This eBook was produced by Tapio Riikonen
and David Widger
HAROLD
by Edward Bulwer Lytton
Dedicatory Epistle
TO THE RIGHT HON. C. T. D'EYNCOURT, M.P.
I dedicate to you, my dear friend, a work, principally composed underyour hospitable roof; and to the materials of which your library, richin the authorities I most needed, largely contributed.
The idea of founding an historical romance on an event so importantand so national as the Norman Invasion, I had long entertained, andthe chronicles of that time had long been familiar to me. But it isan old habit of mine, to linger over the plan and subject of a work,for years, perhaps, before the work has, in truth, advanced asentence; "busying myself," as old Burton saith, "with this playinglabour—otiosaque diligentia ut vitarem torporen feriendi."
The main consideration which long withheld me from the task, was in mysense of the unfamiliarity of the ordinary reader with the characters,events, and, so to speak, with the very physiognomy of a period anteAgamemnona; before the brilliant age of matured chivalry, which hasgiven to song and romance the deeds of the later knighthood, and theglorious frenzy of the Crusades. The Norman Conquest was our TrojanWar; an epoch beyond which our learning seldom induces our imaginationto ascend.
In venturing on ground so new to fiction, I saw before me the optionof apparent pedantry, in the obtrusion of such research as might carrythe reader along with the Author, fairly and truly into the realrecords of the time; or of throwing aside pretensions to accuracyaltogether;—and so rest contented to turn history into flagrantromance, rather than pursue my own conception of extracting itsnatural romance from the actual history. Finally, not without someencouragement from you, (whereof take your due share of blame!) Idecided to hazard the attempt, and to adopt that mode of treatmentwhich, if making larger demand on the attention of the reader, seemedthe more complimentary to his judgment.
The age itself, once duly examined, is full of those elements whichshould awaken interest, and appeal to the imagination. Not untrulyhas Sismondi said, that the "Eleventh Century has a right to beconsidered a great age. It was a period of life and of creation; allthat there was of noble, heroic, and vigorous in the Middle Agescommenced at that epoch." [1] But to us Englishmen in especial,besides the more animated interest in that spirit of adventure,enterprise, and improvement, of which the Norman chivalry was thenoblest type, there is an interest more touching and deep in thoselast glimpses of the old Saxon monarchy, which open upon us in themournful pages of our chroniclers.
I have sought in this work, less to portray mere manners, which modernresearches have rendered familiar to ordinary students in our history,than to bring forward the great characters, so carelessly dismissed inthe long and loose record of centuries; to show more clearly themotives and policy of the agents in an event the most memorable inEurope; and to convey a definite, if general, notion of the humanbeings, whose brains schemed, and whose hearts beat, in that realm ofshadows which lies behind the Norman Conquest;
"Spes hominum caecos, morbos, votumque, labores,
Et passim toto volitantes aethere curas." [2]
I have thus been faithful to the leading historical incidents in thegrand tragedy of Harold, and as careful as contradictory evidenceswill permit, both as to accuracy in the del