The history of the Norman conquest of England, its causes and its results,…
"The history of the Norman conquest of England, its causes and its results,…." by Edward A. Freeman is a historical account written in the late 19th century. The work argues that the Norman Conquest was a decisive turning point—not the beginning—of English history, and examines its causes, course, and long-term effects on law, language, government, and society. Volume I focuses on the deep background in England and Normandy, especially the Anglo-Saxon formation
of the English kingdom and the Danish and Norman contexts leading up to the election of Edward the Confessor. The opening of the work presents revised prefaces explaining editorial updates, map improvements, and the author’s method (including Old-English spellings), while answering critics and clarifying specific historical confusions. The introduction sets the thesis: the Conquest brought a powerful foreign infusion but preserved and reshaped existing English institutions; it was more than a dynastic change yet less than a people’s displacement, and its later legal and linguistic effects grew over time. The plan of the narrative runs from early English and Norman histories through the reigns of Edward, Harold, and William, and on to the settling of results by the time of Edward I. At the start of the main text, the author sketches the heathen English conquest of Britain, distinguishing it from other Teutonic settlements: the English largely displaced the Romano-British order, retained their language, and were later Christianized from Rome, not by native Britons. He attributes this difference to Britain’s weaker Romanization and the newcomers’ distance from Roman civilization, and he rejects the tidy “Heptarchy” model while highlighting the leading early kingdoms (notably Kent, Wessex, East Anglia, and Northumbria) and the early growth of Wessex. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
The history of the Norman conquest of England, its causes and its results, Volume 1 (of 6)
Original Publication
Oxford: Clarendon, 1867, copyright 1879.
Credits
Richard Tonsing, MWS, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
