BOOKS: HISTORY; Archival gilt

A FOOL AND HIS MONEY by Ann Wroe, Cape pounds 15.99

THE fashion for small-scale social history was at its height when, in the mid-1970s, Ann Wroe went to the little town of Rodez in south- central France to research her doctoral thesis. There she was delighted to find a large and neglected archive recording in rich detail the everyday life of a medieval town. Even in the 1970s Rodez boasted the slogan "Rodez: ville moyenne" - an average town. It can't have helped the tourist trade, but for the social historian it must have been reassuring.

Times were hard in this part of France in the 14th century. The Hundred Years War had been going on intermittently since 1337 and, like other towns in the area, Rodez was threatened by invasion from the "English" and crippled by taxes imposed by the French. On top of this Rodez - an isolated network of narrow streets and squares perched on a wind-battered hill - had its own special problem. A wall ran through it dividing the place in two; uphill and upmarket was the City, ruled by the Bishop; downhill the vulgar, more commercial Bourg ruled by the Count.

Among the archives Wroe found a story about the loss and rediscovery of a crock of gold, a story whose retelling would reconstruct a slice of ordinary medieval life. This sort of exercise, however, is trickier than it looks. Wroe shows an impressive mastery of the archivist's craft. She can slip happily between Latin and Occitan (still spoken in the region) and she knows how to trace the lives of her characters from one powdery record to another. But what does her story amount to?

One day in 1369 or 1370 a group of workmen were unblocking a drain in the basement of the house of a cloth seller from the Bourg, Peyre Marques, when they found a pewter wine jug full of gold coins. It was not Marques himself, but his son-in-law who first discovered the hoard, and he bribed the workers to silence. But somehow word got out. Marques, who had long lamented the loss of the fortune he had buried, claimed the treasure for himself and the two men went to court.

To this, Rodez's archives add a few more details and invite the odd conjecture. It seems that Marques' argumentative wife got the local diviners in to search for more hidden treasure - a pagan act much disapproved of by the Church. And evidently Marques, who had once been a successful businessman, had grown forgetful and confused and was now in debt; did he, Wroe wonders, suffer from Alzheimer's Disease? But, as we finally learn at the end of the book, the archives do not even reveal whether it was the father or his son-in-law who won the case. The past, as Wroe admits, has defeated her, and instead of a piece of literary history she offers a shaggy dog story.

It is not surprising that in these circumstances Wroe makes extensive use of background material and heads off on excursions into the lives of Marques' neighbours and relations. Here at least she has abundant material. The problem, perhaps, is that Wroe is too good an archivist. She savours the little details of her subjects' lives, and loves the faint traces of their daily goings-on left on vellum and parchment. But it is hard to find anything particularly distinctive about the medieval inhabitants of this town. They are men and women preoccupied with their work and income, their families and social standing. This, it is true, seems to be just the effect that Wroe was after. She underlines at both ends of the book the similarities in character between l4th-century and modern Rouergats.

But if the inhabitants of medieval Rodez can so easily be seen "as the neighbour in our street, the passenger on our train, the worker in our office", why should we be interested in them? And is it really plausible that people with notions about God, the universe and human nature so very different from our own were fundamentally so like people living today? In the 14th century, after all, Rodez was, as Wroe records, building a great cathedral at its centre; today it is concentrating on pedestrianising its streets.

It is a common complaint that social history focuses on people's mundane activities to the exclusion of the broader horizon of meaning that give these their significance. A Fool and His Money is a case in point.