The reign of Eadward the Confessor. 2d ed., rev. 1870

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Clarendon Press, 1868
 

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Page 157 - He turned a jealous over lord into an effective ally against his rebellious subjects, and he turned those rebellious subjects into faithful supporters against that jealous overlord. He came to his duchy under every disadvantage. At once bastard and minor, with competitors for his coronet arising at every moment, with turbulent barons to hold in check and envious neighbours to guard against, he was, throughout the whole of his early life, beset by troubles, none of which were of his own making, and...
Page 152 - As we cannot refuse to place him among the greatest of men, neither will a candid judgement incline us to place him among the worst of men. If we cannot give him a niche among pure patriots and heroes, he is quite as little entitled to a place among mere tyrants and destroyers. William of Normandy has no claim to a share in the pure glory of Timoleon, Alfred, and Washington ; he cannot even claim the more mingled fame of Alexander, Charles, and Cnut ; but he has...
Page 152 - Washington ; he look on his work as being any the less trustworthy on account of its poetical shape. But of course, whenever he departs from contemporary authority, and merely sets down floating traditions nearly a hundred years after the latest events which he records, his statements need to be very carefully weighed.
Page 135 - But for a private landowner to raise a private fortress to be the terror of his neighbours was something to which Englishmen had hitherto been unaccustomed, and for such a structure the English language had hitherto contained no name.
Page 329 - No man ever deserved a higher or a more lasting place in national gratitude than, the first man who, being neither King nor Priest, stands forth in English history as endowed with all the highest attributes of the statesman. In him, in those distant times, we can revere the great minister, the unrivalled parliamentary leader, the man who could sway councils and assemblies at his will...
Page 135 - Normans, a class of buildings whose grandest type is to be seen in the Conqueror's own Tower of London and in the more enriched keep of Rochester, began, doubtless on a far humbler scale, to rear itself over the dwellings of Englishmen.
Page 534 - Harold and Beorn. It is therefore quite possible that one or other of them may have governed Herefordshire from 1046 to 1050. But it is equally possible that the shire was, during that interval, held by Ralph of Mantes, Ralph the Timid, the son of Walter and Godgifu. Indeed, this last view becomes the more likely of the two, when we remember the firm root which the Normans had taken in Herefordshire before 1051 (see p. 138), which looks very much as if they had been specially favoured in these parts....
Page 555 - ... one that a certain amount of confusion is involved in the familiar description of the great King-Duke as William the Conqueror. He is not often called " Conqueestor" by writers of or near his own time. Moreover, " Conqusestor" hardly means " Conqueror" in the common use of that word, but rather " Acquirer," or " Purchaser," in the wider legal sense of the word "purchase.
Page 149 - ... as if he ruled the king and all England ; and his sons were earls and the king's darlings, and his daughter wedded and united to the king: she was brought to Wherwell, and they delivered her to the abbess.
Page 159 - English ground with no rights but those of his own sword, with no supporters but his own foreign army, he yet contrived to win the English crown with every circumstance of formal legality. He was elected, crowned, and anointed like his native predecessors, and he swore at the hands of an English primate to observe the ancient laws of England. By force and by craft, but with the outward pretext of law always put prominently forward, he gradually obtained full possession of the whole land ; he deprived...

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