PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
The present volume is the first instalment of a work which I have contemplated, and for which I have at various times collected materials, for the last twenty years. I had hoped to complete the work, or so much of it as would come down to the actual accession of William the Conqueror, in time for it to appear during the year 1866, the octocentenary year of the Conquest. I found however that, to make the main subject really intelligible from my point of view, it was necessary to treat the preliminary history at much greater length than I had originally thought of. The present volume therefore is merely introductory to the account of the actual Conquest. The second portion of the narrative, containing the reigns of Eadward, Harold, and William, is already in progress, and will follow with all possible speed.
I think it right to add that this work must not be taken as a sign that I have at all given up the design of going on with my History of Federal Government. Of the second volume of that work a considerable part is already written. One or two circumstances led me to lay it aside for a time, and I do not at all regret that such has been the case. The part on which I was engaged was the history of the German Confederation, and I find that, of what I have written, part has already become antiquated through the events of the past year. When Germany shall have assumed a shape possessing some greater chance of permanence than her present clearly transitional state, I shall be better able to take a general view of German Federal history from the beginning. The peculiarity of the German Confederation is that it is the one recorded Confederation which arose from the separation of the component parts of a Kingdom. There now seems every chance of its changing back again into something more like its original state. The condition of the Hanseatic towns also, another part of my subject, is already greatly modified by the same events. It is even possible that they may not be without effect on the European position of Switzerland. On the whole, I believe that the delay in my work will only lead to its improvement, and that a volume on Swiss Federalism, and on German Federalism generally, will be far more valuable two or three years hence than it would have been if I had been able to complete it in the year before last.
With regard to my present work, my main object is to draw out that view of the Norman Conquest which I believe to be the one true one. That view, I may say, is formed by uniting the views of the two most eminent writers who have dealt with the subject, Augustine Thierry and Sir Francis Palgrave. The name of the last-mentioned illustrious scholar can never be uttered by any student of early English history without a feeling of deep gratitude. But his great and unfinished works set forth only half the truth. His eloquent French rival sets forth the other half. Each of these great writers must stand charged with considerable exaggeration on his own side of the question. Still, in the main, I think we may say that each is right in what he asserts and wrong only in what he leaves out of sight. From one point of view, the Norman Conquest was nearly all that Thierry says that it was; from another point of view, it was hardly more than Sir Francis Palgrave says that it was. Both writers also singularly resemble each other in a certain lack of critical power. Nothing in any period of history, above all, nothing in the period of history with which I am concerned, is more necessary than to distinguish the respective value of different authorities. Now in this respect both Thierry and Sir Francis Palgrave were deficient. Neither, I believe, ever made a statement for which he could not give chapter and verse in some shape or other. But both of them were too apt to catch at any statement which seemed at all to support their several theories, without always stopping to reflect whether such statements came from contemporary chronicles or charters or from careless and ill-informed compilers three or four centuries later.
The prominence which I have given to the preliminary history contained in this volume is due to a deep and growing conviction that the history of the Norman Conquest, and indeed all later English history also, is constantly misunderstood through a fatal habit of beginning the study of English history with the Norman Conquest itself. A confused and unhappy nomenclature hinders many people from realizing that Englishmen before 1066 were the same people as Englishmen after 1066. They thus fail to perceive that the Norman Conquest, instead of wiping out the race, the laws, or the language which existed before it, did but communicate to us a certain foreign infusion in all three branches, which was speedily absorbed and assimilated into the preexisting mass. We cannot understand the Norman Conquest of England without knowing something of the history both of Englishmen and of Normans before they met in arms on the hills of Sussex. As regards the Normans, the conquest of England was but the most brilliant and the most permanent of a series of brilliant conquests, from the occupation of Rouen to the occupation of Naples. As regards England, the Conquest was the grand and final result of causes which had been at work at least ever since the death of Eadgar. The Danish invasions, and the Norman tendencies of Eadward, each, in different ways, both suggested the enterprise of William and made that enterprise easier to be effected. I therefore look on the earlier history of Normandy, and still more on the English history from the accession of Æthelred to the death of Harthacnut, as so closely connected with my subject as to need a treatment in considerable detail. With the reign of Eadward the period of the Conquest itself begins. And I may add that I have done my best to throw some life into a period of our history which is full alike of political instruction and of living personal interest. That period is commonly presented to ordinary readers in the guise either of fantastic legends or else of summaries of the most repulsive dryness. I have striven to show what was the real political state of England in the tenth and eleventh centuries. I have striven also to clothe with flesh and blood the dry bones of men like Brihtnoth and Ulfcytel and Eadmund and our illustrious Danish conqueror himself.
As in my History of Federal Government I ventured to restore the Greek spelling of proper names, so I now follow the example of scholars like Kemble, Lappenberg, and others, in employing the genuine spelling of Old-English names. As they are generally spelled, they are a mere chaos of French and Latin corruptions, following no principle of any kind. Æðelstán becomes “Athelstane,” while Æðelred, exactly the same form, becomes “Ethelred.” I do not however follow Mr. Kemble in retaining the obsolete letter ð. It seems to me as much out of place to write Æðelðryð in the midst of a modern English sentence, as it would be to write Αθênê or Θeopompos. At one time I felt inclined to except those names which are still in familiar use, like Alfred and Edward, on the same principle on which I write Philip and not Philippos. Were the English names, like the Greek, simply cut short at the end, there would be no difficulty in so doing. But it would be unpleasantly inconsistent to write Ælfric and Alfred, Eadwig and Edward. I therefore make a chronological distinction; by the time of our post-Norman Edwards, the a had been dropped in contemporary spelling, and I write accordingly. The names of Normans and other foreigners, William, John, and the like, I give in their modern shape. Nothing could be gained by writing Willelm, Willaume, or Guillaume, all of them mere corruptions just as much as the modern English form. Names of places again I write with their usual modern spelling, because in them we have, what in the names of men we have not, an universally received and, allowing for some misconceptions, fairly consistent system. I except only one or two places, like Brunanburh, Ethandun, Assandun, of which the geographical position is more or less uncertain, and whose fame is wholly confined to the time of which I am writing.
I have given two maps, chiefly founded on those in Spruner’s Hand-Atlas. As in the maps which accompanied my History of Federal Government, any attempts to mark the boundaries of states whose boundaries were always fluctuating must always be more or less conjectural, and my conjectures, or those of Dr. Spruner, may not be the same as the conjectures of all my readers. All such attempts must be taken at what they are worth and no more. For one such conjecture I am specially responsible. In the map of Britain in 597 I have attempted, by means of cross-colouring, to mark the extent of territory north of the Thames and Avon which was West-Saxon in 597, but which I believe to have become Mercian in 628. In so doing I have followed the indications given by Dr. Guest in his papers and local maps; but I believe that mine is the first attempt to show the results of his researches on the general map of Britain. In this map my object was to mark all ascertained places mentioned in the Chronicles, with the addition of a few from Bæda, up to the time of Ecgberht. In the later map of the English Empire my principle was to mark those places which were mentioned in my own history from the time of Ecgberht to the Norman Conquest.
I have now only to return my thanks to those friends who have helped me in my undertaking in various ways, by comments and suggestions, by the loan of books, and in a few cases, though very few, by verifying references to books which I had not at hand. At their head I am proud to place the two men who stand at the head of living students of English history, Dr. Guest and Professor Stubbs. I have also to thank Viscount Strangford for several valuable suggestions as to the early Celtic ethnology of Britain. My thanks are due also for help of different kinds to the Rev. S. W. Wayte, now President of Trinity College, to the Rev. John Earle, late Professor of Anglo-Saxon, to the Rev. J. E. B. Mayor, of St. John’s College, Cambridge, to F. H. Dickinson, Esq., of Trinity College, Cambridge, to the Rev. J. R. Green, of Jesus College, a rising scholar to whom I look for the continuation of my own work, and to W. B. Dawkins, Esq., of Jesus College and of the Geological Survey. Mr. Dawkins I have especially to thank for much help in my investigations of the battle-fields of Maldon and Assandun, and I look to him for more valuable help still when I come to the greater battle which forms the centre of my whole history. And I must add my thanks for the kindness of every sort which I have uniformly received from the Delegates of the University Press, from one especially whose loss all historical students are now lamenting, my late learned and deeply esteemed friend Dr. Shirley.