The Cambridge companion to the age of William the Conqueror

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Summary

"'That the history of England for the last eight hundred years has been what it has been has largely come of the personal character of a single man [...], and that man was William, surnamed at diff...

"'That the history of England for the last eight hundred years has been what it has been has largely come of the personal character of a single man [...], and that man was William, surnamed at different stages of his life and memory, the Bastard, the Conqueror, and the Great'. Writing in 1888, Edward Augustus Freeman, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, made it his 'special business' to furnish his readers with an account of English history viewed through the deeds and character of a single man whom he deemed one of the greatest statesmen of all time. For Freeman and many of his colleagues, history was fundamentally a matter of statesmanship, written and wrought by the acts of great men and determined by their personality and character. An altogether different mentality was expressed by Freeman's close contemporary, Karl Marx, who opened his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte with the observation that 'human beings make their own history, yet they do not make it at will in circumstances chosen freely, but in the circumstances in which they find themselves, which are dealt to and inherited by them'."--

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