Excerpt from The History of the Norman Conquest of England, Vol. 5: Its Causes and Its Results

But, even should I never carry out this or any other scheme, I venture to hope that, writing as I have done, far from either the advantages or the distractions of a capital or an University, writing in my own home among my own books, I have yet been able to do somewhat for the truth of history. I would even believe that what I have written may have gained something by being written in the heart of the realm of Ine and Elfred, on soil where every step calls up some memory of the great struggle which made Britain England. The Teutonic settlement in this island becomes more of a living thing to one who finds that the boundary of the land which Ceawlin won from the Briton abides, after thirteen hundred years, the boundary of his own parish and his own fields. At all events, in bringing my work to an end, I can say in all honesty that I have laboured for truth, that I have never wilfully kept back any scrap of evidence, whether telling for or against my own conclusions, that I have given every reader of mine the means of coming, if he thinks good, to con elusions di¿'erent from my own.

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