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The History of the Norman Conquest of England
The History of the Norman Conquest of England Author:Edward A. Freeman Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XXII. Among the sources from which we draw our knowledge of the times which form the subject of the present History, there are two which stand al... more »one. England, alone among Western nations, alone among nations of either Romance or Teutonic speech, can point to an unbroken history of seven hundred years of the national being recorded in the living speech of the land. We alone can read, in our own tongue in which we were born, the tale both of our lasting conquests and of our momentary overthrow. We can read how we ourselves j settled among strangers whom we drove out from the land in which we I / now dwell, and how conquerors came to settle among us who were ')'" but our disguised kinsmen. The English Chronicle stands alone among the sources of history, holding a place among the written remains of Teutonic prose second only to the Bible of Ulfilas. And, side by side with this precious relic of our own tongue and nation, we may place the hardly less precious fruit of the wisdom of our Conqueror. If the English Chronicle stands alone, Domesday Book stands alone also. No other land can show such a picture of a nation at one of the great turning-points of its history. For the great Survey is in truth a picture of the nation, and nothing less. It is a picture of the nation all the more because there certainly was no intention of making it one. There is no need to depreciate the Survey and its author by speaking of it as a mere vulgar instrument of extortion.2 1 The authority for this Chapter is the presently, " Ce travail, dans lequel des his- Sunrey itself, on which see mote in Ap- toriens modemes ont cru voir la marque pendix A. du ge'nie administratif, fut le simple re- Thierry (ii. 91) begins his account of sultat de la position speciale du roi nor- D...« less