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In England, as in France and Germany, the main characteristic of the lasttwenty years, from the point of view of the student of history, has beenthat new material has been accumulating much faster than it can beassimilated or absorbed. The standard histories of the last generation needto be revised, or even to be put aside as obsolete, in the light of the newinformation that is coming in so rapidly and in such vast bulk. But thestudents and researchers of to-day have shown little enthusiasm as yet forthe task of re-writing history on a large scale. We see issuing from thepress hundreds of monographs, biographies, editions of old texts,selections from correspondence, or collections of statistics, mediaeval andmodern. But the writers who (like the late Bishop Stubbs or ProfessorSamuel Gardiner) undertake to tell over again the history of a long period,with the aid of all the newly discovered material, are few indeed. It iscomparatively easy to write a monograph on the life of an individual or ashort episode of history. But the modern student, knowing well the mass ofmaterial that he has to collate, and dreading lest he may make a slipthrough overlooking some obscure or newly discovered source, dislikes tostir beyond the boundary of the subject, or the short period, on which hehas made himself a specialist.
Meanwhile the general reading public continues to ask for standardhistories, and discovers, only too often, that it can find nothing betweenschool manuals at one end of the scale and minute monographs at the other.The series of which this volume forms a part is intended to do somethingtowards meeting this demand. Historians will not sit down, as once theywere wont, to write twenty-volume works in the style of Hume or Lingard,embracing a dozen centuries of annals. It is not to be desired that theyshould—the writer who is most satisfactory in dealing with Anglo-Saxonantiquities is not likely to be the one who will best discuss theantecedents of the Reformation, or the constitutional history of the Stuartperiod. But something can be done by judicious co-operation: it is notnecessary that a genuine student should refuse to touch any subject thatembraces an epoch longer than a score of years, nor need history be writtenas if it were an encyclopaedia, and cut up into small fragments dealt withby different hands.
It is hoped that the present series may strike the happy mean, by dividingup English History into periods that are neither too long to be dealt withby a single competent specialist, nor so short as to tempt the writer toindulge in that over-abundance of unimportant detail which repels thegeneral reader. They are intended to give something more than a mereoutline of our national annals, but they have little space for controversyor the discussion of sources, save in periods such as the dark age of the5th and 6th centuries after Christ, where the criticism of authorities isabsolutely necessary if we are to arrive at any sound conclusions as to thecourse of history. A number of maps are to be found at the end of eachvolume which, as it is hoped, will make it unnecessary for the reader to becontinually referring to large historical atlases—tomes which (as we mustconfess with regret) are not to be discovered in every private library.Genealogies and chronological tables of kings are added where necessary.<