Note 1 — PART I TERRITORIAL STUDIES (continued 3)

It is probable that in spite of all the efforts of that school which found in Mr Freeman its ablest and most ardent leader, the 'fatal habit', as he termed it at the outset of his magnum opus 'of beginning the study of English history with the Norman Conquest itself', will continue, in practice, to prevail among those who have a choice in the matter. It was characteristic of the late Professor to assign the tendency he deplored to 'a confused and unhappy nomenclature', for to him names, as I have elsewhere shown,1 were always of more importance than they are to the world at large. More to the point is the explanation given by Mr Grant Allen, who attributes to the unfamiliar look of Anglo-Saxon appellatives the lack of interest shown in those who bore them. And yet there must be, surely, a deeper cause than this, an instinctive feeling that in England our consecutive political history does, in a sense, begin with the Norman Conquest. On the one hand it gave us, suddenly, a strong, purposeful monarchy; on the other it brought us men ready to record history, and to give us—treason though it be to say so—something better than the arid entries in our jejune native chronicle. We thus exchange aimless struggles, told in an uninviting fashion, for a great issue and a definite policy, on which we have at our disposal materials deserving of study. From the moment of the Conqueror's landing we trace a continuous history, and one that we can really work at in the light of chronicles and records. I begin these studies, therefore, with the Conquest, or rather with the coming of the Normans. For, as Mr Freeman rightly insisted, it is with the reign of Edward the Confessor that 'the Norman Conquest really begins':2 it was 'his accession' that marked, in its results, 'the first stage of the Conquest itself'.3