page_title: Edward Augustus Freeman
section_title: Historian
hierarchical_section_title: Edward Augustus Freeman / Career / Historian
caption_attribution_description: English: Drawing of Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-1892) at Usk Castle, Monmouthshire, at a meeting of the Cambrian Archaeological Association, 18 August 1876, by Worthington G. Smith
context_page_description: Edward Augustus Freeman was an English historian, architectural artist, and Liberal politician during the late-19th-century heyday of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom William Gladstone, as well as a one-time candidate for Parliament. He held the position of Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, where he tutored Arthur Evans; later he and Evans would be activists in the Balkan uprising of Bosnia and Herzegovina against the Ottoman Empire. After the marriage of his daughter Margaret to Evans, he and Evans collaborated on the fourth volume of his History of Sicily. He was a prolific writer, publishing 239 distinct works. One of his best known is his magnum opus, The History of the Norman Conquest of England. Both he and Margaret died before Evans purchased the land from which he would excavate the Palace of Knossos.
context_section_description: Freeman was made D.C.L. of Oxford and LL.D. of Cambridge honoris causa, and when he visited the United States on a lecture tour was well received at various institutions of learning. In 1884 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and was, for a time, a non-resident professor at Cornell University. Whilst at Oxford, he presided over the Stubbs Society, an exclusive group of high-achieving historians. He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1885.
  He advanced the study of history in England in two directions: by insistence on the unity of history, and by teaching the importance and right use of primary sources.  Politics was at the core, for he often said, "History is past politics and politics present history." He urged that history not be divided "by a middle wall of partition" into ancient and modern, nor broken into fragments as though the history of each nation stood apart. He declared it more than a collection of narratives, deeming it a science, "the science of man in his political character." Freeman asserted that the historical student should view all history as within his range, and have his own special range within which he masters every detail (Rede Lecture).
  Freeman's range included Greek, Roman and the earlier part of English history, together with some portions of foreign medieval history, and he had a scholarly though general knowledge of the rest of the history of the European world. Freeman regarded Rome as "the central truth of European history," the bond of its unity, and he undertook his History of Sicily (1891–1894) partly to illustrate this unity. He believed that all historical study is valueless unless based on a knowledge of original authorities, and explained how they should be weighed and used. He did not use manuscript authorities, however, and maintained he had no need to do so for most of his work, as the authorities he needed were already in print.
  His reputation as a historian rests chiefly on his six-volume History of the Norman Conquest (1867–1879), his longest completed work. In common with his works generally, it is distinguished by exhaustiveness of treatment and research, critical ability, and general accuracy. He is almost exclusively a political historian, and his works are infused with personal insights he gained from his practical experience of people and institutions. His saying that "history is past politics and politics are present history" is significant of this limitation of his work, which dealt less with other subjects in a nation's life.
  J. W. Burrow proposed that Freeman, like William Stubbs and John Richard Green, was an historical scholar with little or no experience of public affairs, with views of the present which were Romantically historicised and who was drawn to history by what was in a broad sense an antiquarian passion for the past, as well as a patriotic and populist impulse to identify the nation and its institutions as the collective subject of English history, making
  the new historiography of early medieval times an extension, filling out and democratising, of older Whig notions of continuity. It was Stubbs who presented this most substantially; Green who made it popular and dramatic ... It is in Freeman ... of the three the most purely a narrative historian, that the strains are most apparent.
  — Burrow 1983
caption: Freeman at a meeting of the Cambrian Archaeological Association at Usk Castle, Monmouthshire, in 1876
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