# Freeman's English continuity did not erase the foreign conquest

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH05.P009](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH05.P009/#char=1649,1748): "He may end (like Carlyle and Freeman) by maintaining that the Norman Conquest was a Saxon Conquest."

The charge serves a precise psychological argument: someone who makes national loyalty depend on an account of national origins acquires a motive to protect that account against evidence. Chesterton contrasts attachment to an existing people with attachment to a historical theory about them. His example nevertheless needs qualification when checked against Freeman's own explanation.

In *A Short History of the Norman Conquest of England* (first published 1880; inspected here in the third edition, Clarendon Press, 1908), Freeman calls William's force a foreign army, describes the displacement of English landowners and officeholders by strangers, and explains the eventual assimilation of their descendants. That is a thesis of English continuity through conquest, not a denial that conquest occurred. He also distinguishes the Normans' Scandinavian ancestry from their subsequent adoption of French speech. [Freeman, chapter I, §§3–4, pp. 3–5; chapter II, §§4–6, pp. 9–12](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/68963/pg68963-images.html).

The primer therefore prevents us from reading Chesterton's accusation as a neutral summary of Freeman. It does not settle every claim in Freeman's much larger history, and it does not establish which passage Chesterton intended. The distinction matters to the paragraph's own principle: a warning against patriotic distortion should itself remain open to historical correction.

## Sources

- [Edward A. Freeman, A Short History of the Norman Conquest of England (1880), third edition (1908), Project Gutenberg #68963](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/68963/pg68963-images.html), Title page; introduction dated 5 June 1880; chapter I §§3–4, pp. 3–5; chapter II §§4–6, pp. 9–12

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