Town Mice and Country Mice in the Province of York 1317–40

Extract

A few months after the end of the second world war a journalist, walking through the streets of devastated Hamburg, saw a girl come out of the basement of a bombed house. She was wearing a clean white tennis-dress and carrying a racquet, and as she picked her way through the piles of burnt-out rubble he pondered, as historians have often pondered before him, upon the remarkable capacity of people not only for surviving, but for continuing the ordinary pattern of their lives, in the most adverse circumstances. I have often remembered that girl in Hamburg as I worked my way through the letters of archbishop Melton’s register with its record of the way in which the ordinary people of the north, the town and country mice of my title, survived and carried on their normal activities, and even re-built and extended their churches, in the midst of the troubles in which they found themselves.