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By EDWARD A.

The History of the Norman Conquest of England.
FREEMAN, M.A. Vols. I. and II. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

AST year we gave a short notice of the first volume of Mr. Freeman's book, and we now gladly hail the appearance of another instalment of it. It would, perhaps, have been better if the two volumes had come out together, for public interest is sometimes apt to flag when a work of five volumes--and this is the proposed length of the "Norman Conquest"-comes out volume by volume. No one, however, can accuse Mr. Freeman of idleness, for the second volume has followed the first with unlooked-for speed. It will probably be read by many with greater pleasure, for the first volume is really introductory, but the second contains the history of the reign of Eadward the Confessor, the time in which the vanguard of the conquering nation came over and settled here in the sees and lordly abbeys and fair manors of the English. It was the time of the sowing of the dragon's teeth by a foreign-hearted king, and even as he sowed the bitter harvest was springing up round about him to be reaped by his nobler successor. We are brought face to face with the men who fought on either side at Senlac, and most of the volume has an interest like that with which one reads some great tragedy, and eagerly marks each word or deed of the heroes who are so soon to be involved in the catastrophe towards which we are hastening;

* Vol. v. p. 383.

as we are.

but with this important difference, that the actors in the Conquest were real men, and on one side were of the same nation and language No writer on the history of a time so far distant gives greater reality and life to scenes and persons than Mr. Freeman does. He not only appreciates and vigorously describes the beauties of hill, and wood, and river, but he has the rare gift of a critical eye for topography, and seizes with certainty on each particular spot which has been the scene of any historical event, and he peoples it again with men who have been long dead. The persons of whom he writes seem to live again before us, and, what is best of all, they are clothed in their own bodies-they are themselves, and not the personages who have been called by their names, but who have really been gradually created out of legend and romance, and handed down to us by one copyist after another. The line of these copyists seems never likely to end; men even now quote Lingard and the Chronicle as if they were of equal value; indeed, but a few weeks ago we read a vindication of a mischievous mistake, perpetrated in what we may call one of the lighter books of history, entirely based on the fact that Palgrave and Lingard had asserted the same before. Mr. Freeman has no part in this indolent and servile habit of taking facts and opinions second-hand. He reads history, as history must be read, in the chronicles and charters of the time; and he writes of men and things, not as they seemed to some other modern author, but as they seemed to those who lived amongst them and took a part in the scenes they told. Yet he makes no effort after originality for its own sake; he is content to follow in the wake of the great men who have gone before him, and heartily acknowledges the help which he has received from them and from his contemporaries; but he does not take a fact or opinion as true simply because it is sheltered by some great name. He sees things with his own eyes, and judges of them with his own mind; and it is well he does so, for there are few men with his power of historical criticism. It is to this that these volumes chiefly owe their interest, for the nearer we get to certainty the more interesting history becomes; just as some landscape becomes more and more beautiful as the mist rolls away before the sun, and each object is seen every moment more clearly and in truer colours. Mr. Freeman, and others like him, are doing all they can to clear away the mists which have gathered round our early history; there are many who are unconsciously thickening them by carelessness or by hazy talk about philosophy falsely so called. But the great feature of these volumes is, that they show an extraordinary knowledge of other times and countries; we too often see men, who write at length on one historical subject, wonderfully ignorant of all save what immediately concerns that subject; and so

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their views are narrowed, and they are often betrayed into serious mistakes; but Mr. Freeman looks at the history of his period and writes about it, as a part of one great whole, and all the wealth of a deeply-read mind is brought to enrich his story.

The first volume is chiefly taken up with the growth of the WestSaxon power and the reigns of the Danish kings. The kingdom planted by Cerdic and Ceawlin gradually increased in power till the West-Saxon kings became Lords and Emperors of Britain. This latter title did not convey any idea of absolutism; it meant that the king who reigned at Winchester was lord of the kings and princes of this alter orbis; but the supreme power was vested not in him alone, but in him and the great national council, the Witenagemót, or Meeting of the Wise. Mr. Freeman has given a very valuable and clear account of the powers and probable constitution of this great assembly. His theory is that, by the time the supremacy of Wessex had been acknowledged in the island

"Every freeman had a right to be present at the council, but that any actual participation in the proceedings had gradually and imperceptibly come to be confined to the leading men, to the king's thegns, strengthened under peculiarly favourable circumstances, by the presence of exceptional classes of freemen, like the London citizens."-Vol. i., p. 112.

The old right which every man had of a voice in the national assembly was never taken away; but the great nobles, the personal followers of the king, were usually the only people who did attend, save in especial cases; and they no doubt announced the decisions to such other freemen whom curiosity had drawn to the spot, "without any fear that the habitual Yea, yea,' would ever be exchanged for Nay, nay.'" This assembly, then, differed in every way from our modern parliament; it was not representative; in theory it was more democratic than most even of the greatest reformers would wish to see again; in fact, it was really aristocratic. Its functions were also entirely different. The personal character of the king was, it is true, of far greater weight than it can be now, for it belonged to him to carry out the decrees of the Witan, and he was the personal lord of all his subjects; but the assembly interfered in many things which are now left to the Crown, made responsible to the nation through its ministers. It not only levied taxes, but made peace and war; it was the supreme court of the kingdom; it distributed, at least before the Danish conquest, the folkland, or public lands; it even chose and deposed the king. For the English people have ever claimed to say who shall reign over them; within the sacred line the choice would of course fall in most cases upon the eldest son of the last king, but if he was not thought fit to reign, then upon the eldest and worthiest of the family; and so, in extreme cases, every

member might be passed by, and one out of the line might be chosen, as was Harold, son of Godwine. As the other states lost their independence their assemblies became merged in the Witan of Wessex, which thus became the great council of the nation. But though they lost their independence they did not lose their distinct existence. In the place of kings they received ealdormen; they were appointed by the king and Witan, but the office was virtually hereditary, and often was so in the formerly royal families. The ealdorman was entirely a subject of the king, but he exercised full sovereign powers within the limits of his government. There was in consequence but little union in the kingdom; there was much energy in almost every place, but no great national force, and the tendency of England was certainly towards disunion. When the shock of the great Danish invasion came, the real weakness of the system of government, as well as the carelessness of the king and the treachery of some of the nobles, worked the ruin of the country.

Mr. Freeman tells the story of the Danish Conquest with great vigour, for he writes with most evident love for his subject when he tells how Englishmen fought and died for their land; most of all when he describes the fight at Maldon, where the three mighty ones kept the bridge against the Danish army, where the patriot ealdorman fought and died with all his following. The tale has been sung in the most stirring strains of old Teutonic verse; it has been enshrined in the tapestry of Ely by the love of Ethelflæd, the hero's widow; it is echoed again now, after centuries of silence, with no less vigour and beauty. And, as one reads how the English fought on foot, forming a wall with their shields-how the hero fell, and the fight waxed fiercer round him, till eorl and ceorl lay dead around the body of their lord, one anxiously looks forward to reading from the same hand the greater fight upon the hill of Senlac. Resistance like that of Brithnoth only served to show how much might have been done had the country been more united. A new power of union was found in the character of Eadmund, and his great struggle, which was at the first purely local, ended in the furious battle at Assandun, where all England, led by her king, fought against the Danes.

Mr. Freeman points out that the reigns of the Danish kings produced two most important changes, which both tended to unite the different parts of the kingdom by heightening the power of the Crown. The local militia had been tried in the Danish invasion, and had been found wanting. The men of each county, the following of each ealdorman, time after time withstood manfully, but ineffectually, the attack upon their own neighbourhood. But there was, as we have seen, no power of union, save that which might be found in the character of the king, and even that might come too

late. "In a country which was so imperfectly united, one part of the kingdom did not greatly care for the misfortunes of another. The devastation of Kent and Wessex would not cause any very deep sorrow or alarm to the Danish people of Northumberland." And when an attempt was made to raise a national army, the Witan had first to be assembled, the matter was discussed with all the freedom which is still the glory of our national assembly, and with all the jealousy and conflicting interests of the different parts of the kingdom, which have now happily passed away for ever; and then the gathering had to be fixed at a distant day, to allow time for the forces to be raised in the different counties, and for them to meet together at one spot. Meanwhile the invading army had probably plundered one district, and then sailed off to another, or carried away their booty to some foreign port. There was no force which could at once be set in motion to check foreign invasion. This want was supplied by Cnut's Housecarls. This body bore a strong likeness to the "following" of the earlier kings and ealdormen, but it was large, and kept constantly under arms, instead of being armed only when they followed their lord. They were, as their name implies, the king's household troops, and were governed by his will alone. Their establishment is one of the many marks of the change which the English Constitution gradually underwent; it shows the immense increase of the power of the Crown. Under a bad king, such as Harthacnut, or under a weak and occasionally violent king, such as Eadward, the Housecarls were sometimes the instruments of wrong; but, as Mr. Freeman points out, no such charge can be laid against the great Cnut. Their position in his reign is very like that of the Dutch soldiers of William III.—they bore no small part in his elevation to the throne of a foreign kingdom, and remained here, not only to guard the king, but to ward off invasion from our shores.

The other, and still more important result of the Danish Conquest, marked by Mr. Freeman, was the change in the position of the great earls, for so the old ealdormen were now called. The constitutional position of these great officers has been much mistaken, and one of the highest merits of Mr. Freeman's work, as far as it has yet gone, is the masterly way in which he has treated this subject. The common idea is that they had the whole governing power, that the kingdom was virtually without any head, and was rapidly tending towards disunion. Writers who are content to take their ideas from Norman authors of two centuries later, or from men who have copied from them, indulge in much tall talk about "the government being in the hands of one of the vilest aristocracies which the world has ever seen." Nothing can show a more entire ignorance of the real fact than such statements. The reign of Eadward is full of signs of

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