Je sui uns hom

Tom Shippey

• Medieval Civilisation 400-1500 by Jacques Le Goff, translated by Julia Barrow
  Blackwell, 393 pp, £19.95, November 1988, ISBN 0 631 15512 0
• The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages. Vol. I: 350-950 edited by Robert Fossier, translated by Janet Sondheimer
  Cambridge, 556 pp, £30.00, February 1989, ISBN 0 521 26644 0
• The Medieval Imagination by Jacques Le Goff, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
  Chicago, 293 pp, £21.95, November 1988, ISBN 0 226 47084 9
• Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages by Georges Vigarello, translated by Jean Birrell
  Cambridge/Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 239 pp, £25.00, October 1988, ISBN 0 521 34248 1
• Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas and Power by Jesse Byock
  University of California Press, 264 pp, $32.50, October 1988, ISBN 0 520 05420 2

Very good, Mr Hardy. Excellent poetry, especially in a time of the breaking of nations (1915). One of time’s universals. ‘War’s annals will cloud into night/Ere their story die.’ But what if you haven’t invented the harrow yet? Or indeed the collar for harnessing horses? The former is not seen till the Bayeux Tapestry; the date of the latter is much debated, but is definitely a Medieval, not an antique invention. So before perhaps the year 1000 you had to go round and break up the clods after ploughing by hand, maybe with a wooden spade. In those circumstances the oldest horse and the rustiest harrow must have seemed positively glamorous.