History, empire, and Islam

E. A. Freeman and Victorian public morality

Vicky Randall

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526135834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of the historian and public moralist E. A. Freeman since the publication of W. R. W. Stephens' Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman (1895). While Freeman is often viewed by modern scholars as a panegyrist to English progress and a proponent of Aryan racial theory, this study suggests that his world-view was more complicated than it appears. Revisiting Freeman's most important historical works, this book positions Thomas Arnold as a significant influence on Freeman's view of world-historical development. Conceptualising the past as cyclical rather than unilinear, and defining race in terms of culture, rather than biology, Freeman's narratives were pervaded by anxieties about recapitulation. Ultimately, this study shows that Freeman's scheme of universal history was based on the idea of conflict between Euro-Christendom and the Judeo-Islamic Orient, and this shaped his engagement with contemporary issues.

Part I

The West

chapter one

The Norman Conquest (1867–79)

As noted in the Introduction, the Norman Conquest was Freeman’s magnum-opus – a work which absorbed his interest for over thirty years, and on which his contemporary and posthumous reputation has rested. While scholarly interest in the Norman Conquest is intensifying, the tendency is still to dissect, rather than to thoroughly examine, these volumes. What is needed is a more holistic approach. As Bratchel observed, fifty years ago, ‘Freeman’s five volume History … might almost be regarded as being as instructive for the student of the nineteenth as for the historian of the eleventh century. Few works demand so eloquently an understanding of the intellectual forces by which, and of the historic environment in which, they were produced’.¹

Pursuing an analysis of the contexts for Freeman’s Norman Conquest, together with a detailed commentary on the content and themes of each volume, this chapter attempts a comprehensive re-evaluation of his major work. I begin with a survey of the sources and historiographical traditions on early English history that emerged between the time of the Conquest and the later nineteenth century. This approach allows a fuller understanding of the materials and interpretations that were available to Freeman when composing his work. Assessing both the strengths and weaknesses of Freeman’s use of these sources, it will be seen that his scholarly ‘faults’ were the consequence of his determination to prove that the English constitution had developed continuously since the fifth century. While Freeman celebrated the English people, I show that his emphasis on race also enabled him to perform a complex act of historiographical synthesis. On the one hand, the concept of race enabled Freeman to combine a traditional belief in the Anglo-Saxon origins of the English constitution with the new ‘Whig’ emphasis on the modernity of liberty, and thereby to produce an account of national exceptionalism. On the other, Freeman’s racial theory reinforced an older notion of the Unity of History inherited from Thomas Arnold, and this fundamentally constrained his panegyric to the English nation. Representing the past as one long and unified chain of cause and effect, Freeman’s narrative establishes the monotony rather than the continuity of history and it culminates in recurrence and recapitulation rather than indefinite progress.

Three historiographical traditions on the Norman Conquest

‘In the course of over nine hundred years’, writes Chibnall, ‘interest in the Norman Conquest has depended on the kind of information available to those – whether professional or amateur – who have studied and interpreted the history of the past’.² Acknowledging the variety of accounts that have been advanced over the centuries, I here emphasise three historiographical traditions of writing on 1066 which Freeman incorporated into his own Norman Conquest. As we will see, the earliest English understanding of 1066 was shaped by the idea of an original Anglo-Saxon freedom that had been destroyed by William the Conqueror. This myth of the ‘Norman Yoke’ first appeared in the fourteenth century and was vital during the Reformation (1532–34) and English Civil Wars (1642–51), when polemical writers used the past to contest contemporary religious and political changes. Following the Glorious Revolution (1688) a second distinct tradition emerged, as ‘Whig’ historians abandoned the idea of a lost Anglo-Saxon democracy and argued that English liberty was a modern phenomenon that had nothing to do with the so-called ‘ancient constitution’. Finally, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a third narrative developed which reflected the influence of Victorian racial theory. Classifying both the Anglo-Saxons and the modern English people as Germanic ‘Teutons’ it was argued that this race had a unique capacity for freedom. Within this racial myth the Anglo-Saxons took on a renewed significance as part of the story of England’s continuously developing liberty – a liberty that had only been temporarily threatened by William.

Almost from the moment of the Conquest itself, then, writers had set to work in an attempt to explain the causes and course of events. The immediate issue for contemporaries of the Norman Conquest was how to present the monarchical succession. Edward the Confessor died childless on 5 January 1066 and Harold Godwinson, who was crowned King the following day, had only a dubious title to the throne as the brother of Edward’s wife, Edith. Duke William, meanwhile, could advance the right of kinship as his great aunt, Emma of Normandy, was Edward’s mother. Whether William’s arrival in England in September 1066 was viewed as an invasion or a rightful reclamation of his throne was a matter of perspective and, as English writers went underground, Norman authorities began producing justifications of William’s actions. Among the earliest were William of Jumièges’ Deeds of the Dukes of the Normans (1070/72), William of Poitiers’ Deeds of William Duke of the Normans and King of the English (c.1073–74), and the Bayeux Tapestry (c.1077).³ These sources suggested that Edward had promised the crown to William before his death and that Harold had become a vassal to the Duke following his shipwreck and imprisonment in France in 1064. Harold was thus depicted as a perjurer of oaths, a usurper, and a tyrant, while William appears as the lawful successor who became King by the judgement of God.

This line was generally followed by English historians and those of mixed parentage throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Henry of Huntingdon’s History of the English People (c.1129–54) was critical of the ferocity of the Conquest and presented the Norman invasion as the last of five ‘plagues’ sent to England by God (following the Romans, Picts, Scots, and Danes).⁴ This did not, however, prevent him from attacking Harold as an imposter and praising William for granting life and liberty to the conquered people.⁵ William of Malmesbury’s Deeds of the English Kings (c.1126–35) similarly mourned the ‘melancholy havoc’ caused by the Conquest, but wrote favourably of the Normans who ‘revived, by their arrival, the rule of religion which had everywhere grown lifeless in England’.⁶ This ambiguity is also found in Matthew Paris’ The History of Saint Edward the King (1236–46).⁷ As Rebecca Reader comments, Paris’ work ‘constitutes an oasis of pro-English feeling’ as it is ‘rich in adulation of Anglo-Saxon monarchy and pervaded by tacit criticism of Norman moral virtue’.⁸ Nevertheless, Paris was hostile to Harold, and included an illustration of Godwinson happily placing the crown on his own head, without religious sanction.⁹ Accompanying this image is a short piece of prose: ‘After the death of King Edward, who has no blood heir, Harold, born the son of Godwin and wrongfully crowned king of England … put Edward’s crown on his own head. He reigned only briefly.’¹⁰

In the acute economic crisis of the fourteenth century, historical narratives written in the renascent English language became increasingly critical of William and the Conquest, emphasising the humiliation and oppression which the native population had suffered ever since 1066. Thomas of Castleford, for example, writing c.1327, complained of English land being taken by ‘alien’ Normans:

Fra Englisse blood Englande he [William] refte,

Na maner soil with them he lefte …

Dwelle they shall alls bondes and thralles,

And do all that to thralldom falles.¹¹

In Robert Mannyng’s Chronicle (completed before 1338), the author similarly identified himself with ‘the Inglis’ and argued that the Normans had put the people in ‘servage’ and caused great sorrow.¹²

The view of the Norman Conquest as detrimental became increasingly widespread in the sixteenth century. In this period, the idealisation of Anglo-Saxon customs and the negative view of the Conquest was propagated by scholars seeking to justify the Reformation as a recovery of ancient religious practices. John Foxe, in his Acts and Monuments [Book of Martyrs] (1559/63), assembled a ‘motley array’ of extracts from early records and legends to support his thesis that a primitive church had existed in England and had flourished independently of Rome before 1066.¹³ While Foxe noted a deterioration of religion in the latter years of the Anglo-Saxon kings, he maintained that it was the arrival of the Normans and their commitment to Roman Catholicism that caused ‘the fresh flowering blood of the church to faint, and strength to fail, oppressed with cold humours of worldly pomp, avarice, and tyranny’.¹⁴ For Foxe, Roman Catholicism represented the ‘loosing out of Satan’, and the Reformation was a return to the original ‘church of Christ’.¹⁵ Matthew Parker, the second Protesta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘History is past politics, politics is present history’
• Part I The West
• Part II The East
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• References
• Index