Civilizing the English? The English histories of William of Malmesbury and David Hume*

Abstract

Abstract This article has two inter-related arguments: first, that in terms of its themes and approaches William of Malmesbury's Deeds of the Kings of the English bears comparison with David Hume's History of England; second, that in twelfth-century England the notion of a civilizing process, including the idea of socio-economic stages of development, was at least as prevalent as in ‘early modern’ England