The Norman tyranny succeeded, and gave this Babel of savage sounds a wrench towards their own language.  Such a mixture necessarily required ages to bring it to some standard:  and, consequently, whatever compositions were formed during its progress, were sure of growing obsolete.  However, the authors of those days were not likely to make these obvious reflections; and indeed seem to have aimed at no one perfection.  From the Conquest to the reign of Henry the Eighth it is difficult to discover any one beauty in our writers, but their simplicity.  They told their tale, like story-tellers; that is, they related without art or ornament; and they related whatever they heard.  No councils of princes, no motives of conduct, no remoter springs of action, did they investigate or learn.  We have even little light into the characters of the actors.  A king or an archbishop of Canterbury are the only persons with whom we are made much acquainted.  The barons are all represented as brave patriots; but we have not the satisfaction of knowing which, of them were really so; nor whether they were not all turbulent and ambitious.  The probability is, that both kings and nobles wished to encroach on each other, and if any sparks of liberty were struck out in all likelihood it was contrary to the intention of either the flint or the steel.

Hence it has been thought necessary to give a new dress to English history.  Recourse has been had to records, and they are far from corroborating the testimonies of our historians.  Want of authentic memorials has obliged our later writers to leave the mass pretty much as they found it.  Perhaps all the requisite attention that might have been bestowed, has not been bestowed.  It demands great industry and patience to wade into such abstruse stores as records and charters:  and they being jejune and narrow in themselves, very acute criticism is necessary to strike light from their assistance.  If they solemnly contradict historians in material facts, we may lose our history; but it is impossible to adhere to our historians.  Partiality man cannot intirely divest himself of; it is so natural, that the bent of a writer to one side or the other of a question is almost always discoverable.  But there is a wide difference between favouring and lying and yet I doubt whether the whole stream of our historians, misled by their originals, have not falsified one reign in our annals in the grossest manner.  The moderns are only guilty of taking-on trust what they ought to have examined more scrupulously, as the authors whom they copied were all ranked on one side in a flagrant season of party.  But no excuse can be made for the original authors, who, I doubt, have violated all rules of truth.

The confusions which attended the civil war between the houses of York and Lancaster, threw an obscurity over that part of our annals, which it is almost impossible to dispel.  We have scarce any authentic monuments of the reign of Edward the Fourth; and ought to read his history with much distrust, from the boundless partiality of the succeeding writers to the opposite cause.  That diffidence should increase as we proceed to the reign of his brother.