My thanks are due to many mutual friends. Among them are M. Joseph Poux, Archiviste du Département de l’Aude; Father Astruc, Curé of St. Vincent’s Church, Carcassonne; Father Villemagne, Curé of Castelnau; Professor Joseph Anglade of the University of Toulouse; M. Galaberd, Archiviste and Librarian of the City of Toulouse, and M. Jules Chalande, also of Toulouse and of the Société Archéologique du Midi de la France. To the studious man, France is a sort of paradise, for the local scholars receive you with enthusiasm and lay themselves out to forward your work.
Our good friend Belloc, the Master of those who would celebrate the Middle Ages in the English tongue, besides his kindly preface, has been good enough to read the manuscript and make several helpful suggestions.
Finally, although all theological discussion has herein been avoided, still I am sure you would prefer to have me frank with my readers and tell them that I am by birth an Episcopalian, as we call Anglicans in America, and by choice a member of the so-called Anglo-Catholic party in that communion.
Hoffman Nickerson.
34, West 54 Street,
New York, N.Y.
January, 1923.
PREFACE.
Nearly all the historical work worth doing at the present moment in the English language is the work of shovelling off heaps of rubbish inherited from the immediate past.
The history of Europe and of the world suffered, so far as English letters were concerned, from two vital defects rising at the end of the eighteenth century and lasting to the end of the nineteenth: when the wholesome reaction began.
In the first place it was not thorough.