has made himself a specialist.

Meanwhile the general reading public continues to ask for standard
histories, and discovers, only too often, that it can find nothing between
school manuals at one end of the scale and minute monographs at the other.
The series of which this volume forms a part is intended to do something
towards meeting this demand. Historians will not sit down, as once they
were wont, to write twenty-volume works in the style of Hume or Lingard,
embracing a dozen centuries of annals. It is not to be desired that they
should--the writer who is most satisfactory in dealing with Anglo-Saxon
antiquities is not likely to be the one who will best discuss the
antecedents of the Reformation, or the constitutional history of the Stuart
period. But something can be done by judicious co-operation: it is not
necessary that a genuine student should refuse to touch any subject that
embraces an epoch longer than a score of years, nor need history be written
as if it were an encyclopaedia, and cut up into small fragments dealt with
by different hands.

It is hoped that the present series may strike the happy mean, by dividing
up English History into periods that are neither too long to be dealt with
by a single competent specialist, nor so short as to tempt the writer to
indulge in that over-abundance of unimportant detail which repels the
general reader. They are intended to give something more than a mere
outline of our national annals, but they have little space for controversy
or the discussion of sources, save in periods such as the dark age of the
5th and 6th centuries after Christ, where the criticism of authorities is
absolutely necessary if we are to arrive at any sound conclusions as to the
course of history. A number of maps are to be found at the end of each
volume which, as it is hoped, will make it unnecessary for the reader to be
continually referring to large historical atlases--tomes which (as we must