student and a country gentleman. After two or three changes of residence, he made his home at Somerleaze, near Wells, in Somersetshire, and it was there that the greatest part of his work was done. He had no lack of occupation, as he was a zealous 'magistrate, a frequent contributor to the Saturday Review and other journals, and a keen politician. At one time he was ambitious to enter Parliament, but he only once went to the poll, and was then unsuccessful. A professorship at Oxford was also an attraction to him, but twice he failed in his candidature for such a post. At last, in 1884, when his friend William Stubbs left Oxford to be Bishop of Chester, Freeman was appointed to

EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN. From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry.

succeed him as Regius Professor of Modern History. For the next eight years he lived part of the year in Oxford and part at Somerleaze. He had always been an eager traveller, full of insight into local and architectural history in many countries. When his health became enfeebled in his later years, he spent some time in Sicily, an island that always had a peculiar interest to him on account of the continuity of its history through long and varying periods. He was on a tour in Spain with his wife and two daughters when he died on 16th May 1892.

Freeman's first book, a History of Architecture, was published in 1849, four years after he had taken his degree. It would take a good deal of space to enumerate all his works from that date till his death. He was always writing, and he published almost everything that he wrote. Many of his articles in magazines were afterwards collected into volumes, and some of them are among the best things he did. But the chief works, on which his reputation as a historian must ultimately

rest, were the History of Federal Government, which stopped short at the first volume in 1863: The History of the Norman Conquest, his most ambitious and best-known work, which appeared in successive volumes from 1867 to 1879 (6 vols., with index); The Historical Geography of Europe (1881-82); the Reign of William Rufus (1882); and History of Sicily (1891-92), which was left unfinished at his death.

In estimating Freeman's merits as a historian and a writer, it must never be forgotten that he was a journalist and a politician, and in both capacities a very combative partisan. His style was very largely formed by the strenuous endeavour to impress his views upon contemporaries, and it was a style that was better suited for a dogmatic lecture or a magazine article than for historical narrative. He acquired a habit of hammering his contention into the minds of his readers or hearers by repeating it in different words. This iteration was not unimpressive in a harangue or in a short article, but it became wearisome in a long and substantial work. The consequent prolixity was increased in Freeman's case by his inability to sift and select his facts. Everything which he had carefully investigated seemed to him of immense importance, and if he could not find a place for it in his text, he must put it into a lengthy appendix. It is difficult to believe that the Norman Conquest will be read in times to come by any but professed students. And the habit of controversy affected the historical value of Freeman's work. His convictions on historical questions, as on other subjects, were very clearly formed and almost passionately asserted. When once he had formed such a conviction, he was extremely loath to change it, even in the face of convincing evidence; and though he would have repudiated the charge of conscious unfairness, he was unquestionably inclined to read his convictions into his authorities, and to draw from them everything that would support his own view. One of his favourite dicta was that 'history is past politics, and politics are present history!' This led him to endeavour to look at the past from the political point of view, to try and place himself in the position of a politician in ancient times. For such a purpose a keener and more sympathetic imagination was needed than Freeman possessed. Some of his most ambitious work is vitiated because he was too much of a nineteenth-century politician to grasp the subtler differences between the conceptions of the eleventh century and those of his own day.

Although it may be doubted whether Freeman's larger books will prove to be of permanent literary importance, there can be no doubt that he did work of immense value in his generation. Many of the lessons which he set himself to teach he taught so thoroughly that they have become almost commonplaces to later students; and curiously enough the most prolix of historical writers

could be, when he chose, a master of the art of compression. Few men could write a short book better than Freeman could when he was bound by precise limits of space. His 'William I.' in the series of Twelve English Statesmen gives an admirable summary of the main conclusions arrived at in the six volumes of the Norman Conquest, and his General Sketch of European History, in a series of school manuals which he himself edited for Messrs Macmillan, is a model of concise and clear narration. A youthful student of history can find few better introductions to the subject than the collected volumes of Freeman's Essays. Few men have had a wider knowledge of the general course of human history, and few have been such consummate masters of apposite and illuminating comparison. Freeman was at his best as a traveller. On a historic site his vast stores of knowledge enabled him to form and present with astonishing readiness a striking picture of all the important events which it suggested to his memory.

If circumstances had been more favourable, Freeman would have been a really great professor of history. It was a misfortune to him, and perhaps to his subject, that he failed to obtain election to the Chichele Professorship of Modern History in 1862. He had a real enthusiasm for teaching, and an Oxford chair would have given him an admirable opportunity for developing his powers in that direction. But in 1884 the appointment came too late. He was older than the great scholar whose place he took, he had done the bulk of his work, and most of the lessons which he wished to teach he had already formulated in the ways which were open to him. Oxford had altered very much since his own days of residence, and he had taken little direct part in the change.

A school of modern history had grown up and reached a fairly advanced stage of development. Freeman was at once too big and too obstinate to fit himself into a ready-made groove. His brusque and combative manner, which concealed real kindness of heart, helped to create rather than to remove misunderstandings. Freeman was never quite happy or comfortable in Oxford; and though he had warm and attached disciples, it cannot be held that he exercised the influence on the studies and life of the University which he would have done if he had entered upon his office twenty years earlier. And he was uneasily conscious that some of his main contentions, especially his insistence upon the predominance of German origins in the building up of modern Europe, were beginning to be questioned, and by some inquirers to be rejected. For a man who had been rather a ruthless critic of others, Freeman was singularly sensitive to attack. was rather pathetic than inspiring to see a student of his eminence standing before an inadequate academic audience, not to tell them new truths, but to assert that he still adhered to assertions

It

that he had made almost a generation ago, that he had nothing to unlearn and little to learn.

The Death of Harold.

While Harold still lived, while the horse and his rider still fell beneath his axe, the heart of England failed not, the hope of England had not wholly passed away. Around the twofold ensign the war was still fiercely raging, and to that point every eye and every arm in the Norman host was directed. The battle had raged ever since nine in the morning, and evening was now drawing in. New efforts, new devices, were needed to overcome the resistance of the English-diminished as were their numbers, and wearied as they were with the livelong toil of that awful day. The Duke bade his archers shoot up in the air, that their arrows might, as it were, fall straight from heaven. The effect was immediate and fearful. No other device of the wily Duke that day did such frightful execution. Helmets were pierced; eyes were put out; men strove to guard their heads with their shields, and, in so doing, they were of course less able to wield their axes. And now the supreme moment drew near. There was one point of the hill at which the Norman bowmen were bidden specially to aim with their truest skill. As twilight was coming on, a mighty shower of arrows was launched on its deadly errand against the defenders of the standard. There Harold still fought; his shield bristled with Norman shafts; but he was still unwounded and unwearied. At last another arrow, more charged with destiny than its fellows, went more truly to its mark. Falling like a bolt from heaven, it pierced the king's right eye; he clutched convulsively at the weapon, he broke off the shaft; his axe dropped from his hand, and he sank in agony at the foot of the standard. while twenty knights who had bound themselves to lower or to bear off the English ensigns strove to cut Most of the twenty paid their way to the same spot. for their venture with their lives, but the survivors succeeded in their attempt. Four of them reached the standard at the very moment Harold fell. Disabled as he was, the king strove to rise; the four rushed upon him and despatched him with various wounds. .. One pierced through the shield of the dying king and stabbed him in the breast; another smote him with the sword just below the fastenings of his helmet. But life was still in him; as he still struggled, a third pierced his body through with his lance, and a fourth finished the work by striking off his leg with his sword. Such was the manner which the boasted chivalry of Normandy meted out to a prince who had never dealt harshly or But we cruelly by either a domestic or a foreign foe. must add, in justice to the Conqueror, that he pronounced the last brutal insult to be a base and cowardly act, and he expelled the doer of it from his army.

The Harrying of the North.

Mean

One thing at least is certain, that the Norman Conquest crushed all hopes of Northumbrian dominion, as dominion, for ever. In this sense the Norman Conquest was in very truth a Saxon Conquest. It ruled that England should be for ever an united kingdom; and it further ruled that the seat of dominion of that united kingdom should be placed in its Southern and not in its Northern part. Yet Northern England may at least boast this much, that in no part of the land did the Conqueror meet with

stouter resistance, that on no part of the land did his avenging hand fall more heavily. We read in the writers of the time of the harrying of the northern shires, of the fields laid waste, of the towns left without inhabitants, of the churches crowded by the sick and hungry as the one place of shelter. We read in the formal language of documents how men bowed themselves for need in the evil day, and sold themselves into bondage for a morsel of bread. We read how the weary and homeless met with such shelter, such alms, as one monastery and one town could give at the hands of good Abbot Ethelwig of Evesham. And, perhaps more striking than all, we read in the calm pages of Domesday the entries of waste,' 'waste,' down whole pages, the records which show how lands which had supplied the halls of two or three English thegns could now yield hardly a penny of income to their foreign masters. To most of us all this is mere book-learning; it was mere book-learning to me a few months back. But tales like these put on a new and fearful truth, they are clothed with a life which is terrible, indeed, to one who has seen the like with his own eyes. The harrying of Northumberland has ceased to be a mere name to one who has seen something of the harrying of Herzegovina. The churchyard of Evesham, crowded with the refugees who had fled from their wasted houses, becomes a reality in the eyes of one who has looked on the same sad sight in the lazzaretto of Ragusa.

Ancient Greece and Medieval Italy.

As the Greek nation was the first which developed for itself anything worthy of the name of civilisation, Greece and the Greek colonies naturally formed the whole extent of their own civilised world. Other nations were simply outside Barbarians. In the best days of Greece the interference of a foreign power in her internal quarrels would have seemed as if the sovereign of Morocco or China should claim the presidency of a modern European congress. In later times, indeed, Sparta and Thebes and Athens, each in turn, found it convenient to contract political alliances with the great king at Ekbatana, or with their more dangerous neighbour at Pella. But the Mede always remained a purely external enemy or a purely external paymaster; the Macedonian had himself to become a Greek before his turn came to be the domi

nant power of Greece. But in medieval Italy the case was widely different. She affected, indeed, to apply the name Barbarian to all nations beyond the mountainbulwark. Nor did the assumption want some show of justification in her palpable pre-eminence in wealth, in refinement, in literature, in many branches of art, above all in political knowledge and progress. But, notwithstanding this, it was impossible to place medieval Italy so far above contemporary France or Spain or Germany as ancient Greece stood above the rest of her contemporary world. All the states of Western Christendom were fragments of a single Empire, whose laws and language and general civilisation had left traces among them all. A common religion, too, united them against the paynim of Cordova or Bagdad, too often against the schismatic who filled the throne of Constantine. Italy for ages saw the lawful successor of her kings and Cæsars in a Barbarian of the race most alien to her feelings and language. Most of her highest nobility drew their origin from the same stock. No wonder, then, if nations less alien to her tongues and manners played a part in her

internal politics which differed widely from any interference of Barbarians in the affairs of Greece. Italian parties ranged themselves under the German watchwords of Guelf and Ghibelin, and fought under the standards of Angevin, Provençal, and Aragonese invaders. Florence looked to France-lily to lily-as her natu ral ally and her chosen protector. Sicily sought for her deliverer from French oppression in the rival power of a Spanish king. French and Spanish princes had been so often welcomed into Italy, they had so often filled Italian thrones and guided Italian politics, that men perhaps hardly understood the change or foresaw the consequences when for the first time a king of France entered Italy in arms as the claimant of an Italian kingdom. Gradually, but only gradually, the strife which had once been a mere disputed succession between an Angevin and an Aragonese pretender grew into a strife between the mightiest potentates of the West for the mastery of Italy. and of Europe.

See Dean W. R. W. Stephens's Life and Letters of E. A. Freeman (2 vols. 1895). RICHARD LODGE.

William Stubbs (1825-1901) was born at Knaresborough in Yorkshire. From a private school at Knaresborough he went on to Ripon Grammar School, and in 1844 matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1848 he took his degree with first-class honours in classics and a third-class in mathematics, and in the same year he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College. Two years later he resigned his fellowship on acceptance of the college living of Navestock in Essex. It was while he held this living that he made his reputation as a strenuous and accurate student of the ecclesiastical and mediæval history of England. This he owed partly to the publication of the Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum in 1858, but mainly to the editorship of several chronicles in the Rolls Series. No volumes in this invaluable collection were edited with such consummate scholarship, with such critical insight and convincing knowledge, as those which were entrusted to his care. And the prefaces which he prefixed to these chronicles, especially those to the Chronicles of Richard I. and to the second volume of Benedict of Peterborough, proved that he was not only a master of the methods of research, but also a really great historian, capable at once of interpreting such remarkable characters as those of Henry II. and his sons, and also of explaining the obscure workings of early institutions. His knowledge of detail was enormous, and no appeal for information on the knottiest points of constitutional or genealogical history failed to elicit an answer from his stores of information. With another student of similar tastes, E. A. Freeman, his intercourse was at all times intimate and friendly. But there were many marked and obvious contrasts between the two men. Freeman was always writing to the press, reviewing books, attacking Froude, denouncing hunting and vivisection, expressing his opinion on Disestablishment, on tithes, on Ireland, on the Eastern question, and

generally siding with the Radical party in politics. Stubbs, on the other hand, was a retiring student, happy with his books and his family, and almost a recluse. Although a strong Conservative, he made no attempt to emphasise or assert his political opinions, and he often boasted in later years that he had never reviewed a book in his life.

Perhaps on account of this greater reticence, which preserved him from the enmities which Freeman's outspokenness too often provoked, Stubbs was the more fortunate in gaining recognition for his work. In 1862 he was appointed librarian at Lambeth, a post in which he was succeeded by another historian, J. R. Green ; and in 1866 he became Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. The eighteen years which he spent in Oxford were certainly the most fruitful and possibly the happiest period of his life. His chief publications were the Select Charters (1870), a collection of documents and extracts from chronicles to illustrate the constitutional development of England to the end of Edward I.'s reign, and the Constitutional History of England, of which the first volume appeared in 1874, and the third and last in 1878. This latter book was at once accepted both in this country and on the Continent as the magisterial and, for the time, the definitive work on the subject. No doubt supplementary information may be and has been obtained, and upon points of detail Stubbs's conclusions may be open to modification, but the book is so cautious and based upon such exhaustive study that it is difficult to believe it can ever be quite superseded. No fewer than thirteen volumes in the Rolls Series were edited by Stubbs during these years. On the other side of his professorial work, as a lecturer, Stubbs was less obviously successful. He read his lectures from manuscript, and he did not attract a large class. Every year he was bound to deliver two public lectures, a duty at which he always grumbled. To these lectures more hearers came than to his consecutive courses, but he never drew such a crowd as came to listen to his predecessor, Goldwin Smith, or to his two successors, Freeman and Froude. Yet he was a really great and stimulating teacher. To him, more than any other man, was due the foundation and organisation of the flourishing school of modern history in Oxford. The secure basis upon which that school has been built was the strenuous study of the consecutive history of the English constitution, which Stubbs inculcated and for which he in large measure supplied the materials. The most influential and formative book in the studies of the school from that day to this has been Stubbs's Select Charters.

In 1879 Stubbs was appointed to a canonry at St Paul's, which he held along with his professorship in Oxford. He was now in a most enviable position, as his income was adequate to his needs, he had easy access to books both in Oxford and London, and in both places he was highly appre

ciated. But in 1884 he was offered and accepted the bishopric of Chester, and five years later he was translated to the see of Oxford. As a bishop he was energetic and liked by his clergy, while his learning added to the prestige of the Episcopal bench. But it may be held that his ecclesiastical duties might have been as efficiently performed by a man who had less obvious powers in another direction. As a bishop Stubbs was almost lost to history and to literature. At Chester he edited two volumes of William of Malmesbury, and while he lived at Cuddesdon he resumed some of his former connection with the university, and sat once more on boards and committees. But his only independent publication in the last sixteen years of his life was a collection of the public lectures which he had delivered with so much open repining during his tenure of the Oxford chair. Some of them are of remarkable merit, and one or two show glimpses of that genial humour which was familiar to Stubbs's personal friends, but which is not conspicuous in his published works and by many readers is probably unsuspected. He was fond of making epigrams, and one of them is worth quoting here:

Froude informs the Scottish youth
That parsons do not care for truth.
The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries
That History is a pack of lies.

What cause for judgments so malign?
A brief reflexion solves the mystery.
Froude believes Kingsley a divine,

And Kingsley goes to Froude for history!

Perhaps constitutional history does not lend itself either to humour or to eloquence. At any rate, Stubbs was more eminent as a historian than as a man of letters. For evidence of his ability to write with vigour and point the reader must go either to his little book on the Early Plantagenets, his only contribution to the innumerable manuals which have been produced in such profusion by later historians, or preferably to the Prefaces in the Rolls Series. Since Stubbs's death these Prefaces have been collected and republished in a separate volume, and they will probably prove more attractive to the general reader than the Constitutional History, which is too solid and substantial for the ordinary appetite.

Henry II. and his Sons.

Henry's division of his dominions among his sons was a measure which, as his own age did not understand it, later ones may be excused for mistaking; but the object of it was, as may be inferred from his own recorded words, to strengthen and equalise the pressure of the ruling hand in the different provinces of various laws and nationalities. The sons were to be the substitutes, not the successors of their father; the eldest as the accepted or elected sharer of the royal name, as feudal superior to his brothers, and first in the royal councils, stood in the same relation to his father as the king of the Romans to the emperor; he might rule with a full delegated power, or perhaps with inchoate independence, but the father's hand was to guide the helm of State.

Unhappily the young brood of the eagle of the broken covenant were the worst possible instruments for the working of a large and complex policy: the last creatures in the world to be made useful in carrying on a form of government which the experience of all ages has tried and found wanting.

Yet how grand a scheme of western confederation might be deduced from the consideration of the position of Henry's children; how great a dream of conquest may after all have been broken by the machinations of Lewis and Eleanor! What might not a crusade have effected headed by Henry II., with his valiant sons, the first warriors of the age; with his sons-in-law, William the Lion, William of Sicily, and Alfonso of Castile; with Philip of France, the brother-in-law of his sons; Frederick Barbarossa, his distant kinsman and close ally; the princes of Champagne and Flanders, his cousins? In it the grand majestic chivalry of the emperor, the wealth of Sicily, the hardy valour and practical skill of Spain, the hereditary crusading ardour of the land of Godfrey of Bouillon and Stephen of Blois, the statesman-like vigour and simple piety of the great Saxon hero, under the guidance of the craft and sagacity, the mingled unimpetuosity and caution, of Henry II., might have presented Europe to Asia in a guise which she has never yet assumed. Yet all the splendour of the family confederation, all the close-woven, widespread web that fortune and sagacity had joined to weave, end in the cruel desertion, the baffled rage, the futile curses of the chained leopard in the last scene at Chinon. The lawful sons, the offspring, the victims, and the avengers of a heartless policy; the loveless children of a loveless mother have left the last duties of an affection they did not feel to the hands of a bastard-the child of an early, obscure, misplaced, degrading, but not a merce. nary love. (From the Preface to Benedictus Abbas.)

Impartiality in a Historian.

For my own part, I do not see why an honest partisan should not write an honest book if he can persuade himself to look honestly at his subject, and make allowance for his own prejudices. I know it is somewhat critical work, and a man who knows himself in one way may be quite ignorant of himself in another. I take Hallam as an illustrious example. Hallam knew himself to be a political partisan, and, wherever he knew that political prejudice might darken his counsel, he guarded most carefully against it: he did not claim the judicial character without fitting himself for it; and where he knew himself to be sitting as judge he judged admirably; so admirably that the advanced advocates even of his own views have long ago thrown him over as too timid and temporising for their purpose. Yet where he was not awake to his own prejudice, in matters, for instance, regarding religion and the Church, in which he seems to have had no doubt about his own infallibility of negation, how ludicrously and transparently unfair he is!

I do not see any necessity for this. I do not see why a man should not say once for all: I like Charles I. better than Oliver Cromwell; I like the cause for which Charles believed himself to be contending better than that for which Cromwell strove. Charles is attractive to me, Oliver is repulsive; Charles is my friend, Oliver is my foe but am I bound to maintain that my friend is always right and my enemy always wrong; am I bound to hold Charles for a saint, Oliver for a monster;

am I bound never to mention Charles without a sigh or Oliver without a sneer; am I bound to conceal the faults of the one and to believe every calumny against the other? If you like, put it the other way, believe in the great Protestant statesman, treat Charles as the overrated fine gentleman, the narrow-minded advocate of a theory which he did not understand, the pig-headed maintainer of a cause you dislike. You may be a partisan, but can you not believe that, if you believe your own side of the question, truth will be found on your side? Misrepresentation, exaggeration, dishonesty of advocacy, will only disparage the presentment which you desire to make of your own convictions and your own prepossessions. Nay, I would go further, and say I should like Charles better than Oliver even if his cause were less my own than I conceive it to be. I am ready to stick to my friends and vote against my unfriends; but why should I shut my eyes to the false and foolish things that my friends do, or to the noble aspirations, honesty, and good intentions of those whom I think wrong in their means and mistaken in their ends? Yet, as I began by saying, without some infusion of spite it seems as if history could not be written; that no man's zeal is roused to write unless it is moved by the desire to write down. Of course I seem to be stating extreme cases, but it is extreme cases that make their own advertisements, and that do the great mischief. Here the study of ancient history has its great advantage over modern; yet battles are still fought over the character of Tiberius, and the 'lues rehabitandi' has given a new reading to the history of Marius and Sylla. (From Lectures on Mediaval and Modern History.)

RICHARD LODGE.

Walter Bagehot (1826-77) was born at Langport, Somerset, and from school at Bristol he passed in 1842 to University College, London, where he took his M.A. in 1848; in 1852 he was called to the Bar, but joined his father as a banker and shipowner at Langport. From Paris in 1851 he had written a series of letters justifying Napoleon's coup d'état. Soon after he became a writer for the periodicals, and was associated with R. H. Hutton on the National Review. In 1858 he married a daughter of Mr Wilson, founder of the Economist newspaper, and from 1860 till his death he was its editor. His works include The English Constitution (1867), a book of great value, translated into several foreign tongues; Physics and Politics (1872), applying to politics the evolution theory; Lombard Street (1873), a standard work on the money market; and three volumes of literary, biographical, and economic studies, with Memoir by R. H. Hutton (1879-81; new ed. 1895). Bagehot was an unconventional, original, and suggestive thinker, a trenchant but sagacious critic, and a vigorous and even brilliant writer. He was readier than most contemporaries to give due weight to the historical and evolutionary aspects of things; he recognised the limitations of the Ricardian economics, and treated political economy as a science not of rigorous laws, but of tendencies. There are essays on him in Mr Birrell's Miscel lanies (1902) and in Sir Leslie Stephen's Studies of a Biographer (2nd series, 1902).