William Stubbs - Modern Views of Him

Modern Views of Him

In the main his ideas of a confrontational political framework have been superseded by K.B. McFarlane's 'community of interest' theory; the idea that the amount of possible conflict between a king and his nobles was actually very small (case in point, Henry IV, 1399–1413). Historians like Richard Partington, Rosemary Horrox and notably May McKisack, have pushed this view further.

J. W. Burrow proposed that Stubbs, like John Richard Green and Edward Augustus Freeman, was an historical scholar with little or no experience of public affairs, with views of the present which were Romantically historicised and who was drawn to history by what was in a broad sense an antiquarian passion for the past, as well as a patriotic and populist impulse to identify the nation and its institutions as the collective subject of English history, making

...the new historiography of early medieval times an extension, filling out and democratising, of older Whig notions of continuity. It was Stubbs who presented this most substantially; Green who made it popular and dramatic... It is in Freeman...of the three the most purely a narrative historian, that the strains are most apparent.