a frontal attack on the powers of the Second Chamber when the
king’s death in May upset all calculations. This unthought-of
complication seemed to act like the letting of blood in an
apoplectic patient.
The prince of Wales became king as George V. (q.v.), and a temporary truce was called; and the reign began with a serious attempt between the leaders of the two great parties, by private conference, to see whether compromise was not possible (see Parliament). Apart from the Accession of George V. parliamentary crisis, really hingeing on the difficulty of discovering a means by which the real will of the people should be carried out without actually making the House of Commons autocratically omnipotent, but also without allowing the House of Lords to obstruct a Liberal government merely as the organ of the Tory party, the new king succeeded to a noble heritage. The monarchy itself was popular, the country was prosperous and in good relations with the world, except for the increasing naval rivalry with Germany, and the consciousness of imperial solidarity had made extraordinary progress among all the dominions. However the domestic problems in the United Kingdom might be solved, the future of the greatness of the English throne lay with its headship of an empire, loyal to the core, over which the sun never sets. (H. Ch.)
XIII.—Sources and Writers of English History
The attempt here made to combine a bibliography of English history with some account of the progress of English historical writing is beset with some difficulty. The evidential value of what a writer says is quite distinct from the literary art with which he says it; the real sources of history are not the works of historians, but records and documents written with no desire to further any literary purpose. Domesday Book is unique as a source of medieval history, but it does not count in the development of English historical writing. That is quite a secondary consideration; for there was much English history before any Englishman could write; and even after he could write, his compositions constitute a minor part of the evidence.
Our earliest information about the land and its people is derived from geological, ethnological and archaeological studies, from the remains in British barrows and caves, Roman roads, walls and villas, coins, place-names and inscriptions. The writings of Caesar and Tacitus, and a few scattered notices in other Roman authors, supplement this evidence. But the scientific accuracy of Tacitus’ Germania is not beyond dispute, and that light fails centuries before the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Great Britain. The history of that conquest itself is mainly inferential; there is the flebilis narratio of Gildas, vague and rhetorical, moral rather than historical in motive, and written more than a century after the conquest had begun, and the narrative of the Welsh Nennius, who wrote two and a half centuries after Gildas, and makes no critical distinction between the deeds of dragons and those of Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxons themselves could not write until Christian missionaries had reintroduced the art at the end of the 6th century, and history was not by any means the first purpose to which they applied it. It was first used to compile written statements of customs and dooms which were their nearest approach to law, and these codes and charters are the earliest written materials for Anglo-Saxon history. The remarkable outburst of literary culture in Northumbria during the 7th and 8th centuries produced a real historian in Bede; Bede, however, knows little or nothing of English history between 450 and 596, and he is valuable only for the 7th and early part of the 8th centuries. Almost contemporary is the Vita Wilfridi by Eddius, but more valuable are the letters we possess of Boniface and Alcuin. The famous Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was probably started under the influence of Alfred the Great towards the end of the 9th century. Its chronology is often one, two or three years wrong even when it seems to be a contemporary authority, and the value of its evidence on the conquest and the first two centuries after it is very uncertain. But from Ecgbert’s reign onwards it supplies a good deal of apparently trustworthy information. For Alfred himself we have also Asser’s biography and the Annals of St Neots, a very imaginative compilation, while most of the stories which have made Alfred’s name a household word are fabulous. Even the Chronicle becomes meagre a few years after Alfred’s death, and its value depends largely upon the ballads which it incorporates; nor is it materially supplemented by the lives of St Dunstan, for hagiologists have never treated historical accuracy as a matter of moment; and our knowledge of the last century of Anglo-Saxon history is derived mainly from Anglo-Norman writers who wrote after the Norman Conquest. Some collateral light on the Danish conquest of England is thrown by the Heimskringla and other materials collected in Vigfusson and Powell’s Corpus Poeticum Boreale, and for the reign of Canute and his sons there is the contemporary Encomium Emmae, which is a dishonest panegyric on the widow of Æthelred and Canute. For Edward the Confessor there is an almost equally biased biography.
For the Norman Conquest itself strictly contemporary evidence is extremely scanty, and historians have exhausted their own and their readers’ patience in disputing the precise significance of some phrases about the battle of Hastings used by Wace, a Norman poet who wrote nearly a century after the battle. One version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle goes down to 1079 and another to 1154, but their notices of current events are brief and meagre. The Bayeux tapestry affords, however, valuable contemporary evidence, and there are some facts related by eye-witnesses in the works of William of Poitiers and William of Jumièges. A generation of copious chroniclers was, moreover, springing up, and among them were Florence of Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon, Simeon of Durham and William of Malmesbury. Their ambition was almost invariably to write the history of the world, and they generally begin with the Creation. They only become original and contemporary authorities towards the end of their appointed tasks, and the bulk of their work is borrowed from their predecessors. Frequently they embody materials which would otherwise have perished, but their transcription is marred by an amount of conscious or unconscious falsification which seriously impairs their value. All the above-mentioned writers lived in the half-century immediately following the Norman Conquest, but their critical acumen and their literary art vary considerably. William of Malmesbury, Eadmer and Ordericus Vitalis attain a higher historical standard than had yet been reached in England by any one, with the possible exception of Bede. They are not mere annalists; they practise an art and cultivate a style; history has become to them a form of literature. They have also their philosophy and interpretation of history. It is mainly a theological conception, blind to economic influences, and attaching excessive importance to the effects of the individual action of emperors and popes, kings and cardinals. Even their characters are painted in different colours according to their action on quite irrelevant questions, as, for instance, their benefactions to the monastery, to which the historian happens to belong, or to rival houses; and the character once determined by such considerations, history is made to point the moral of their fortunes, or their fate. It is regarded as the record of moral judgments and the proof of orthodox doctrine, and it is long before ecclesiastical historians expel the sermon from their text.
The line of monastic historians stretches out to the close of the middle ages. Most of the great monasteries had their official annalists, who produced such works as the Annals of Tewkesbury, Gloucester, Burton, Waverley, Dunstable, Bermondsey, Oseney, Winchester (see Annales Monastici, 5 vols., ed. Luard, and other volumes in the Rolls series). Some of them are mainly local chronicles; others are almost national histories. In particular, St Albans developed a remarkable school of historians extending over nearly three centuries to the death of Whethamstede in 1465 (see Chronica Monasterii S. Albani, Rolls series, 7 vols., ed. Riley). Only a few of the 235 volumes published under the direction of the master of the Rolls, and called the Rolls series, can here be mentioned. Other medieval writers have been
