Mr. Freeman did he
did nothing better than this. He never "writes down" to his readers: he
expects to find in them something of his own interest in the buildings
and their makers; and he supplies the knowledge which only the traveller
who is also a historian has at hand.

The volume that is now published contains sketches written at different
times from 1861 to 1891. It will be seen that they all bear more or less
directly on the great central work of the historian's life, the history
of the Norman Conquest. In his travels he went always to learn, and when
he had learned he could not help teaching. The course of each of these
journeys can be traced in his own letters as published in the _Life_. In
1856 he made his first foreign excursion--to Aquitaine--and after 1860 a
foreign tour was "almost an annual event."[4] In 1861 he paid his first
visit to Normandy, with the best of all companions. In 1867 he went
again, specially for the sake of the "Norman Conquest," with Mr. J.R.
Green and Mr. Sidney Owen; and in the next year he was in Maine with Mr.
Green. In 1875 he was again in Normandy, for a short time, on his way to
Dalmatia. In 1876 he went to Maine also to "look up the places belonging
to"[5] William Rufus, and again in 1879 with Mr. J.T. Fowler and Mr.
James Parker. In 1891 he paid his last visit to the lands which he had
come to know so well. He was then thinking of writing on Henry I., a
work of which he lived to write but little. In this last Norman journey
the articles, published in _The Guardian_ after his death, were written.
His method on each of these expeditions seems to have been the same.
Before he started he read something of the special history of the places
he was to visit. He always, if possible, procured a local historian's
book. He wrote his articles while he was still away. "To many of these
Norman places," says his daughter who has prepared this volume for the
press, "he went several times, and he never wearied of seeing them again
himself or of showing them to others.... In the last Norman journey of
1891 how one feels he was at home there, re-treading the ground so
carefully worked out for the Norman Conquest and William Rufus--the same
enthusiasm with which, often under difficulties of weather or of health,
he 'stepped out' all he could of Sicily."

Not only did he walk, and read, and write, while he was abroad, he drew:
and from the hundreds of characteristic sketches which he has left it
ha