This book is about the people who are usually left out of history: the men and women who have laboured to make a living in a world they did not create; whose work has sustained that wealthy, ruling minority which is normally the subject of history books. Professor Harrison used the evidence of the common people themselves, and draws upon recent work in crowd history, popular religion, cultural change, demography and the history of women and the family to describe the everyday life of ordinary people: their social structure, their work, family relationships, ideas and beliefs, their institutions and popular movements. His book vividly recreates the past as it felt to peasants working in the fields, artisans in their workshops, industrial workers in their factories, and it enables us to trace our history from the present back to earliest times. - Dust jacket.