A foreigner's attempt to treat of difficult and much disputed points of English history requires some justification. Why should a Russian scholar turn to the arduous study of English mediaeval documents? Can he say anything of sufficient general interest to warrant his exploration of so distant a field?
The first question is easier to answer than the second.
There are many reasons why we in Russia are especially keen to study what may be called social history -- the economic development of nations, their class divisions and forms of co-operation. We are still living in surroundings created by the social revolution of the peasant emancipation; many of our elder contemporaries remember both the period of serfdom and the passage from it to modern life; some have taken part in the working out and putting into practice of the emancipating acts.
Questions entirely surrendered to antiquarian research in the West of Europe are still topics of contemporary interest with us.
It is not only the civil progress of the peasantry that we have to notice, but the transformation and partial decay of the landed gentry, the indirect influence of the economic convulsions on politics, ideas, and morality, and, in a more special way, the influence of free competition on soil and people that had been fettered for ages, the passage from 'natural husbandry' to the money system, the substitution of rents for labour, above all, the working of communal institutions under the sway of the lord and in their modern free shape. Government and society have to deal even now with problems that must be solved in the light of history, if in any light at all, and not by instinct groping in the dark. All such practical problems verge towards one main question: how far legislation can and should act upon the social development of the agrarian world. Are economic agencies to settle for themselves who has to till land and who shall own it?
Or can we learn from Western history what is to be particularly avoided and what is to be aimed at? I do not think that anybody is likely to maintain at the present day, that, for instance, a study of the formation and dissolution of the village community in the West would be meaningless for politicians and thinkers who have to concern themselves with the actual life of the village community in the East.
Another powerful incitement comes from the scientific direction lately assumed by historical studies. They have been for a long time very closely connected with fine literature:
their aim was a lifelike reproduction of the past; they required artistic power, and stirred up feelings as well as reflective thought. Such literary history has a natural bent towards national tradition, for the same reason that literature is attracted by national life: the artist gains by being personally in touch with his subject; it is more easy for him to cast his material into the right mould. Ancient history hardly constitutes an exception, because the elements of classical civilisation have been appropriated by European nations so as to form part of their own past. What I call literary history has by no means done all its work. There is too much in the actions of men that demands artistic perception and even divination on the part of the historian, to allow this mode of treatment to fall into decay.
But nobody will deny that historical study is extending more and more in the direction of what is now called anthropology and social science. Historians are in quest of laws of development and of generalisations that shall unravel the complexity of human culture, as physical and biological generalisations have put into order our knowledge of the phenomena of nature.
There is no subject more promising from this point of view than the history of social arrangements. It borders on political economy, which has already attained a scientific standing; part of its material has been fashioned by juridical doctrine and practical law, and thereby moulded into a clear, well-defined shape; it deals with facts recurring again and again with much uniformity, and presenting great facilities for comparison; the objects of its observation are less complex than the phenomena of human thought, morality, or even political organisation. And from the point of view of the scientific investigator there can be no other reason for taking up a particular epoch or nation, but the hope of getting a good specimen for analysis, and of making use of such analysis for purposes of generalisation.
