A consideration of Gibbon and early medieval history in the context of eighteenth-century European knowledge of the period might be thought to be worth no more than a passing observation in proportion to the amount of attention Gibbon himself accorded it. Gibbon discusses western medieval Europe in chapter 49 of his history; it occupies sixty-six pages and embraces 600 years of western European history from the eighth to the fourteenth century from a relatively limited perspective. Instead, one might simply wish to refer to the fuller and more authoritative accounts in the wealth of early French, German and Italian scholarship on the period, of which Gibbon himself gives only some inkling, were it not for the enormous influence Gibbon has enjoyed in England, especially since the later nineteenth century. The Decline and fall, for example, was recommended at Oxford in 1884 as a text for European history 1272–1519. The old Cambridge Medieval History, designed by Bury, editor of Gibbon, and old-fashioned, especially volumes II and III, even as it appeared, was manifestly within the Gibbonian political narrative tradition and conceptual framework, with its preoccupation with empire and adoption of similar chronological and thematic emphases. Gibbon's assessment of the emergent barbarian successor states in the context of decline had an unfortunate effect on English scholarship on the European early Middle Ages, with the honourable exceptions of Edward Freeman and Thomas Hodgkin, until the middle of the twentieth century.