<P> Freeman's range included Greek, Roman and the earlier part of English history, together with some portions of foreign medieval history, and he had a scholarly though general knowledge of the rest of the history of the European world . Freeman regarded Rome as "the central truth of European history," the bond of its unity, and he undertook his History of Sicily (1891--1894) partly to illustrate this unity . He believed that all historical study is valueless unless based on a knowledge of original authorities, and explained how they should be weighed and used . He did not use manuscript authorities, however, and maintained he had no need to do so for most of his work, as the authorities he needed were already in print . </P> <P> His reputation as a historian rests chiefly on his History of the Norman Conquest (1867--1876), his longest completed book . In common with his works generally, it is distinguished by exhaustiveness of treatment and research, critical ability, and general accuracy . He is almost exclusively a political historian, and his works are infused with personal insights he gained from his practical experience of people and institutions . His saying that "history is past politics and politics are present history" is significant of this limitation of his work, which dealt less with other subjects in a nation's life . </P> <P> J.W. Burrow proposed that Freeman, like William Stubbs and John Richard Green, was an historical scholar with little or no experience of public affairs, with views of the present which were Romantically historicised and who was drawn to history by what was in a broad sense an antiquarian passion for the past, as well as a patriotic and populist impulse to identify the nation and its institutions as the collective subject of English history, making </P> <P> the new historiography of early medieval times an extension, filling out and democratising, of older Whig notions of continuity . It was Stubbs who presented this most substantially; Green who made it popular and dramatic...It is in Freeman...of the three the most purely a narrative historian, that the strains are most apparent . </P>

Who said history is past politics and politics is present history