Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/115

Rh It is, of course, one of the fundamental problems of English history how far the government of England was Normanized in the century following the Conquest. To a French scholar like Boutmy everything begins anew in 1066, when "the line which the whole history of political institutions has subsequently followed was traced and defined." To Freeman, on the other hand, the changes then introduced were temporary and not fundamental. He is never tired of repeating that the old English are the real English; progress comes by going back to the principles of the Anglo-Saxon period and casting aside innovations which have crept in in modern and evil times; "we have advanced by falling back on a more ancient state of things, we have reformed by calling to life again the institutions of earlier and ruder times, by setting ourselves free from the slavish subtleties of Norman lawyers, by casting aside as an accursed thing the innovations of Tudor tyranny and Stewart usurpation." The trend of present scholarly opinion lies between these extremes. It refuses to throw away the Anglo-Saxon period, whose institutions we are just beginning to read aright; but it rejects its idealization at Freeman's hands, who, it has been said, saw all things "through a mist of moots and witans" and not as they really were, and it finds more truth in Carlyle's remark that the pot-bellied equanimity of the Anglo-Saxon