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Early English History.

375

ART. III-1. Geschichte der Europäischen Staaten. Herausgegeben von A. H. L. Heeren und F. A. Ukert. Geschichte von England. Von Dr. R. PAULI. Hamburgh, 1853.

2. The Rise and Progress of the English Constitution. By E. S. CREASY, M.A. London, 1853.

3. Forsyth's History of Trial by Jury. London, 1853. 4. Les quatre Conquêtes de l'Angleterre. Par M. EMILE DE BONNECHOSE. Paris, 1852.

EVERY year that we live, a final history of England comes more and more to be regarded as a fond imagination of our grandfathers. A story which should gather together the whole mass of human experience, which a lifetime of more than a thousand years has evolved, and roll it out, once for all, in fair round periods, would require for its narrator not only an archæologist of the toughest fibre, and a littérateur of the most elastic thread, but a prophet of the keenest foresight and the loftiest view. How much of such a history, even if it were written, would be intelligible to the present generation, we cannot tell, unless by first performing the impossible task of determining what proportion our present development bears to that which we are yet destined to achieve; that much of it would be unintelligible, however, we may safely infer from the fact that what has been revealed to Kemble, and Palgrave, and Lappenberg, and Pauli, was hidden from the eyes of John Milton and Algernon Sidney. The Tower stood by the Thames then as now, the zeal for truth was not weaker, and the records of experience were covered with the dust of two centuries less, but sufficient for their day as for ours were the labours which belonged to it; and if we can read the past, as they did, so as to draw from it an antidote for present evil, together with some not doubtful indication of our course over the tract which lies within the reach of an intelligent human anticipation, we may well rest contented without indulging the vain fancy that we have exhausted what, to our children's children, will be an exhaustless mine, to the scrutiny of which the novel occasion will never fail to bring its newborn light.

But whilst a history of England, in this impossible sense, is being abandoned, the history of England, in the only sense in which it is possible, is being written. The political and judicial institutions of our ancestors, their social and domestic life, their literary and æsthetic activity, both during the Anglo-Saxon time and after the Conquest, have all received invaluable illustration within the last twenty years. The publication of the

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But whilst a bist Lapet ta impossible nenne, is being abandoned the isory of England, in the only sense in which it is possible terms. The political and judicial institutions of our ancestors, their social and domestic life, them literary and asetie activity, both during the Anglo Saxon time and after the Conquest, have all received inv slushle pige tration within the last twenty yess The moblemtid @ EX

charters of the Anglo-Saxon Kings, Ealdormen, and Prelates, down to the year 966, (the so-called Codex Diplomaticus Ævi Saxonici,) by the English Historical Society, under the able editorship of Kemble, worthily recommenced, on the more solid foundation which Gibbon had indicated, the work which Milton and Burke had left incomplete, and in which hitherto Sharon Turner alone had laboured satisfactorily. Then came the edition of the Anglo-Saxon laws, commenced by Price, and completed by Thorpe, under the authority of the Record Commission. In Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical history the labours of Sir Henry Spelman, Dr. Wilkins, and still more those of Dr. Lingard, both earlier and later, deserve notice. But the first work which combined vigorous and bold, if not always just thinking, with an adequate mastery of the sources, was Sir Francis Palgrave's "Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth." The work of Palgrave was speedily followed by that of a foreign investigator, who enjoys no small reputation for thoroughness, in a country where men do not shrink from labour. Lappenberg performed the task, which he tells us his still more celebrated countrymen Niebuhr and Ranke had at one time proposed to themselves, and in Benjamin Thorpe, one of the most eminent of English Anglo-Saxon scholars, whom we have already mentioned as the editor of the ancient laws and institutes of England, he found more than a translator. It is only a portion of Lappenberg's work, however, which has yet appeared in English, and we have long been eagerly looking for the fulfilment of Mr. Thorpe's promise to bestow upon us a translation of the volume which treats of the first four Norman reigns, with additions and emendations of equal value with those by which he has made the Anglo-Saxon history his own. Towards the comprehension of this latter period, of which Thierry has been the most conspicuous, though, as his own countrymen now acknowledge, by no means the most trustworthy exponent,* the labours of Sir Henry Ellis on Domesday book have rendered invaluable aid. With marvellous industry and acuteness he has contrived, from the perusal of this remarkable register, to throw the light of authentic history on the public and private relations of the conquerors and the conquered, on the value of land and money, on territorial jurisdictions and franchises, on tenures, services, ecclesiastical matters, and many miscellaneous subjects of equal interest, and scarcely less importance. It was with such materials as the starting point for his own investigations, that Mr. Allen composed his very remarkable contribution to the history of our

* Les quatre Conquêtes de l'Angleterre. Par M. Emile de Bonnechose, passim.

Modern Historians of England belong to Ranke's School. 377

public law, the "rise and growth of the royal prerogative;" that Kemble, on the foundation of his own previous work, raised as a superstructure the best book on Anglo-Saxon institutions which has yet appeared; and that Palgrave is now engaged in writing his "History of Normandy and England." We have still to mention two writers, distinguished in this as in other departments of historical literature, with whose names the general reader is better acquainted, Mr. Hallam and Dr. Lingard. Mr. Hallam has recently added to his history of the middle ages a volume of supplementary notes, in which will be found, with less labour than elsewhere, a summary of the results brought to light by the various investigators who, during thirty years, have followed the author over the tract of medieval history;-Dr. Lingard, in his History of England, whatever may be its defects in other respects, has largely availed himself of modern labours, and in the third edition of his "Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church," has so interwoven the new with the old as to give the whole the freshness of a recent work.

In this enumeration we have purposely confined ourselves to those writers who have illustrated the social, political, and judicial institutions of our ancestors. If our object had been to furnish an exhaustive list of those who have charged themselves with the task of writing the history of England for this generation, we should have had to add to it the names of several eminent expositors of our earliest literary efforts, and of the successive changes which our language underwent from the Saxon of Alfred to the English of Chaucer. Amongst these the most prominent are, perhaps, Dr. Latham, Sir Frederic Madden, and the Conybeares. But our chief business at present is with a writer who, hitherto at least, has distinguished himself rather in the former than the latter field, and as it is wide enough, if not for his future activity, at least for our present survey, we shall not trespass upon what many might consider greener pastures.

It was natural that the study of Anglo-Saxon should be chiefly undertaken by persons already conversant with the language and literature of Germany, and it is not, therefore, astonishing, that the writers whom we have mentioned should all of them have adopted the method which, in that country, has been so successfully employed by the historical school of which Ranke is the head. The peculiarity of this method consists in accepting no fact which cannot be authenticated by contemporaneous, or, at all events, nearly contemporaneous, documentary evidence. In construing the documents, however, regard is had not simply to the matter which they professedly contain. By a searching philological scrutiny into the forms of speech

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