William the Conqueror

Transcribed from the 1913 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN D.C.L., LL.D.
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S SQUARE, LONDON
1913
COPYRIGHT
First Edition printed March 1888. Reprinted July 1888, 1890, 1894, 1898, 1903, 1907, 1913
This small volume, written as the first of a series, is meant to fill quite another place from the Short History of the Norman Conquest , by the same author. That was a narrative of events reaching over a considerable time. This is the portrait of a man in his personal character, a man whose life takes up only a part of the time treated of in the other work. We have now to look on William as one who, though stranger and conqueror, is yet worthily entitled to a place on the list of English statesmen. There is perhaps no man before or after him whose personal character and personal will have had so direct an effect on the course which the laws and constitution of England have taken since his time. Norman as a Conqueror, as a statesman he is English, and, on this side of him at least, he worthily begins the series.
16 St. Giles’, Oxford, 6 th February 1888.
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.