… is from page vi of the late Oxford and Princeton historian E.L. Woodward’s 1965 “Preface to a Third Edition” of his 1947 volume, A History of England:
The historian writing of the few who are remembered must always keep in mind these many who have no memorial, whether they were peasants or craftsmen a thousand years ago, living in harsh conditions and subject to the violence of strangers, or whether they are the anonymous millions of a ‘welfare state’ in danger of being crushed by the machinery and institutions devised for their happiness.
