ABSTRACT
Eben William Robertson was born in 1815, came to Worcester College, Oxford, in 1833, graduated in Classics in 1837 and, after a period at Lincoln’s Inn, lived as a country gentleman in Leicestershire. He published two books: Scotland under her Early Kings (1862)1 and Historical Essays (1872).2 That these are among the most important nineteenth-century works on Anglo-Saxon history is demonstrable. Their influence, or at least their acknowledged influence, has been slight. Robertson was largely neglected in his own day (though not by Stubbs)3 and almost completely in ours. He is used by Maitland exceedingly lightly; his works do not appear in the bibliographies of the textbooks by Stenton,4 Loyn5 and Sawyer.6 They do not appear even in Rosenthal’s full-scale bibliography.7
