The greatest story in the world, period 2 (of 3)

by Horace G. Hutchinson

The Further Story of the Old World up to the
Discovery of the New

BY HORACE G. HUTCHINSON

LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

FIRST PUBLISHED ... 1924

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.

PREFACE TO PERIOD II

I have taken up our "Greatest Story" from the point at which we dropped it at the end of the first volume; that is about the year A.D. 100, when the Roman Empire was a solidly established institution.

Throughout that first volume our own land of Britain scarcely had a place. In the latter part of the period—A.D. 100 to A.D. 1500—which this second volume covers, men of Britain played a great role. For centuries, kings of England were rulers of large domains on the Continent of Europe also, and at one time their Continental territories were more extensive and richer than their insular possessions. The world story thus becomes, in some measure, England's also. Moreover, when there have seemed to be two or more ways open for the telling of the story, I have always tried to adopt what I may call the English way, the way which seemed likely to bring it most warmly and intimately home to English hearts and minds. Thus, for example, when the course of history brought us to the point at which we were to consider the manner of life of those Gothic or Germanic tribes which came flooding in from the eastern side of the Rhine, I have chosen, for a type of their lives in general, what we partly know and partly surmise of those lives as they were lived in our own island. Again, where I have endeavoured to give an idea of the manner in which the Northmen, the sea-rovers, made their settlements, I have taken their incursions on England as a type of the rest. In both instances it would have been equally possible to tell the story of some of the people of Charlemagne's great empire and the Continental settlements of the Northmen as typical examples, but the other appeared to me the way far more likely to make the picture real and the story appealing to the eye of an Anglo-Saxon reader.