Journeys to England and Ireland, ed. J.P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence and K.P. Mayer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958)

Excerpt:
Well, here I am at Tocqueville, in my old family ruin. A  league away is the harbour from which William set out to conquer England. I am surrounded by Normans whose names figure in the lists of the conquerors. All that, I must admit, ‘flatters the proud weakness of my heart’, and sometimes stirs a childish enthusiasm of which afterwards I am ashamed. However all that brings me round to a subject I had quite forgotten about, and puts me in mind to write to you my musings about English history, which I must do much more shortly than I could wish as I have so little time here. I will write haphazard what I think for you to put in order if you can or will. But on my soul and conscience I warn you that I don’t yet know what I am going to say.

I don’t think you like the beginnings, and I can well believe it. I could never read about them without yawning, and could never remember the  sequence of events narrated. But still I think that when I, as you too, studied the matter, had our reading been better directed, we might have found it interesting and the source of some pregnant thoughts. As for facts, I have given up all hope of remembering the names of the kings of the Heptarchy and all that muddle of obscure happenings whose cause and whose results no one knows. But I should like to get a clear picture of the movements of peoples spreading over on top of
each other and getting continually mixed up, but each still keeping something that it had from the beginning. There is hardly anywhere better than England for studying the underlying factors and the details of the armed emigrations which overturned the Roman Empire, because there were more of them there and
they lasted into a time when the barbarians in the rest of Europe were already refinding civilisation. But besides that there is something in the broad picture which strikes the imagination; revolution after revolution compared to which those of our own time are trifles: the driving back of the British tribes by the Scots: the Saxons coming and driving all before them: the battles of the Saxons against the Danes, a third race of conquerors still coming from the same part of the world, but keeping keeping more of the savage energy of the Northern peoples; battles which lasted until the Normans, coming from the North, too, but endowed both with the impetuous energy of the Danes and with a higher civilisation than the Saxons, united them all under one yoke. One thinks with horror of the inconceivable sufferings of humanity at that time.

Online:
Achive.org (Recommended Translation) [pdf]