History of the English People, Volume I / Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE VOLUME I
BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A. HONORARY FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE, OXFORD
I Dedicate this Book
TO TWO DEAR FRIENDS MY MASTERS IN THE STUDY OF ENGLISH HISTORY
EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN AND WILLIAM STUBBS
CONTENTS
LIST OF MAPS
For the conquest of Britain by the English our authorities are scant and imperfect. The only extant British account is the Epistola of Gildas, a work written probably about A.D. 560. The style of Gildas is diffuse and inflated, but his book is of great value in the light it throws on the state of the island at that time, and above all as the one record of the conquest which we have from the side of the conquered. The English conquerors, on the other hand, have left jottings of their conquest of Kent, Sussex, and Wessex in the curious annals which form the opening of the compilation now known as the English or Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, annals which are undoubtedly historic, though with a slight mythical intermixture. For the history of the English conquest of mid-Britain or the Eastern Coast we possess no written materials from either side; and a fragment of the Annals of Northumbria embodied in the later compilation ( Historia Britonum ) which bears the name of Nennius alone throws light on the conquest of the North.
From these inadequate materials however Dr. Guest has succeeded by a wonderful combination of historical and archæological knowledge in constructing a narrative of the conquest of Southern and South-Western Britain which must serve as the starting-point for all future enquirers.
This narrative, so far as it goes, has served as the basis of the account given in my text; and I can only trust that it may soon be embodied in some more accessible form than that of a series of papers in the Transactions of the Archæological Institute. In a like way, though Kemble's Saxons in England and Sir F. Palgrave's History of the English Commonwealth (if read with caution) contain much that is worth notice, our knowledge of the primitive constitution of the English people and the changes introduced into it since their settlement in Britain must be mainly drawn from the Constitutional History of Professor Stubbs.