Abroad he was feared by the bad, whilst at home such order prevailed throughout England, that a man might travel in safety "with his bosom full of gold" from one end to the other.[1]
What I do here protest against is the common practice of implicitly believing every tradition, of repeating every idle story which has been foisted into the text either by credulity or rancorous hatred—of, in fact, mistaking party feeling for history. The Chroniclers had every reason to malign William. His very position was enough. He had pressed with a heavy hand on the Old-English nobles, stripped them too often of their civil power, and their religious honours; and failing to learn, had, like a second Attila, tried to uproot their language.
The truth is, we are so swayed by our feelings that the most dispassionate writer is involuntarily biased. We in fact pervert truth without knowing we do so. Language, by its very nature, betrays us. No historian, with the least vividness of style, can copy from another without exaggeration. The misplacement of a single word, the insertion of a single epithet, gives a different colour and tone. And, in this very matter of the New Forest, we need only take the various accounts, as they have come down, to find in them the evidences of their own untruth.[2]
- ↑ The Chronicle. Ed. Thorpe. Vol. i. p. 354. This, of course, must not be too literally taken. It is one of those stock phrases which so often recur in literature, and may be found, under rather different forms, applied to other princes.
- ↑ Voltaire was the first to throw any doubt on the generally received account (Essai sur les Moeurs et l'Esprit det Nations, tom. iii. ch. xlii. p. 169. Pantheon Litteraire. Paris, 1836). He has in England been followed by Warner (Topographical Remarks on the South-Western Parts of Hampshire, vol. i. pp. 164-197), and Lewis, in his Historical Enquiries concerning the New Forest, pp. 42-55.
