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HAROLD

by Edward Bulwer Lytton

DEDICATORY EPISTLE

I dedicate to you, my dear friend, a work, principally composed underyour hospitable roof; and to the materials of which your library, rich inthe authorities I most needed, largely contributed.

The idea of founding an historical romance on an event so important andso national as the Norman Invasion, I had long entertained, and thechronicles of that time had long been familiar to me. But it is an oldhabit of mine, to linger over the plan and subject of a work, for years,perhaps, before the work has, in truth, advanced a sentence; "busyingmyself," as old Burton saith, "with this playing labour—otiosaquediligentia 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 has givento song and romance the deeds of the later knighthood, and the gloriousfrenzy of the Crusades. The Norman Conquest was our Trojan War; an epochbeyond which our learning seldom induces our imagination to ascend.

In venturing on ground so new to fiction, I saw before me the option ofapparent pedantry, in the obtrusion of such research as might carry thereader along with the Author, fairly and truly into the real records ofthe time; or of throwing aside pretensions to accuracy altogether;—andso rest contented to turn history into flagrant romance, rather thanpursue my own conception of extracting its natural romance from theactual history. Finally, not without some encouragement from you,(whereof take your due share of blame!) I decided to hazard the attempt,and to adopt that mode of treatment which, if making larger demand on theattention of the reader, seemed the 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 untruly hasSismondi said, that the "Eleventh Century has a right to be considered agreat age. It was a period of life and of creation; all that there wasof noble, heroic, and vigorous in the Middle Ages commenced at thatepoch." 1 But to us Englishmen in especial, besides the more animatedinterest in that spirit of adventure, enterprise, and improvement, ofwhich the Norman chivalry was the noblest type, there is an interest moretouching and deep in those last glimpses of the old Saxon monarchy, whichopen upon us in the mournful 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 the motivesand policy of the agents in an event the most memorable in Europe; and toconvey a definite, if general, notion of the human beings, whose brainsschemed, and whose hearts beat, in that realm of shadows which liesbehind 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 evidences willpermit, both as to accuracy in the delineation of character, andcorrectness in that chronological chain of dates without which there canbe no historical philosophy; that is, no tangible link between the causeand the effect. The fictitious part of my narrative is, as in "Rienzi,"and the "Last of the Barons," confined chiefly to the private life, withits domain of incident and passion, which is the legitimate appanage of