[I]t may be doubted whether any work of comparable importance in English historical literature has ever been more easy to criticize than Freeman's Norman Conquest. It was in Green's phrase "far too rhetorical and diffuse", and yet despite its excessive length, it concentrated too exclusively upon strictly political events. Nor was the treatment of the authorities itself comprehensive, so that a generation which has been taught to value the record sources of history, and which pays perhaps even an excessive reverence to material which has not yet been printed, is inevitably sceptical of an historian who neglected records, who misinterpreted Domesday Book, and who positively boasted his contempt for manuscripts. Freeman was, in fact, more erudite than critical, and even the narrative sources which were the sure foundation of his work were sometimes by him mishandled. Generally, as J. R. Green remarked, he tended to be unjust to the Norman writers, but otherwise he often gives the impression of giving equal credence to all his authorities and of blending together their contradictory accounts into an unreal synthesis. In this way his account of the crisis of 1051–2 is, for instance, incomprehensibly confused. It must, moreover, be added that, having made up his mind, he could show most obstinate bias towards his sources, selecting only those which could best illustrate his point of view... Freeman's Norman Conquest was, in short, magisterial without being definitive.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "[I]t may be doubted whether any work of comparable importance in English historical literature has ever been more easy to criticize than Freeman's Norman Conquest. It was in Green's phrase "far too rhetorical and diffuse", and yet despite its excessive length, it concentrated too exclusively upon strictly political events. Nor was the treatment of the authorities itself comprehensive, so that a generation which has been taught to value the record sources of history, and which pays perhaps even an excessive reverence to material which has not yet been printed, is inevitably sceptical of an historian who neglected records, who misinterpreted Domesday Book, and who positively boasted his contempt for manuscripts. Freeman was, in fact, more erudite than critical, and even the narrative sources which were the sure foundation of his work were sometimes by him mishandled. Generally, as J. R. Green remarked, he tended to be unjust to the Norman writers, but otherwise he often gives the impression of giving equal credence to all his authorities and of blending together their contradictory accounts into an unreal synthesis. In this way his account of the crisis of 1051–2 is, for instance, incomprehensibly confused. It must, moreover, be added that, having made up his mind, he could show most obstinate bias towards his sources, selecting only those which could best illustrate his point of view... Freeman's Norman Conquest was, in short, magisterial without being definitive." in the context of "David C. Douglas, 'The Norman Conquest and British Historians', Lecture on the David Murray Foundation, University of Glasgow (20 February 1946), quoted in Time and the Hour: Some Collected Papers of David C. Douglas (1977), p. 63" to mean that wisdom is timeless.