Excerpt

The idea of founding an historical romance on an event so important and so national as the Norman Invasion, I had long entertained, and the chronicles of that time had long been familiar to me...

I have sought in this work, less to portray mere manners, which modern researches have rendered familiar to ordinary students in our history, than to bring forward the great characters, so carelessly dismissed in the long and loose record of centuries; to show more clearly the motives and policy of the agents in an event the most memorable in Europe; and to convey a definite, if general, notion of the human beings, whose brains schemed, and whose hearts beat, in that realm of shadows which lies behind the Norman Conquest...

This edition features a linked Table of Contents and Footnotes

CONTENTS (abridged list)

DEDICATORY EPISTLE

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

BOOK I.

BOOK II.

BOOK III.

...

BOOK X.

BOOK XI.

BOOK XII.

NOTES

FOOTNOTES

About the Author

"Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton PC (1803 – 1873), was an English novelist, poet, playwright, and politician. He was immensely popular with the reading public and wrote a stream of bestselling novels which earned him a considerable fortune. He coined the phrases "the great unwashed",[1] "pursuit of the almighty dollar", "the pen is mightier than the sword", as well as the infamous opening line "It was a dark and stormy night"."--Wikipedia