ABSTRACT
One of the most persistent of human illusions is the belief that at some past epoch all mankind were good and happy. The Greeks and Romans believed in the Golden Age; the Bible begins with paradise. When machinery came in, it produced by reaction a great movement of admiration for the Middle Ages, which took many forms. There was romantic admiration for the age of chivalry, as in many of Scott’s novels; there was an attempt to return to the ages of faith, as in the Oxford movement; there was an idealisation of the sturdy yeoman, who is supposed to have given England the victory at Crécy and Agincourt; there was William Morris’s attempt to revive handicrafts and a mediaeval type of communism associated with Wat Tyler, the rebel peasant, and John Ball, the socialist priest. In the British labour movement to this day there remains an undercurrent of resentment against the machine. In imaginative posters the proletarian is represented turning his back on the factory to seek a free life on the fields.
