The Peasant BODO
' The Peasant BODO' is found in historian Eileen Power's popular Medieval People , an early social history text that went through ten editions from 1924 to 1963. The frontispiece of my copy (1999, The Folio Society, London) appropriately includes a quote from the Venerable Bede, the first truly English historian, who finished writing his epic five volume Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum in 731 AD. In this extract, the monk notes the essential unfairness of making a record of past people and events : "Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us ... There be of them that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported. And some there be which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them." ...