FREEMAN, EDWARD AUGUSTUS Eng lish historian, was born at Harborne, Staffordshire, and educated privately until he went to Trinity college, Oxford, where he be came a fellow in 1845. In 1847 he married a daughter of a former tutor, the Rev. R. Gutch. His life was one of strenuous literary work. He wrote many books, and countless articles for newspapers and reviews, especially for the Saturday Review, which was the vehicle for his prolonged attack on Froude. In politics he was a follower of Gladstone, but foreign politics interested him more than domestic, especially the struggle for independence of the small countries of eastern Europe. In 1854 he became Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and he died at Alicante, in Spain, on March 16, 1892.
His reputation as an historian rests chiefly on his History of the Norman Conquest (15 vols., 1867-76), which is exhaustive in treatment and remarkably accurate. Its ruling idea, however— that of the permanence of the Anglo-Saxon elements in spite of the Conquest, and their continued importance as the basis of constitutional development—is less generally accepted now. He advanced the study of history in England in two main ways, by insisting on the unity of history, as against its artificial division into periodic or national sections, and by teaching the importance of original authorities. The central truth of European history, he thought, its bond of unity, was the permanence of Rome, and he wrote his History of Sicily (1891--94) to illustrate this.
See W. R. W. Stephens, Life and Letters of E. A. Freeman (1895).