Quotes from Barbara W. Tuchman

A Bishop of Durham in 1318 could not understand or pronounce Latin and after struggling helplessly with the word Metropolitanus at his own consecration, muttered in the vernacular, "Let us take that word as read." Later when ordaining candidates for holy orders, he met the word aenigmate (through a glass darkly) and this time swore in honest outrage, "By St. Louis, that was no courteous man who wrote this word!

If the historian will submit himself to his material instead of trying to impose himself on his material, then the material will ultimately speak to him and supply the answers.

Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own.

The English patrician bloomed in his natural climate.

Smite a villein and he will bless you; bless a villein and he will smite you.

liberality in gifts and expenditure which, since his followers lived off it, was extolled as the most admired attribute of a noble.

For each man that shall be damned shall be damned by his own guilt, and each man that is saved shall be saved by his own merit." Unperceived, here was the start of the modern world.

The fate of warnings in political affairs is to be futile when the recipient wishes otherwise.

the Pastoureaux spread the fear of insurrection that freezes the blood of the privileged in any era when the mob appears. Excommunicated by Pope John XXII, they were finally suppressed when he forbade anyone to provision them on pain of death and sanctioned the use of force against them. That was sufficient, and the Pastoureaux ended like every outbreak of the poor sooner or later in the Middle Ages, with corpses hanging from the trees.

When a pope's election could not be explained rationally, it was attributed to the Holy Ghost.

Let us retreat when we can, not when we must. Lord Chatham

The clergy were to pray for all men, the knight to fight for them, and the commoner to work that all might eat.

The castle's predecessor, the Roman villa, had been unfortified, depending on Roman law and the Roman legions for its ramparts.

It is clearer now that no anti-Semitic government in any country has ever helped its scapegoats to leave by any other door than death.

The Empire had no political cohesion, no capital city, no common laws, common finances, or common officials. It was the relic of a dead ideal.

double et louche (a provocative phrase which could mean "double and squinting" or "equivocal" or "shady" in the sense of disreputable).

terrible worm in an iron cocoon," as he was called in an anonymous poem, the knight rode on a saddle rising in a high ridge above the horse's backbone with his feet resting in very long stirrups so that he was virtually standing up and able to deliver tremendous swinging blows from side to side with any one of his armory of weapons.

It is a feature of government that the more important the problem, the further it tends to be removed from handling by anyone well acquainted with the subject.

Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls.

The limitation prompting folly " was an attitude of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable.

Rule was still personal, deriving from the fief of land and oath of homage. Not citizen to state but vassal to lord was the bond that underlay political structure.

Devout or not, all owned and carried Books of Hours, the characteristic fashionable religious possession of the 14th century noble.

In history this is exactly the same as in the daily newspaper. The normal does not make news.

Chairs were few; even kings and popes received ambassadors sitting on beds furnished with elaborate curtains and spreads;