Edward A. Freeman

William the Conqueror (Dodo Press) Edward A. Freeman

Professor Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-1892) was an English historian. Ecclesiastical architecture was his great interest. He visited many churches and began a practice of making drawings of buildings on the spot and afterwards tracing them over in ink. His first book, save for his share in a volume of English verse, was a History of Architecture (1849). He wrote many books, and countless articles for reviews, newspapers and other publications, and was a constant contributor to the Saturday Review until 1878, when he ceased to write for it for political reasons. His Saturday Review articles corrected many errors and raised the level of historical knowledge among the educated classes, but as a reviewer he was apt to forget that a book may have blemishes and yet be praiseworthy. Freeman was a prolific writer. The quantity of work which he turned out is enormous, for the fifteen large volumes which contain his Norman Conquest (1867-1876), his unfinished History of Sicily, his William Rufus (1882), and his Essays (1872-1879), and the crowd of his smaller books, are matched in amount by his uncollected contributions to periodicals.