from the vagrant population, from which at the same 
     period the first merchants and the artisans of the towns 
     were being recruited, or from among the inhabitants of 
     the great estates, whose serfdom they thus shook off. 
     (p. 69)

The medieval world ended in a frenzy of applied knowledge—
new medieval knowledge applied to the recreation of antiquity.

*      The great study of The Waning of the Middle Ages  by J. 
Huizinga is almost entirely concerned with the feudal nobility, 
whose tenure had been greatly modified by the medieval 
guildsmen, and was to be quite diminished by the middle class 
that later came with typography. In many ways, Huizinga is 
baffled by the medieval world as much as Heinrich Wolfflin was 
by medieval art. Both men hit upon the idea of applying to it