of the land which was worked under its steward to its
own profit, and the land which was held by tenants, and the names of
those tenants and of their wives and of their children, and the exact
services and rents, down to a plank and an egg, which they had to do for
their land. We know today the name of almost every man, woman, and child
who was living on those little _fiscs_ in the time of Charlemagne, and a
great deal about their daily lives.