But these concessions, these partial admissions, did but deepen the blindness of such historians and their readers towards the formation and the climax of our race; upon the Dark and the Middle Ages, history as written in the English language was warped beyond recognition.
Then came the reaction towards historical truth: it has already far advanced and the book for which I have the honour here to write a Preface is a notable example of that progress.
“History” (said the great Michelet in a phrase which I am never tired of repeating) “should be a resurrection of the flesh.” What you need for true history is by no means an agreement with the philosophy of the time which you describe (you may be wholly opposed to that philosophy) but at least a full comprehension of it and an understanding that those who worked its human affairs were men fundamentally the same as ourselves. Humanity has not essentially differed from the beginning of recorded, or, indeed, of geological time. Man as man (the only thing which concerns history, or, indeed, the morals and philosophy of mankind) has been the same since first he appears fully developed upon the earth. But in the case of Western Europe during the Middle Ages the thing is far more intimate. We are dealing with men who are not only of our genus but of our very stock; wholly of our particular blood, our own fathers, our own family. What is more, in those ancestors we should take our greatest pride. For never did our race do better or more thoroughly, never was it more faithfully itself, than in the years between the First Crusade and the effects of the Black Death: 1100-1350. Those three long lifetimes were the very summit of the European story.
Now I say that to treat properly of this affair it is not indeed necessary to agree with the philosophy of those men—that is, with their religion. It is certainly not necessary to agree with the details of their action, as, for example, their lapses into cruelty on the one hand or their fierce sense of honour on the other. We may be baser, or more reasonable, or more gentle, or more lethargic than they, and yet remain true historians of them. But what one must have if one is to be an historian at all, and not a mere popular writer, repeating what the public of “the best sellers” wants to have told to it, is a knowledge of the spirit of our ancestors from within.
Now this can only be obtained in one fashion, to wit, by accurate, detailed, concrete record. Find out what happened and say it. Proportion is of course essential; but to an honest man proportion will come of itself from a sufficient reading, and only a dishonest man will after a sufficient reading warp proportion and make a brief by picking out special points.
The trouble is that this period has been dealt with in the past without minute research. There has been plenty of pretence at such research, but most of it was charlatan.
Let me take as a specific instance by way of example:
Freeman’s huge volumes upon the Norman Conquest were long treated as a serious classic. He pretended to have read what he had not read. He pretended to have studied ground he had not studied. He wrote what he knew would sell because it was consonant with what was popular at the time. He attacked blindly the universal Catholic religion of the epoch he dealt with because he hated that religion. But scholarly he was not and did not attempt to be; yet scholarly he pretended to be, and upon supposed scholarship he based his false representation. I will give three examples.
He calls the Battle of Hastings “Senlac.” He found the term not where he pretends, in Ordericus Vitalis, but in Lingard, who was the first man to commit the error. Lingard was the great quarry from which Freeman’s generation of Dons dug out its history without ever acknowledging the source. “Senlac” could not possibly be a Saxon place-name, but Freeman understood so little about the time and was so ignorant of the genius of the language, that he took it for Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps he thought in some vague way he was restoring a “Teutonic” name; more “Teutonic” than Hastings itself!
To this religious motive of his there was undoubtedly added the motive of novelty and of showing off. What the ridge of Battle was originally called by the people of the place, before the Norman invasion, we cannot tell. It may have been “Sandleg” (which would be Sussex enough), or it may have been “Senhanger,” also sound Sussex, or it may have been something ending in the Celtic and Latin “lake.” But “Senlac” it most certainly could not have been; and that Freeman should have pretended to scholarship in a matter of that kind damns him.