Fanatical Hatred or Brotherly Love? Rethinking E. A. Freeman’s Feud with J. A. Froude
When J. A. Froude published his articles on Thomas Becket in the Nineteenth Century (1877), he found himself attacked again by his nemesis E. A. Freeman, who published a 100-page review, concluding that Froude’s history of Becket was in fact a fiction. It has been argued that such criticisms were motivated by the professionalising historian’s need to exclude the literary and artistic Froude from a discipline seeking to promote its newly adopted scientific methodology. But the nature of Freeman’s review of Froude’s ‘Becket’ suggests that there was something deeply personal at the core of Freeman’s vitriol, originating not in a methodological dispute but rather in ecclesiastical debates that embroiled Oxford life while both Froude and Freeman were students and later fellows there almost 30 years before, when a very different history of Becket was first published.