Froude's forbearance, as well as his own vanity, had blinded him to the danger he was incurring.

The first sentence of his first article explains the fury of an invective for which few parallels could be found since the days of the Renaissance.
"Mr.Froude's appearance on the field of mediaeval history will hardly be matter of rejoicing to those who have made mediaeval history one of the chief studies of their lives." Freeman's pedantry was, as Matthew Arnold said, ferocious, and he seems to have cherished the fantastic delusion that particular periods of history belonged to particular historians.

Before writing about Becket Froude should, according to this primitive doctrine, have asked leave of Freeman, or of Stubbs, or of an industrious clergyman, Professor Brewer, who edited with ability and learning several volumes of the Rolls Series.

That to warn off Froude would be to warn off the public was so much the better for the purposes of an exclusive clique.

For Froude's style, that accursed style which was gall and wormwood to Freeman, "had," as he kindly admitted, "its merits." Page after page teems with mere abuse, a sort of pale reflection, or, to vary the metaphor, a faint echo from Cicero on Catiline, or Burke on Hastings.
"On purely moral points there is no need now for me to enlarge; every man who knows right from wrong ought to be able to see through the web of ingenious sophistry which tries to justify the slaughter of More and Fisher"; although the guilt of More and Fisher is a question not of morality, but of evidence.