Edward Freeman eBooks

The Fifth Century. E-book. Formato EPUB Edward Freeman   -  Ozymandias Press, 2018  - 

The movements within and without the Empire which, in the course of a few years at the beginning of the fifth century, altogether changed the face of Western Europe have never, as far as I know, been told in our own tongue, perhaps not in any other tongue, as a connected tale. The facts are recorded by Gibbon with his usual accuracy, clearness, and careful reference to authorities; but they are scattered over several chapters and are never brought together in their relation to one another. To Gibbon, with Rome itself as his main subject, their importance lay chiefly in their purely Roman aspect, as so many blows dealt to the power of Rome. To our latest English inquirer into these times they naturally come in the same way, important only as they bear on the destinies of Italy and her invaders. Mr. Hodgkin does not give, because he was not called upon to give, a minute or a consecutive narrative any more than Gibbon does. Of the German writers on the Völkerwanderung, Dahn and Pallmann hardly touch these particular years; Wietersheim has a careful and critical examination of the facts and authorities; but it hardly amounts to a narrative. Of writers dealing specially with our own island, Lappenberg has a sketch, to the purpose as far as it goes, of the British side of the story, but he hardly attempts to connect it with the continental side. Mr. Green, in the Making of England, attempts no examination of authorities, and he gives a few words only to the continental side; but it is clear that he had fully grasped the connection between the two. Tillemont in a past age, Clinton in the age just before our own, have brought the authorities together with their usual painstaking research. And I venture to think that the time has not yet come when we can afford to cast away collectors whom no scrap of information in the original writers ever seems to escape. But Clinton does not attempt a narrative, and the narrative which the worthy Tillemont does attempt, though it is well to follow the example of Gibbon and Hodgkin in keeping it ever at our elbow, can hardly be looked on as sufficient according to the standard of modern criticism. Fauriel, in his Histoire de la Gaule Meridionale sous la domination des conquérants Germains, has used his authorities well, and he comes nearer than any other writer to giving a connected narrative of the events with which we are immediately concerned. Still his point of view, the point of view of a countryman of Sidonius and Gregory, is distinctly South-Gaulish. It is no part of his business to take any special points to connect the continental with the insular story...

William the Conqueror. E-book. Formato EPUB Edward Freeman   -  Ozymandias Press, 2016  - 

The history of England, like the land and its people, has been specially insular, and yet no land has undergone deeper influences from without.  No land has owed more than England to the personal action of men not of native birth.  Britain was truly called another world, in opposition to the world of the European mainland, the world of Rome.  In every age the history of Britain is the history of an island, of an island great enough to form a world of itself.  In speaking of Celts or Teutons in Britain, we are speaking, not simply of Celts and Teutons, but of Celts and Teutons parted from their kinsfolk on the mainland, and brought under the common influences of an island world.  The land has seen several settlements from outside, but the settlers have always been brought under the spell of their insular position.  Whenever settlement has not meant displacement, the new comers have been assimilated by the existing people of the land.  When it has meant displacement, they have still become islanders, marked off from those whom they left behind by characteristics which were the direct result of settlement in an island world.             The history of Britain then, and specially the history of England, has been largely a history of elements absorbed and assimilated from without.  But each of those elements has done somewhat to modify the mass into which it was absorbed.  The English land and nation are not as they might have been if they had never in later times absorbed the Fleming, the French Huguenot, the German Palatine.  Still less are they as they might have been, if they had not in earlier times absorbed the greater elements of the Dane and the Norman.  Both were assimilated; but both modified the character and destiny of the people into whose substance they were absorbed.  The conquerors from Normandy were silently and peacefully lost in the greater mass of the English people; still we can never be as if the Norman had never come among us.  We ever bear about us the signs of his presence.  Our colonists have carried those signs with them into distant lands, to remind men that settlers in America and Australia came from a land which the Norman once entered as a conqueror.  But that those signs of his presence hold the place which they do hold in our mixed political being, that, badges of conquest as they are, no one feels them to be badges of conquest—all this comes of the fact that, if the Norman came as a conqueror, he came as a conqueror of a special, perhaps almost of an unique kind.  The Norman Conquest of England has, in its nature and in its results, no exact parallel in history.  And that it has no exact parallel in history is largely owing to the character and position of the man who wrought it.  That the history of England for the last eight hundred years has been what it has been has largely come of the personal character of a single man.  That we are what we are to this day largely comes of the fact that there was a moment when our national destiny might be said to hang on the will of a single man, and that that man was William, surnamed at different stages of his life and memory, the Bastard, the Conqueror, and the Great... 

The Chief Periods of European History. E-book. Formato EPUB Edward Freeman   -  Perennial Press, 2016  - 

This subject brings me at once within the range of controversy. I believe that the doctrine for which I have struggled so long, the doctrine, as I have somewhere put it epigramatically, that we, the English people, are ourselves and not somebody else, is now often held to be altogether set aside. Only a few old-fashioned people like myself are thought likely to maintain it. Yet, whenever I come across these new lights, I always begin to doubt whether those who kindle them have ever minutely contrasted the circumstances or the results of the Teutonic settlements in Britain with those of the better known Teutonic settlements in Gaul. Now this is the very root of the matter; in discoursing of the phænomena of Gaul, I have always had an eye to the phænomena of Britain, and I trust some day, if I am ever able to work through my materials, to set forth the contrast in full. To this object the lectures which I am now gradually giving will, I hope, serve; but it will be best to put no essential part of them forth to the world till I can deal with the subject as a whole. Till then I will simply put on record, for the benefit of those who may have heard statements attributed to me which they have certainly not read in my writings, that I have nowhere said, because I never thought, that every one Briton was necessarily killed, even in those parts of Britain which became most thoroughly Teutonic. At the same time, I think that every one who really reads his Gregory and his Bæda, every one who carefully compares the map of Gaul with the map of Britain, every one who stops to think over the history of the French and the English tongues—and the history of the Welsh tongue too will not do him any harm—may possibly come to the conclusion that the doctrine that Englishmen after all are Englishmen has really some little to be said for it.