Edward A. Freeman

Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–1892) was an English historian. Educated at Trinity College, Oxford, he lived as an independent scholar on a private income, writing prodigiously for the Saturday Review and producing The History of the Norman Conquest (1867–79) in six volumes, The Reign of William Rufus (1882), histories of Sicily and of federal government, and books on architecture and the Ottoman question. He held that history is past politics and insisted on working from the original chroniclers. In 1884 he became Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. He died of smallpox at Alicante while traveling in Spain.