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in the same rank with studies usually considered more severe. I 
claim no more for Topography than it deserves if I say that the 
taste for minute local inquiries has affected the whole tone of the 
modern English historians. Such homely touches as are obtained 
from Topography give the charm to Macaulay, and perhaps in 
a less degree, to Froude. It is the acknowledged fault of many 
lofty historians and accurate chroniclers that they tell the history 
of kings, courts and armies, and leave the mass of the nation, 
the national life as it really was, to oblivion or imagination. The 
body of our country, through its insular form has been for many 
centuries homogeneous or nearly so as regards its laws of succession 
to property and presentation to the church, and consequently if we 
examine the descent of one sample manor we shall obtain a history 
which is, in its outline, the history of almost every manor in the 
land, and we shall thus gain a truer view of England in the past 
than if we fix our eyes with undue singleness of attention on the 
court at Windsor, the army on the frontier or the dungeon in 
the Tower. I am not forgetting that we may put too high a power 
on our microscope ; that there always were millions of a labouring 
population, for the most part small farmers, whose names are 
never to be recovered, whose lives were but those of satellites to 
their lord, and of whom probably little or nothing is worth 
recovery. It is well understood that the numerous villains of early 
times were slaves, saleable with, though not without, the land 
they lived on. No event in the history of a parish could claim to 
rival in importance the change which converted the ancient villain 
first into the small yeoman in whom England used to glory, and 
since into the modern farmer and his servants. You can, however, 
rarely name a century even in which the emancipation was 
made. It was gradual in its method and in its localities. The 
King often wished to play off the workman ‘against the 
baronage, and he occasionally succeeded. Thus, from the 
twelfth to the seventeenth or nineteenth centuries, the rural 
workmen were continually gaining rights here and there, few of 
