It would be hard to say that one historian should not review the work of another; but we may at least expect that he should do so with sympathetic consideration for the difficulties which all historians encounter, and should not pass sentence until he has all the evidence before him.

What were Freeman's qualifications for delivering an authoritative judgment on the work of Froude?
Though not by any means so learned a man as his tone of conscious superiority induced people to suppose, he knew his own period very well indeed, and his acquaintance with that period, perhaps also his veneration for Stubbs, had given him a natural prejudice in favour of the Church.

For the Church of the middle ages, the undivided Church of Christ, was even in its purely mundane aspect the salvation of society, the safeguard of law and order, the last restraint of the powerful, and the last hope of the wretched.
Historically, if not doctrinally, Freeman was a High Churchman, and his ecclesiastical leanings were a great advantage to him in dealing with the eleventh century.

It was far otherwise when he came to write of the sixteenth.

If the Church of the sixteenth century had been like the Church of the eleventh century, or the twelfth, or the thirteenth, there would have been no Reformation, and no Froude.
Freeman lived, and loved, the controversial life.