"He was chosen, not by some small or packed assembly, but by the chief men of the land. And he was chosen, not by this or that shire or earldom, but by the chief men of the whole land.... All this is implied in the weighty and carefully chosen words of Florence" (Norman Conquest (1869), iii. 597).
So also he confidently insists that—
"There can be no doubt that the Witan of Northumberland, no less than the Witan of the rest of England, had concurred in the election of Harold. The expressions of our best authorities declare that the chief men of all England concurred in the choice" (ibid., p. 57).
The only authority given for this assertion is the above statement by Florence that "Harold was 'a totius Angliæ primatibus ad regale culmen electus.'"
Now, the known authorities from which Florence worked (the Abingdon and Worcester chronicles) "are," Mr. Freeman admits, "silent about the election." The fact, therefore, rests on the ipse dixit of Florence (for the words of the Peterborough chronicler are quite general, and, moreover, he is admittedly a partisan), who was, strictly speaking, not a contemporary authority.
Stephen's election, as Mr. Freeman observes, "can hardly fail to call to our minds" that of Harold, and in the case of Stephen's accession we have what he himself terms the "valuable contemporary" evidence of the Continuator of Florence." This evidence, which is better, because more contemporary, than that of Florence as to 1066, is equally precise (vide supra), and might, in the absence of rebutting testimony, be appealed to as confidently as Mr. Freeman appeals to that of Florence. But in this case it is proved, by rebutting evidence, to be worthless, just as it is at Maud's "reception" in 1141 (see p. 64).
Therefore, we see how dangerous it is to accept such statements, when unsupported, as exact in every detail, and are led to regard the words of Florence as a mere conventional phrase, rather than to hold, as Mr. Freeman insists, that in "no passage in any writer of any age ... does every word deserve to be more attentively weighed."
The caution with which such evidence should be used is one of the chief lessons this work is intended to enforce (see p. 267).
Page [8]. There is much confusion as to the charters of liberties issued by Stephen. The "second" charter, as explained in the text, was issued at Oxford in the spring of 1136; the other, commonly termed the "coronation" charter, is found only, it would seem, in the Cottonian MS. Claud. D. II., and has no note of date. Mr. Hubert Hall has been good enough to inform me that the authority of this MS. is first-rate; and, as to the date at which the charter was issued, that of the coronation, there is no doubt, was the most probable. It is important to observe that the oath stated by William of Malmesbury to have been taken by Stephen at his first arrival (and afterwards committed to writing at Oxford) was "de libertate reddenda ecclesiæ et conservanda." William's remark that this oath, "postea scripto inditum, loco suo non prætermittam," proves that he must have looked on the Oxford charter as the record of this oath in writing; for that is the only charter which he gives in his work. This fits in with the fact that the charter assigned to the coronation contains no mention of the Church and her liberties, while the "second" (Oxford) charter is full of them. It would appear, then, that the Oxford charter combined the original oath to the Church with the "coronation" charter to the people at large, at the same time expanding them both in fuller detail.
Page [37]. (Cf. p. [354].) It would, perhaps, have been rash to introduce into the text the conjecture that in the first Geoffrey de Mandeville we have the actual "Gosfregth Portirefan" to whom the Conqueror's charter to the citizens of London was addressed, although the story in the De Inventione, the known connection of the Mandevilles with the shrievalty, and the striking resemblance of the two names (even closer than in "Esegar" and "Ansgar"), all point to the same conclusion.