Volume 31, Number 3 · March 1, 1984
Fable of the Poor
By Noel Annan
The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age
by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Knopf, 596 pp., $25.00
Controversies among English historians may appear to the world arid or comical affairs, but in fact they are the signs that we know something about a subject but that we don't yet know quite enough. The combatants throw up enormous banks of material and at first the divide between them seems unbridgeable. Sometimes the digging by rival groups is so intense that the ground of the debate shifts, as happened over the commutation of labor services in the system of land tenure called feudalism, and is happening now over the famous dispute about the gentry in the early seventeenth century. At other times the chasm between the two sides gets filled in by the bulldozers—sometimes indeed by the work of one man, as when Father David Knowles put an end to the debate about the dissolution of the monasteries with volumes of such dispassionate erudition that the exchanges a generation previously between G. G. Coulton and Cardinal Gasquet looked absurd.
Review, 3121 words
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