Stephen, King of England succession. Stephen's new Anglo-Norman kingdom had been shaped by the Norman conquest of England in 1066, followed by the Norman expansion into south Wales over the coming years. Both the kingdom and duchy were dominated by a small number of major barons who owned lands on both sides of the English Channel, with the lesser barons beneath them usually having more localised holdings. The extent to which lands and positions should be passed down through hereditary right or by the gift of the king was still uncertain, and tensions concerning this issue had grown during the reign of Henry I.
The History of the Norman Conquest of England a wide readership that the "History" was "among the great works of the present century". But in the later years of Freeman's life the book's reputation was injured by a series of attacks levelled on it by the genealogist and local historian J. H. Round. Round brought against Freeman the same kind of aggressively pedantic nit-picking that Freeman himself had been used to bring against other historians. Round was neither interested in nor knowledgeable about Anglo-Saxon history, but had "an instinctive feeling that in England our consecutive political history does, in a sense, begin with the Norman conquest". Part of