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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.
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.
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.
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.