SOURCE: Gillingham, John. ”Civilizing the English? The English Histories of William of Malmesbury and David Hume.” Historical Research 74, no. 183 (February 2001): 17-43.

In the following essay, Gillingham compares the histories of England composed by William and Hume, noting that the idea of using histories as an aid to refining the temperament of the Englishman was as popular in the twelfth century as it was during the eighteenth, the time of Hume's writings.

According to Gervase of Canterbury, writing early in the thirteenth century, ‘William the Bastard brought into England a new form of living and speaking’ (‘novam vivendi formam et loquendi’).¹ By a new form of speaking he presumably meant French.² But what did he mean by a new form of living? Gervase—who explicitly described himself as a simple chronicler and not anything as sophisticated as a historian—does not tell us. But we do at least know...