The history of Roman Britain has yet to be written. Every year excavations, inscriptions, coins add a little to our knowledge of these tantalisingly obscure centuries. Perhaps the best short sketches to which the student can be referred are the chapter on Britain in Mommsen’s Provinces of the Roman Empire (translated by Dickson: London, 1886), and a similar chapter in Emil Hübner’s Römische Herrschaft in West Europa (Berlin, 1890). Both these scholars are complete masters of all that epigraphy has to tell concerning the Roman occupation of Britain. In the early chapters of various volumes of the Victoria County History of England, Mr. F. Haverfield is bringing the Roman archæology of the counties there described thoroughly up to date. It is to be hoped that these may all before long be combined by him into one great work on Britannia Romana.
For Anglo-Saxon history perhaps Lappenberg’s Geschichte von England (translated by B. Thorpe: London, 1881) is still the most trustworthy guide; but the Making of England and the Conquest of England by John Richard Green have all the characteristic charm of that author’s historical work; perhaps also it should be said, his characteristic tendency to translate a brilliant hypothesis into historical fact. The truly monumental history of The Norman Conquest by E. A. Freeman will assuredly always remain the great quarry from which all later builders will hew their blocks for building. Even those who differ most strongly from his conclusions must bear witness to his unwearied industry and single-minded desire for historical accuracy, whether he always compassed it or not. One of Freeman’s antagonists, C. H. Pearson, offers some useful suggestions in his History of England during the Early and Middle Ages; and the same author’s Historical Maps of England during the First Thirteen Centuries contain an immense amount of carefully collected geographical material, and deserve to be more widely known than they are at the present time. Another doughty combatant, J. H. Round, in Feudal England (London, 1895), has set himself to demolish Professor Freeman’s theories as to the battle of Hastings and some other matters.
Sir James Ramsay’s Foundations of England (1898) is an extremely careful digest of all the authorities bearing on the subject.
W. Bright’s Early English Church History, C. F. Keary’s Vikings in Western Christendom and C. Plummer’s Life and Times of Alfred the Great are all helpful books.
Where English and Scottish history touch one another the works of E. W. Robertson, Scotland under Her Early Kings and Historical Essays; W. F. Skene, Celtic Scotland, and Andrew Lang, History of Scotland, will be found useful, and should be consulted in order to see the arguments of the champions of Scottish independence.
For the history of institutions reference should be made to Bishop Stubbs (Constitutional History); F. W. Maitland (Domesday Book and Beyond); H. M. Chadwick (Studies on Anglo-Saxon Institutions); J. M. Kemble (The Saxons in England); F. Palgrave (The Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth); H. C. Coote (The Romans of Britain—worth studying, with distrust, as an extreme statement of the survival of Roman customs in Britain); F. Seebohm (The English Village Community); and P. Vinogradoff (Villainage in England, The Growth of the Manor and an essay on “Folkland” in the English Historical Review for 1893, which has been generally accepted as containing the true explanation of that much-discussed term of Anglo-Saxon law).
A good edition of the Anglo-Saxon Laws was prepared in 1840 by Benjamin Thorpe and published by the Record Commission. A more complete edition, with full commentary, was made by Reinhold Schmid and published in Leipzig in 1858. Even this is now being surpassed by the work of Felix Liebermann (Halle, 1898–1903), who has published an excellent text, but whose commentary on the laws has yet to appear. For the charters and other similar documents of the Anglo-Saxon kings we may refer to Kemble’s Codex Diplomaticus (6 vols., 1839–48); Birch’s Cartularium Saxonicum (3 vols., 1885–93), and Haddan and Stubbs’s Councils (3 vols., 1869–78), which are splendid collections of this kind of material for the historical student. As convenient manuals, Diplomatarium Anglicum Aevi Saxonici by Benjamin Thorpe (1845); Stubbs’s Select Charters (1895), and Earle’s Handbook to the Land Charters, will be found useful.
For a much more detailed list of authorities than can here be given the reader is referred to the excellent manual on The Sources and Literature of English History by Dr. Charles Gross of Harvard University (1900).
APPENDIX II.
GENEALOGY OF NORTHUMBRIAN KINGS.
