our modern English historians are never really at home until they get to the Hanoverian dynasty. Before that they have to deal with a remaining remnant of the vigorous Catholic spirit, and they are perplexed and bewildered by it, so that it vitiates their conclusions. That is why they cannot write of the later Stuarts, and especially of James II, with any proper sense of proportion. They cannot conceive how strong nor even how widespread was the support of the national dynasty, because that support was mixed up with the (to them and in our time) utterly alien Catholic idea.
I say that the main task of an historian writing in the English language is the shovelling away of rubbish; and this is particularly true of the rubbish which has accumulated over the record of the Dark and early Middle Ages (A.D. 500 to 1000; A.D. 1000 to 1500).
From the very beginning of the affair popular history was warped by the spirit of ridicule (Voltaire’s creation propagated in the English language by Voltaire’s pupil Gibbon) against the formation of Christendom and that tremendous story of definition upon definition, council upon council, from which emerged at last the full Christian creed. The decisive conflicts of Nicea, of Chalcedon, were made a silly jest, and generations of boys and young men were taught to think of the most profound questions ever settled by the human mind as verbal quips and incomprehensible puerilities.
Next the gradual transformation of our Catholic civilization from the majestic order of our pagan origin to the splendid spring of the twelfth century was represented with incredible insufficiency as the conquest of the Occident by barbarian Germans, who, though barbarians, possessed I know not what fund of strength and virtue. Institutions which we now know to be of Roman origin were piously referred to these starved heaths of the Baltic and to the central European wilds. Their inhabitants were endowed with every good quality. Whatever we were proud of in our inheritance was referred to the blank savagery of outer lands at no matter what expense of tortured hypothesis or bold invention. This warping of truth was indulged in because the northern part of Europe stood (in the nineteenth century when this false “Teutonic” school had its greatest vogue) for a successful opposition to the rest of Christendom, and for a schism within the body of civilized men.
But the worst fault of all, worse even than the superficial folly of Gibbon’s tradition in our treatment of the great Christian foundation and worse than the Teutonic nonsense, was the misunderstanding of those four great centuries in which our race attained the summit of its happiness and stable culture—the twelfth, the thirteenth, the fourteenth and the fifteenth. And of these, the greatest, the thirteenth, was in particular ignored.
Men did indeed (partly because it enabled them to “turn” the position of true history by concession to, partly from the unavoidable effect of, increasing historical knowledge) pay lip service in England, during the later part of the nineteenth century, to the greatness of the true Middle Ages. In his early period, Ruskin is a conspicuous example of a writer who, without in the least understanding what the Middle Ages were like, hating yet ignorant of the faith that was their very soul, could not remain blind to the vivid outward effect of their expression. Even Carlyle, far more ignorant than Ruskin and far more of a player to the gallery, could not altogether avoid the strong blast of reality which blew from those times.
But these concessions, these partial admissions, did but deepen the blindness of such historians and their readers towards the formation and the climax of our race; upon the Dark and the Middle Ages, history as written in the English language was warped beyond recognition.
Then came the reaction towards historical truth: it has already far advanced and the book for which I have the honour here to write a Preface is a notable example of that progress.
“History” (said the great Michelet in a phrase which I am never tired of repeating) “should be a resurrection of the flesh.” What you need for true history is by no means an agreement with the philosophy of the time which you describe (you may be wholly opposed to that philosophy) but at least a full comprehension of it and an understanding that those who worked its human affairs were men fundamentally the same as ourselves. Humanity has not essentially differed from the beginning of recorded, or, indeed, of geological time. Man as man (the only thing which concerns history, or, indeed, the morals and philosophy of mankind) has been the same since first he appears fully developed upon the earth. But in the case of Western Europe during the Middle Ages the thing is far more intimate. We are dealing with men who are not only of our genus but of our very stock; wholly of our particular blood, our own fathers, our own family. What is more, in those ancestors we should take our greatest pride. For never did our race do better or more thoroughly, never was it more faithfully itself, than in the years between the First Crusade and the effects of the Black Death: 1100-1350. Those three long lifetimes were the very summit of the European story.
Now I say that to treat properly of this affair it is not indeed necessary to agree with the philosophy of those men—that is, with their religion. It is certainly not necessary to agree with the details of their action, as, for example, their lapses into cruelty on the one hand or their fierce sense of honour on the other. We may be baser, or more reasonable, or more gentle, or more lethargic than they, and yet remain true historians of them. But what one must have if one is to be an historian at all, and not a mere popular writer, repeating what the public of “the best sellers” wants to have told to it, is a knowledge of the spirit of our ancestors from within.
Now this can only be obtained in one fashion, to wit, by accurate, detailed, concrete record. Find out what happened and say it. Proportion is of course essential; but to an honest man proportion will come of itself from a sufficient reading, and only a dishonest man will after a sufficient reading warp proportion and make a brief by picking out special points.
The trouble is that this period has been dealt with in the past without minute research. There has been plenty of pretence at such research, but most of it was charlatan.
Let me take as a specific instance by way of example:
Freeman’s huge volumes upon the Norman Conquest were long treated as a serious classic. He pretended to have read what he had not read. He pretended to have studied ground he had not studied. He wrote what he knew would sell because it was consonant with what was popular at the time. He attacked blindly the universal Catholic religion of the epoch he dealt with because he hated that religion. But scholarly he was not and did not attempt to be; yet scholarly he pretended to be, and upon supposed scholarship he based his false representation. I will give three examples.
He calls the Battle of Hastings “Senlac.” He found the term not where he pretends, in Ordericus Vitalis, but in Lingard, who was the first man to commit the error. Lingard was the great quarry from which Freeman’s generation of Dons dug out its history without ever acknowledging the source. “Senlac” could not possibly be a Saxon place-name, but Freeman understood so little about the time and was so ignorant of the genius of the language, that he took it for Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps he thought in some vague way he was restoring a “Teutonic” name; more “Teutonic” than Hastings itself!
To this religious motive of his there was undoubtedly added the motive of novelty and of showing off. What the ridge of Battle was originally called by the people of the place, before the Norman invasion, we cannot tell. It may have been “Sandleg” (which would be Sussex enough), or it may have been “Senhanger,” also sound Sussex, or it may have been something ending in the Celtic and Latin “lake.” But “Senlac” it most certainly could not have been; and that Freeman should have pretended to scholarship in a matter of that kind damns him.
The second point is far more striking and can be tested by anyone who visits the localities mentioned in the five principal contemporary authorities. He desires to reduce the numbers involved in the battle; partly from a silly prejudice against anything written by a monk, partly from a desire to belittle the actions of the early Middle Ages and the whole of its civilization, partly (mainly, perhaps) from a desire to be novel. He makes up the estimates
