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Edward Augustus Freeman Quotes

Edward Augustus Freeman was an English historian, architectural artist, and Liberal politician during the late-19th-century heyday of Prime Minister William Gladstone, as well as a one-time candidate for Parliament. He held the position of Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, where he tutored Arthur Evans; later he and Evans were activists in the Balkan uprising of Bosnia and Herzegovina against the Ottoman Empire.

After the marriage of his daughter Margaret to Evans, he and Evans collaborated on the fourth volume of his History of Sicily. He was a prolific writer, publishing 239 distinct works. One of his best known is his magnum opus, The History of the Norman Conquest of England . Both he and Margaret died before Evans purchased the land from which he would excavate the Palace of Knossos. Wikipedia  

✵ 2. August 1823 – 16. March 1892
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Famous Edward Augustus Freeman Quotes

“I am parochially minded; but my parish is a big one, taking in all civilized Europe and America.”

Edward Augustus Freeman

Source: Letter to J. A. Doyle (19 August 1889), quoted in W. R. W. Stephens, The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, Volume II (1895), 406

“I have actually sat down to make a distinct History of the Norman Conquest, which I can do easier than anybody else, as I have worked so much at the subject for twenty years past, that is, a great part of the story; there will be little more to do than to write down what is already in my head.”

Edward Augustus Freeman

Source: Letter to Dean Hook (23 December 1865), quoted in W. R. W. Stephens, The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, Volume I (1895), p. 335

“[T]he risk of these sports, and the supposed manliness of facing that risk, is generally put forth as one of their merits. Now I may be very blind and mean-spirited, but the manly sport of foxhunting seems to me not to be manly at all, but to be at once cowardly and fool hardy. It is cowardly as regards the cruelty practised on a victim which cannot defend himself by tormentors who, as far as the victim is concerned, are perfectly safe. It is foolhardy as risking men's lives for no adequate cause. It is manly, it is something much better than manly, when a man sacrifices or risks his life in a good cause. But I can see nothing manly, nothing in any way praiseworthy, in a man risking his life in a bad cause or in no cause at all. When a fox-hunter is suddenly cut off in the midst of his cruelties, I can see nothing in his end at all resembling the end of the martyr who dies for his religion or of the hero who dies for his country. I believe I am unfashionable in thinking so, but I cannot help it.”

Edward Augustus Freeman

Source: 'The Morality of Field Sports', The Fortnightly Review (October 1869), quoted in E. A. Freeman, The Morality of Field Sports (1874), p. 24

“Can any modern fox-hunter honestly say that his hunting is done with the legitimate object of getting rid of a noxious animal in the quickest way? It is nothing of the kind. It is plain that instead of men hunting with any object of getting rid of foxes, the fox exists simply for the purpose of being hunted. But for the practice of hunting, the fox would long ago have been as extinct in England as his cousin the wolf.”

Edward Augustus Freeman

Source: 'The Morality of Field Sports', The Fortnightly Review (October 1869), quoted in E. A. Freeman, The Morality of Field Sports (1874), p. 18

“It seems to me that an age of belief sowed the good seed of which an age of unbelief, an age at least of less fervent belief, reaps the fruits. It strikes me that the moral precepts and moral influences of Christianity needed the dogmatic teaching and the systematic discipline of past times to gain for them a hold in the world. The sower may sometimes have sowed tares along with his wheat, but the wheat has survived the tares. I believe that many a man who has little faith in Christian theology is deeply influenced by Christian morality, and that he is altogether a different man from what he would have been had Christianity never been.”

Edward Augustus Freeman

Source: 'The Morality of Field Sports', The Fortnightly Review (October 1869), quoted in E. A. Freeman, The Morality of Field Sports (1874), p. 12

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