Henry Hallam - Historian

Historian

In 1834 Hallam published The Remains in Prose and Verse of Arthur Henry Hallam, with a Sketch of his Life. In 1852 a selection of Literary Essays and Characters from the Literature of Europe was published.

The Middle Ages is described by Hallam himself as a series of historical dissertations, for the period from the 5th to the 15th century. The work consists of nine long chapters: the histories of France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and of the Greek and Saracenic empires, fill five chapters. Others deal with major institutional features of medieval society: the feudal system, the ecclesiastical system, and the political system of England. The last chapter sketches society, commerce, manners, and literature in the Middle Ages.

The Constitutional History of England takes up the subject at the point at which it had been dropped in the View of the Middle Ages, namely the accession of Henry VII, and carries it down to the accession of George III. Hallam stopped here because he was unwilling to touch on issues of contemporary politics which seemed to him to run back through the whole period of the reign of George III; and he was accused of bias. The Quarterly Review for 1828 contains a hostile article on the Constitutional History, written by Southey, full of reproach: the work, he said, is the "production of a decided partisan." It was his distant treatment of Charles I, Cranmer and Laud that provoked the indignation of Southey.

Hallam, like Macaulay, ultimately referred political questions to the standard of Whig constitutionalism. But he was conscientious with his materials; and it was this which made the Constitutional History one of the standard text-books of English politics.