Our belief is that the books may profitably be used by all grades of historical students between the standards of fourth-form boys in secondary schools and undergraduates at Universities. What differentiates students at one extreme from those at the other is not so much the kind of subject-matter dealt with, as the amount they can read into or extract from it.
In regard to choice of subject-matter, while trying to satisfy the natural demand for certain "stock" documents of vital importance, we hope to introduce much fresh and novel matter. It is our intention that the majority of the extracts should be lively in style--that is, personal, or descriptive, or rhetorical, or even strongly partisan--and should not so much profess to give the truth as supply data for inference. We aim at the greatest possible variety, and lay under contribution letters, biographies, ballads and poems, diaries, debates, and newspaper accounts. Economics, London, municipal, and social life generally, and local history, are represented in these pages.
The order of the extracts is strictly chronological, each being numbered, titled, and dated, and its authority given. The text is modernised, where necessary, to the extent of leaving no difficulties in reading.
We shall be most grateful to teachers and students who may send us suggestions for improvements.
I have to thank Sir E. Maunde Thompson and the Council of the Royal Society of Literature for so readily permitting me to quote from Sir E. Maunde Thompson's edition of Adam of Usk's _Chronicle_. With three exceptions, the sources quoted in this volume are contemporary, and, where I have employed non-contemporary material, I have endeavoured to justify its use in a prefatory note to the extract.
_Postscript._--Mr. C. L. Kingsford, in his valuable critical account, _English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century_, recently published, argues strongly against the accepted authorship of the _Vita et gesta Henrici Quinti_ (quoted on pp. 15-19). Hearne erroneously attributes it to Thomas Elmham. Mr. Kingsford shows that the date of its composition lies between 1446 and 1449, and that its anonymous author was, in all probability, a foreigner.