Edward Augustus Freeman[1] (2 August 1823 – 16 March 1892) was an English historian, architectural artist, and Liberal politician, a one-time candidate for Parliament.

[3] His parents, John and Mary Ann (née Carless) Freeman, used the Latin name of the month in which he was born as his middle name.

They were a family of modest means; however, the paternal grandfather, Joseph Freeman (about 1768–1822),[4] had been a wealthy man, and the owner of Pedmore Hall.

Edward's mother, Mary Anne, née Carless (or Carlos), had noble ancestry, descending through her father, William, then residing near Birmingham, from the same Colonel William Carless who had assisted the future Charles II as he hid from his enemies in the branches of the Royal Oak after the Battle of Worcester, 1651, the last of the English Civil War.

of Cambridge honoris causa, and when he visited the United States on a lecture tour was well received at various institutions of learning.

[10] His reputation as a historian rests chiefly on his six-volume History of the Norman Conquest (1867–1879), his longest completed work.

He is almost exclusively a political historian, and his works are infused with personal insights he gained from his practical experience of people and institutions.

[10] J. W. Burrow proposed that Freeman, like William Stubbs and John Richard Green, was a historical scholar with little or no experience of public affairs, with views of the present which were Romantically historicised and who was drawn to history by what was in a broad sense an antiquarian passion for the past, as well as a patriotic and populist impulse to identify the nation and its institutions as the collective subject of English history, making the new historiography of early medieval times an extension, filling out and democratising, of older Whig notions of continuity.

It is in Freeman ... of the three the most purely a narrative historian, that the strains are most apparent.Freeman involved himself in politics, was a follower of Gladstone, and approved the Home Rule Bill of 1886, but objected to the later proposal to retain the Irish members at Westminster.

He was prominent in the agitation which followed "the Bulgarian atrocities" of the April Uprising; his speeches were often intemperate, and he was accused of uttering the words "Perish India!"

The only difference is that the Russians have punched some Hebrew heads irregularly, and the heathen Chinee has before now suffered from California mobs; but there is no religious persecution in either case, only the natural instinct of any decent nation to get rid of filthy strangers.

[18]In a letter to a friend, describing America, Freeman wrote, "This would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it".

Though Rickman's scheme remains in use, the subdivisions proposed by both Freeman and Sharpe are also often found in recent books.

His published scholarly works include the six large volumes of Norman Conquest, his unfinished History of Sicily,[23] and his William Rufus (1882).

He wrote several others on the early Middle Ages, and produced works on Aratus, Sulla, Nicias, William the Conqueror, Thomas of Canterbury, Frederick II and many more.

[7] The naturalist William Henry Hudson was dismissive of Freeman's style of argument in his 1920 book Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn.

[26] Most of Freeman's papers are also now held in the University of Manchester Library, including works in manuscript, correspondence and 6,200 of his architectural sketches of European churches.