Freeman, Edward A.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Edward A. (1823-1892), a noted English historian. He was a graduate of Oxford University, and in 1873 he became professor of modern history in that institution. A list of his published works includes over thirty titles. Among these are several volumes on cathedral architecture and various antiquities. His most famous book is The History of the Norman Conquest. Other works are Growth of the English Constitution, Historical Essays, The Ottoman Power in Europe, Methods of Historical Study. Mr. Freeman was a patient investigator, a man of immense learning, a seeker for truth, a pugnacious opponent, a persistent glorifier of the Teuton, and a man of the highest and kindliest character. In 1863 his reputation for sagacity as a historian received a severe shock in the United States . In this year he published the first part of a work entitled The History of Federal Government from the Achaean League to the Disruption of the United States. Americans, acting on the principle that "the wish is father to the thought," have never forgiven him fully for believing that the experiment of a free government in the New World had proved a failure; when, as a matter of fact, Freeman was one of the Stuart-Mill group of ardent Northern sympathizers,--but he had lost hope. The wish was not father to the thought, any more than with Hawthorne, who publicly despaired at about the same time. We are indebted to Freeman's scholarly pages for a number of pertinent extracts. See Macaulay ; Hume ; Green ; Lingard
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's said Freeman held the Oxford chair of modern history from 1873; in fact he became Regius Professor there only in 1884, succeeding William Stubbs, and held the post until his death in 1892. The reputation Aiton's still treats as secure did not survive: even before 1910 J. H. Round had gone through the Norman Conquest volumes cataloguing errors of detail, and the six-volume work is now read mainly as a monument of Victorian historiography rather than as an authority. What Aiton's admiringly calls Freeman's role as "a persistent glorifier of the Teuton" is exactly what modern historians hold against him, treating his Teutonic race-theory of English liberty as ideology rather than evidence. His judgement that free government in America had failed looks, from this side of 1865, like the passing pessimism of a wartime observer, which is roughly how Aiton's already defended it.
Written for this edition, 2026.