We have now glanced at the serf's theoretical relation in law to his lord; we have seen how this agrarian machinery worked in practice at those points where, in the nature of the case, there was most friction; let us now pass on to take a more general and at the same time more detailed view of village life in its entirety.

The self-sufficing nature of the medieval village, and the peasant's comparative isolation even from neighbouring villages, are well brought out by Dr Cunningham and Professor Ashley, Mr Tawney and Mr Lipson. The villages were small, ranging roughly from fifty to five hundred souls at most; Siméon Luce's higher estimate for Normandy can be disproved by irrefragable statistics from contemporary documents. The people are few, and their ideas and words are few, the average peasant has probably never known by sight more than two or three hundred men in his whole life; his vocabulary is almost certainly confined to something even less than the six hundred words which W. H. Riehl found to be the stock-in-trade of the German peasant two generations ago. His parish priest is not bound to preach to him more than four times a year; and the evidence suggests that a great many did not fulfil even this theoretical obligation. But this narrow life means a great deal to him and his family; it is all the life they have, or hope to have, on this earth.