Harold

Harold, by Edward
Bulwer-Lytton, Complete

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Title: Harold, Complete The Last Of The Saxon Kings
Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Release Date: March 2005 [EBook #7684] [Yes, we are more than one

year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on April 8, 2003]
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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 under
your hospitable roof; and to the materials of which your library, rich in
the authorities I most needed, largely contributed.
The idea of founding an historical romance on an event so important
and so national as the Norman Invasion, I had long entertained, and the
chronicles of that time had long been familiar to me. But it is an old
habit of mine, to linger over the plan and subject of a work, for years,
perhaps, before the work has, in truth, advanced a sentence; "busying
myself," as old Burton saith, "with this playing labour--otiosaque
diligentia ut vitarem torporen feriendi."

The main consideration which long withheld me from the task, was in
my sense of the unfamiliarity of the ordinary reader with the characters,
events, and, so to speak, with the very physiognomy of a period ante
Agamemnona; before the brilliant age of matured chivalry, which has
given to song and romance the deeds of the later knighthood, and the
glorious frenzy of the Crusades. The Norman Conquest was our Trojan
War; an epoch beyond which our learning seldom induces our
imagination to ascend.
In venturing on ground so new to fiction, I saw before me the option of
apparent pedantry, in the obtrusion of such research as might carry the
reader along with the Author, fairly and truly into the real records of
the time; or of throwing aside pretensions to accuracy altogether;--and
so rest contented to turn history into flagrant romance, rather than
pursue my own conception of extracting its natural romance from the
actual 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
the attention of the reader, seemed the more complimentary to his
judgment.
The age itself, once duly examined, is full of those elements which
should awaken interest, and appeal to the imagination. Not untruly has
Sismondi said, that the "Eleventh Century has a right to be considered a
great age. It was a period of life and of creation; all that there was of
noble, heroic, and vigorous in the Middle Ages commenced 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 the noblest type, there
is an interest more touching and deep in those last glimpses of the old
Saxon monarchy, which open upon us in the mournful pages of our
chroniclers.
I have sought in this work, less to portray mere manners, which modern
researches have rendered familiar to ordinary students in our history,
than to bring forward the great characters, so carelessly dismissed in
the long and loose record of centuries; to show more clearly the

motives and policy of the agents in an event the most memorable in
Europe; and to convey a definite, if general, notion of the human beings,
whose brains schemed, and whose hearts beat, in that realm of shadows
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 the