catena/parity/cases/chunkmd/paged.md

This preface was set before the pagination began, and any tool that starts
reading at the first page marker will lose it. That has happened, and it cost
a book all but two thousand of its characters.

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# I. The Setting

The valley is twelve miles long and never more than two wide. At its northern
end the river enters through a gorge that no road followed until the last
century; at its southern end it leaves through a marsh that no road follows
yet. Everything that happened here happened to people who could not easily
leave, and who knew it.

The population in the first surviving survey is given as four hundred and six
households, which at the usual multiplier means somewhere near two thousand
people. That figure held, within a tenth either way, for three hundred years.

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What changed was not how many people lived in the valley but what they owed
for the privilege. The earliest schedule lists eleven separate renders, seven
of them in kind. The latest lists two, both in coin. Between those two
documents lies the whole of the argument.

It would be convenient to say that the change was gradual. It was not. Two
thirds of it happens in a single generation, in the middle of the fourteenth
century, for reasons the documents do not give and which have to be supplied
from outside.

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# II. The Quarrel

The quarrel began over a mill. It nearly always does. A mill is the one piece
of capital in a village that everybody must use and only one person can own,
and the law of the mill is therefore the law of the place in miniature.

The lord's mill stood at the northern end, where the fall was steepest. The
abbey's mill stood two miles downstream, on land the abbey had been given by a
man whose grandson disputed the gift. Both houses claimed the right to compel
the valley's tenants to grind at their own stones, and both were prepared to
break the other's.