Mr. Clayton’s Rejoinder

Extract

In the March BLACKFRIARS I reviewed Dr. Coulton’s Medieval Village and pointed out that the title of the book was ‘misleading and inaccurate,’ that neither the middle ages nor its village was the subject of Dr. Coulton’s study, and that ‘a false view of village life’ was presented. Dr. Coulton in his reply does not question the truth of my statements.

I also picked out no less than seventeen sentences from the book (giving in each case the page on which the sentence could be found) for evidence that Dr. Coulton is untrustworthy as a historian.

Four of these sentences were badly phrased. Dr. Coulton thinks otherwise. The reader can decide. But the blunders and errors in the other thirteen sentences Dr. Coulton leaves unanswered. They were not trivial or unimportant mistakes; they were serious misrepresentations. I could have made the list of mistakes longer, for the Medieval Village is disgraced by inaccuracies.