before the
reader, if I would be faithful to the plan of my work, the political and
moral features of the age, as well as its lighter and livelier
attributes, and so lead him to perceive, when he has closed the book, why
England was conquered, and how England survived the Conquest.

In accomplishing this task, I inevitably incur the objections which the
task itself raises up,--objections to the labour it has cost; to the
information which the labour was undertaken in order to bestow;
objections to passages which seem to interrupt the narrative, but which
in reality prepare for the incidents it embraces, or explain the position
of the persons whose characters it illustrates,--whose fate it involves;
objections to the reference to authorities, where a fact might be
disputed, or mistaken for fiction; objections to the use of Saxon words,
for which no accurate synonyms could be exchanged; objections, in short,
to the colouring, conduct, and composition of the whole work; objections
to all that separate it from the common crowd of Romances, and stamp on
it, for good or for bad, a character peculiarly its own. Objections of
this kind I cannot remove, though I have carefully weighed them all. And
with regard to the objection most important to story-teller and novel
reader--viz., the dryness of some of the earlier portions, though I have
thrice gone over those passages, with the stern determination to inflict
summary justice upon every unnecessary line, I must own to my regret that
I have found but little which it was possible to omit without rendering
the after narrative obscure, and without injuring whatever of more
stirring interest the story, as it opens, may afford to the general
reader of Romance.

As to the Saxon words used, an explanation of all those that can be
presumed unintelligible to a person of ordinary education, is given
either in the text or a foot-note. Such archaisms are much less numerous
than certain critics would fain represent them to be: and they have
rarely indeed been admitted where other words could have been employed
without a glaring anachronism, or a tedious periphrase. Would it indeed
be possible, for instance, to convey a notion of the customs and manners
of our Saxon forefathers without employing words so mixed up with their
daily usages and modes of thinking as "weregeld" and "niddering"? Would
any words from the modern vocabulary suggest the same idea, or embody the
same meaning?

One