directed against 'Great Man' theories of history, championing the peaceful arts against the bellicose preoccupations of 'drum-and-trumpet' history. In its inter-war development, represented in the schools by the Piers Plowman text-books, and in the universities by Eileen Power's Medieval People and the work of the first generation of economic historians, it evoked the human face of the past – and its material culture – against the aridities of constitutional and administrative