CHAPTER VI

THE SPREAD OF THE DOCTRINE

THE doctrine was greatly popularized and widely disseminated by Professor E. A. Freeman. In his hands it became a principle of interpretation of English constitutional history and a general standard of institutional value. The views which he propagated throughout his life with enormous industry were first set forth in 1849 in a pamphlet entitled Thoughts on the Study of History, issued in aid of the movement to found at Oxford a new School of Modern History. The methods and viewpoints of the school of Hume and Gibbon were ascendant at Oxford while Freeman was a student there, but under the influence of Turner and Kemble he experienced a reaction, of which this pamphlet was the expression. In it he contended that "we have at last discovered that we owe not more to Athenian forms of beauty, to Roman laws and government, than to those seeds of liberty and glory which the despised barbarian planted in his German forest or on his Scandinavian rock." When it was proposed that the new Oxford school should concentrate on the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, he urged that an understanding of that period could not be had unless Teutonic origins were consulted. "I can not conceive," he added, "that the history of the days of Crecy and Agincourt, with all their tinsel frippery of chivalry, can ever be brought into real comparison with those of true and unmixed Teutonic greatness."

Freeman began his career as a historian as a champion of these views, to whose service he brought extraordinary zeal and untiring industry, combined with great facility of literary composition. He was a keen politician and an active journalist as well as a historian. His fecundity was marvellous. His History of Federal Government and three volumes of his Norman Conquest were produced in the period 1860-1869, and during the same period he contributed 723 articles to the Saturday Review, 82 to the Guardian, and 7 to other periodicals, among them the Edinburgh Review and the Fortnightly Review. During this decade his monthly output of review articles or magazine essays averaged over seven, and between times he was writing the histories upon which his reputation mainly rests; also carrying on a voluminous correspondence, for he was an indefatigable letter writer.

1 W. R. W. Stephen, Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, Vol. I, p. 257.

These facts have a material bearing on the situation disclosed by critical examination of his works. One who approaches his Norman Conquest after a reading of the writings of Turner and Kemble must be impressed by the slightness of Freeman's own contribution to the theory he extolled and the ease with which he put his trust in it, although the whole scheme of his work depended upon its solidity.

According to the older historians, modern England took its characteristic pattern from the organization of public authority by the Norman kings. Freeman had quite another story to tell. His thesis was that the Teutonic invasions of England implanted a polity of Teutonic origin, which although overlaid and obscured by the Norman conquest, was never destroyed and eventually emerged in the form of the English system of representative government. On the first page of his first volume he announced this principle of interpretation, to which he adhered in all his writings:

"The Norman conquest brought with it a most extensive foreign infusion, which affected our blood, our language, our laws, our arts; still it was only an infusion; the older and stronger elements still survived, and in the long run they again made good their supremacy." 1

1 E. A. Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest. Although he stated his theory in the introductory portion of his first volume, he reserved to the fifth, and last, volume, his statement of constitutional results.

Hence he held that the Anglo-Saxon witenagemot was a representative national assembly and that the Norman parliament was essentially a continuation of it. He stoutly asseverated the truth of both these propositions, but when the evidence is sought on which they rest, it is found that the first proposition has no better support than the vague conjectures of Turner and Kemble, although he added to them some conjectures of his own.

According to Turner, the primitive free community of Germany was produced by the characteristic habits of the Nomadic branch of the human race. Freeman improved upon this by declaring that such a polity "is far more than Teutonic; it is a common Aryan possession." He agreed with Kemble that the characteristic institution of this free community was the Mark, and he averred that it still survived, in its primitive form, in the forest cantons of Switzerland.

"The ancient Teutonic community can now be seen in its purity only in a few of the smallest Swiss centers, and in several of these the ancient freedom had to be recovered and was not uninterruptedly retained."

He offered no evidence in support of this identification, but according to his biographer he had intended to deal with Swiss institutions in his

Federal Government, a work he never completed. This work, which he began in 1861, gives by its title an example of the way in which Freeman could jump to conclusions. It reads: History of Federal Government, from the Foundation of the Achaian League to the Disruption of the United States. But the United States was not disrupted, and Freeman never published more than the first volume of his history.

Freeman differed with Kemble on one point. Kemble had criticized as fabulous the stories of the extermination of the natives by the Saxon invaders, and held that the mass of the Celtic population remained on the land, reduced to a servile condition. Freeman held that the land was cleared of the Celts, and "the intruding nation altogether supplanted the elder nation." He had no additional evidence to offer, but nevertheless he made this sweeping assertion:

"In short, though the literal extirpation of a nation is an impossibility, there is every reason to believe that the Celtic inhabitants of those parts of Britain which had become English at the end of the sixth century had been as nearly extirpated as a nation can be. The women would doubtless be largely spared, but as far as the male sex is concerned, we may feel sure that death, emigration, or personal slavery were the only alternatives which the vanquished found at the hands of our fathers."