The latter detachment turned in flight and decoyed some of the leading Frenchmen past the spot where the ambush was laid. Then, facing round, they caught their rash pursuers 'between two fires'. I have shown above, from the 'precise statement' which is found in the 'Battle Chronicle', that the great manœuvre which deceived the English was a similarly combined one. Mr Freeman, completely missing this point, makes the Norman 'division', which did not take part in the flight 'ride up the hill' (p. 490), where its slopes were deserted, whereas, on the contrary, they thrust themselves between the pursuers and the hill, and then charged on their rear, riding, of course, not on to, but away from the hill.

So close is the Arques parallel that in Wace we find the same words occurring in both cases:

while William of Malmesbury describes the French king as thus 'astutia insidiis exceptus', just as he describes Harold, in turn as thus 'astutiâ Willelmi circumventus'. Mr Freeman quoted both passages, yet failed to note the parallel.

I speak, it will be seen, of 'the relief of Arques'. As my critic so rashly assumed that in my original article I exhausted Mr Freeman's errors,¹³⁵ I may point out that this subject introduces us, at once, to fresh ones. Our author, for instance, held that Arques was not relieved. Let us see. We are first rightly told, on the authority of William of Poitiers, that the Duke blockaded the stronghold (munitio) by erecting a castellum at its foot (p. 128). On the next page we are told that the latter was 'a wooden tower'—which is precisely what it was not—and that it 'is described as a munitio' by William of Poitiers, whereas that term, as we have just seen, denoted, on the contrary, the rebel stronghold itself. Then we are told that the French king marched to the relief of the rebels, bringing with him 'a good stock of provisions, of corn, and of wine' for the purpose, but 'was far from being successful in his enterprise' (p. 131). In fact, he 'went home, having done nothing towards the immediate object of his journey—the relief of the besieged' (p. 137). Mr Freeman added in a note: 'So I understand the not very clear statement of William of Poitiers that the King went away.' Now, William's statement (which is quoted by him) is absolutely clear:

Perveniens tamen quo ire intenderat, Rex exacerbatissimis animis summâ vi præsidium attentavit: Willelmum ab ærumnis uti eriperet, pariter decrementum sui, stragem suorum vindicaret.

The King, that is, in spite of the ambush, reached his destination (the blockaded stronghold) and then furiously attacked the castellum below, with the double object of raising the blockade and of avenging the death of his followers. Wace is, if possible, even more explicit. After describing the affair of the ambush, he proceeds thus:

Arques, therefore, was duly relieved; the blockading party being only strong enough to defend, when attacked, its own castellum.

We will certainly not say of Mr Freeman that he had not read his Wace 'with common care'—to quote from his criticism on Professor Pearson—but really, when more suo he corrected ex cathedrâ the faults of others, he might at least have made sure of his facts. We will take (from the narrative of the Battle of Hastings) the case of the knighting of Harold on the eve of the Breton war:

But it is only the feigned flight that connects the Battle of Hastings with Arques and its blockade. We read, as the battle is about to begin, of 'the aged Walter Giffard, the lord of Longueville, the hero of Arques and Mortemer' (p. 457). As our author breaks the thread of his narrative (pp. 128-37) to tell us in detail about those whose names occur in it, we need not scruple in this instance to do the same. Turning back, therefore, we read:

The chief who now commanded below the steep of Arques lived to refuse to bear the banner of Normandy below the steep of Senlac ... and to found, like so many others among the baronage of Normandy, a short-lived earldom in the land which he helped to conquer (p. 123).

In the act of that refusal he is thus described:

Even in the days of Arques [1053] and Mortimer [1054] he was an aged man, and now [1066] he was old indeed; his hair was white, his arm was failing (p. 465).

Yet we meet the veteran again, a generation later, as 'old Walter Giffard, now [1090] Earl of Buckingham, in England ... the aged warrior of Arques and Senlac' (W.R., i. 231). 'Nor do we wonder,' we read, 'to find,' among the supporters of William Rufus in 1095, 'the name of Walter Giffard, him [sic] who appeared as an aged man forty years before' (W.R., i. 472). But even Mr Freeman admits that 'we are somewhat surprised to find', among the opponents of Henry I in 1101, 'now at the very end of his long life, the aged Walter Giffard, lord of Longueville, and Earl of Buckingham' (W.R., ii. 395). Surprised? We are indeed; for, if he was 'an aged man' half a century before, what must he have been when he joined the rebels in 1101? It reminds one of a delightful passage in the quaint 'Memorie of the Somervells', where the artless author, speaking of the action, in 1213, of his ancestor 'being then near the nyntieth and fourth year of his age', observes:

What could have induced him ... to join himself with the rebellious barrons at such an age, when he could not act any in all human probabilitie, and was as unfit for counsel, is a thing to be admired, but not understood or knowne.

One need scarcely point out that Mr Freeman has confused two successive bearers of the name. The confusion is avoided by the Duchess of Cleveland in her work on 'The Battle Abbey Roll', as it had been by Planché and previous writers.

I here notice it chiefly as illustrating Mr Freeman's ready acceptance of even glaring improbabilities.

But one of the most singular flaws in the late Professor's work was his evident tendency to confuse two or more persons bearing the same name. Three or four Leofstans of London were rolled by him into one; Henry of Essex was identified with a Henry who had a different father and who lived in Cumberland; while a whole string of erroneous conclusions followed, we saw, from identifying Osbern 'filius Ricardi' with Osbern 'cognomine Pentecost'.¹³⁶ It is strange that one who was so severe on confusion of identity where places were concerned¹³⁷ should have been, in the case of persons, guilty of that confusion.

SUMMARY

I would now briefly recapitulate the points I claim to have established. We have seen, in the first place, that Mr Freeman's disposition of the English forces is, with all that it involves, nothing but a sheer guess—a guess to which he did not consistently adhere, and to which his own precedent, moreover, is directly opposed. Secondly, as to the 'palisade' which formed, according to him, so prominent a feature of the battle, we have found that of the passages he vouched for its existence only one need even be considered; and that one, according to himself, where he last quotes and deals with it, describes, not a palisade but the time-honoured 'array of the shield-wall'.¹³⁸ Then, passing to the battle and taking it stage by stage, I have shown that on its opening phase he went utterly astray in search of an imaginary assault on a phantom palisade; we have seen how another such guess transported to 'the western ravine' a catastrophe which, even on his own showing, must have happened somewhere else, and assigned it to a stage of the battle which is quite possibly the wrong one. We have watched him missing the point of the great feigned flight and failing to see how Norman craft caught the English in a trap. And lastly, the critical manœuvre of the day, by which the Duke's great object was gained, and 'the great advantage of the ground lost' to the English, proves on inquiry—although introduced, like other assertions, as a historic fact—to be yet another unsupported guess: for the statement that by this manœuvre 'the Normans were at last on the hill' and could thus 'charge to the east right against the defenders of the Standard' there is absolutely no foundation.

We have now—confining ourselves to points as to which there can be no question—examined Mr Freeman's account of the Battle of Hastings. It is, as I showed at the outset, the very crown and flower of his work, and it is, I venture to assert, mistaken in its essential points. Must it, then, be cast aside as simply erroneous and misleading? Hardly. In the words of his own criticism on Mr Coote's Romans in Britain: 'It ought to be read, if only as a curious study, to show how utterly astray an ingenious and thoroughly well-informed man can go.' For there is the true conclusion. The possession of exhaustive knowledge, the devotion of unsparing pains—neither of these were wanting. Then 'wanting is—what?' Men have differed and will always differ, as to how history should be written; but on one point we are all agreed. The true historian is he, and he only, who, from the evidence before him, can divine the facts. Other qualities are welcome, but this is the essential gift. And it was because, here at least, he lacked in that, in spite of all his advantages, in spite of his genius and his zeal, our author, in his story of this battle, failed as we have seen.

Mr Freeman held that his predecessors, Thierry and Sir Francis Palgrave, 'singularly resemble each other in a certain lack of critical power'. His own lack, as I conceive it, was of a somewhat different kind. For if he studied the text and weighed the value of his authorities, yet he was often liable to danger from his tendency to a parti pris. Setting out with his own impression, he read his texts in the light of that impression rather than with an open mind. Thus we might say of his 'very lucid and original account' of the great battle, as he said of Mr Coote's work: 'The truth of the whole matter is that all this very ingenious but baseless fabric has been built upon the foundation of a single error.' Had he not stumbled at the outset over that 'quasi castellum', he might never have erected that 'ingenious but baseless fabric'. As it is, while the battle should be largely rewritten, preserving only such incidents as are taken straight from the authorities, the accompanying plan must be wholly destroyed. Till then, as Dr Stubbs has said of the discovery that 'Ingulf' was a forgery, 'it remains a warning light, a wandering marshfire, to caution the reader not to accept too abjectly the conclusions of his authority'.

What then remains, it may be asked, of Mr Freeman's narrative? When one remembers its superb vividness, carrying us away in spite of ourselves, one is tempted to reply, in his own words on the saga of Stamfordbridge:

We have, indeed, a glorious description which, when critically examined, proves to be hardly more worthy of belief than a battlepiece in the Iliad.... Such is the magnificent legend which has been commonly accepted as the history of this famous battle.... And it is disappointing that, for so detailed and glowing a tale, we have so little of authentic history to substitute (pp. 365-8).

For, as he has so justly observed, when dismissing as 'mythical' this 'famous and magnificent saga' (pp. 328-9), 'a void is left which history cannot fill, and which it is forbidden to the historian to fill up from the resources of his own imagination'.

Accepting the principle here enunciated by Mr Freeman himself, I do not merely reject demonstrably erroneous statements. I protest against his giving us a narrative drawn 'from the resources of his own imagination'. It is no answer to say that his guesses cannot be actually proved to be wrong; the historian cannot distinguish too sharply between statements drawn from his authorities and guesses, however ingenious, representing imagination alone. No one I am sure, reading Mr Freeman's brilliant narrative, could imagine how largely his story of the battle is based on mere conjecture.

What the battle really was may be thus tersely expressed—it was Waterloo without the Prussians. The Normans could avail nothing against that serried mass.

As Mr Oman has so well observed, the Norman horse might have surged for ever 'around the impenetrable shield-wall'.¹³⁹ It was only, as he and Mr Hunt¹⁴⁰ have shown, by the skilful combination of horsemen and archers, by the maddening showers of arrows between the charges of the horse, that the English, especially the lighter armed, were stung into breaking their formation and abandoning that passive defence to which they were unfortunately restricted. 'While no mode of array could be stronger so long as the line remained unbroken, it made it hard to form the line again.'¹⁴¹ Dazzled by the rapid movements of their foes, now advancing, now retreating, either in feint or in earnest, the English, in places, broke their line, and then the Duke, as Mr Oman writes, 'thrust his horsemen into the gaps'.¹⁴² All this is quite certain, and is what the authorities plainly describe. Let us, then, keep to what we know. Is it not enough for us to picture the English line stubbornly striving to the last to close its broken ranks, the awful scene of slaughter and confusion, as the Old Guard of Harold, tortured by Norman arrows, found the horsemen among them at last, slashing and piercing right and left. Still the battle-axe blindly smote; doggedly, grimly still they fought, till the axes dropped from their lifeless grasp. And so they fell.

Mr Archer, when he first came forward to defend 'Mr Freeman's account of the great battle',¹⁴³ observed that I claimed 'here to prove the entire inadequacy of Mr Freeman's work', that I held him 'wrong, completely wrong in his whole conception of the battle'.¹⁴⁴ And he admitted that

'such a contention, it will at once be perceived, is very different from any mere criticism of detail; it affects the centre and the very heart of Mr Freeman's work. If he could blunder here in the most carefully elaborated passage of his whole history, he could blunder anywhere; his reputation for accuracy would be gone almost beyond hope of retrieving it' (p. 336).

'Blunder', surely, is a harsh word. I would rather say that the historian is seen here at his strongest and at his weakest: at his weakest in his tendency to follow blindly individual authorities in turn, instead of grasping them as a whole, and, worse still, in adapting them, at need, to his own preconceived notions; at his strongest, in his Homeric power of making the actors in his drama live and move before us. Not in vain has 'the wand of the enchanter', as an ardent admirer once termed it, been waved around Harold and his host. We are learning from recent German researches how the narratives of early Irish warfare are 'perfectly surrounded with magic'; how, for instance, at the battle of Culdreimne 'a Druid wove a magic hedge, which he placed before the army as a hindrance to the enemy'. But spells are now no longer wrought

and the Druid's hedge must go the way of our own magician's 'palisade'.

But, as I foresaw, in his eagerness to prove, at least, the existence of a palisade, my critic was soon reduced to impugning Mr Freeman's own supreme authority, and at last to throwing over Mr Freeman himself. 'Incidit in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim.' Sneering¹⁴⁵ at what the historian termed his 'highest', his 'primary' authority, that 'precious monument', the Bayeux Tapestry—merely because it will not square with his views—he rejects utterly Mr Freeman's theory as to its date and origin,¹⁴⁶ and substitutes one which the Professor described as 'utterly inconceivable'.¹⁴⁷ He has further informed us that 'common sense' tells him that the English axemen cannot possibly have fought 'in the close array of the shield-wall', as Mr Freeman says they did.¹⁴⁸ And then he finally demolishes Mr Freeman's 'conception of the battle' by dismissing 'an imaginary shield-wall',¹⁴⁹ and assuring us that the absurd vision of 'an extended shield-wall vanishes like smoke'.¹⁵⁰

It is impossible not to pity Mr Freeman's would-be champion. Scorning, at the outset, the thought that his hero could err 'in the most carefully elaborated passage of his whole history',¹⁵¹ his attitude of bold defiance was a joy to Mr Freeman's friends.¹⁵²

But his wildly brandished weapon proved more deadly to friend than foe: he discovered, as I knew, he could only oppose me by making jettison of Mr Freeman's views. Of this we have seen above examples striking enough; but the climax was reached in his chief contention, namely, that the lines in the Roman de Rou, which describe, Mr Freeman asserted, 'the array of the shield-wall',¹⁵³ cannot, on many grounds, be 'referred to a shield-wall'.¹⁵⁴ No contradiction could be more complete. So he now finds himself forced to write:

I do not say—I have never said—that I agree with every word that Mr Freeman has written about the great battle; but I do regard his account of Hastings as the noblest battle-piece in our historical literature—perhaps in that of the world.¹⁵⁵

'O most lame and impotent conclusion!' We are discussing whether that account is 'right', not whether it is 'noble'. To the splendour of that narrative I have borne no sparing witness. I have spoken of its 'superb vividness', I have praised its 'epic grandeur', I have dwelt on the writer's 'Homeric power of making the actors in his drama live and move before us', and have compared his tale with the 'glorious description' in the saga of Stamfordbridge. But the nearer it approaches to the epic and the saga, the less likely is that stirring tale to be rigidly confined to fact.

I will not say of Mr Archer, 'his attack must be held to have failed', for that would imperfectly express its utter and absolute collapse. The whole of my original argument as to the narrative of the battle remains not merely unshaken, but, it will be seen, untouched. Mr Archer himself has now pleaded that 'the only' point he 'took up directly' was that of the disputed passage in Wace;¹⁵⁶ and here he could only make even the semblance of a case by deliberately ignoring and suppressing Mr Freeman's own verdict (iii. 763-4), to which, from the very first, I have persistently referred. In his latest, as in his earliest article, he adheres to this deliberate suppression, and falsely represents 'Mr Freeman's interpretation' as 'a palisade or barricade' alone.¹⁵⁷

Those who may object to plain speaking should rather denounce the tactics that make such speaking necessary. When my adversary claims that his case is proved, if the disputed passage does not describe a shield-wall, he is perfectly aware that Mr Freeman distinctly asserted that it did. To suppress that fact, as Mr Archer does,¹⁵⁸ can only be described as dishonest.

Judging from the desperate tactics to which my opponent resorted, it would seem that my 'attack' on Mr Freeman's work cannot here be impugned by any straightforward means. The impotent wrath aroused by its success will lead, no doubt, to other attempts equally unscrupulous and equally futile. But truth cannot be silenced, facts cannot be obscured. I appeal, sure of my ground, to the verdict of historical scholars, awaiting, with confidence and calm, the inevitable triumph of the truth.

CONCLUSION

'History is philosophy teaching by examples.' In one sense the period of the Conquest was, as Mr Freeman asserted in his preface, 'a period of our history which is full alike of political instruction and of living personal interest'. In one sense, it is an object-lesson never more urgently needed than it is at the present hour. Only that lesson is one which Mr Freeman could never teach, because it is the bitterest commentary on the doctrines he most adored. In the hands of a patriot, in the hands of a writer who placed England before party, the tale might have burned like a beacon-fire, warning us that what happened in the past, might happen now, today. The Battle of Hastings has its moral and its moral is for us. An almost anarchical excess of liberty, the want of a strong centralized system, the absorption in party strife, the belief that politics are statesmanship, and that oratory will save a people—these are the dangers of which it warns us, and to which the majority of Englishmen are subject now as then. But Mr Freeman, like the Bourbons, never learnt, and never forgot. A democrat first, an historian afterwards, History was for him, unhappily, ever 'past politics'. If he worshipped Harold with a blind enthusiasm, it was chiefly because he was a novus homo, 'who reigned purely by the will of the people'. He insisted that the English, on the hill of battle, were beaten through lack of discipline, through lack of obedience to their king; but he could not see that the system in which he gloried, a system which made the people 'a co-ordinate authority' with their king, was the worst of all trainings for the hour of battle; he could not see that, like Poland, England fell, in large measure, from the want of a strong rule, and from excess of liberty. To him the voice of 'a sovereign people' was 'the most spirit-stirring of earthly sounds'; but it availed about as much to check the Norman Conquest as the fetish of an African savage, or the yells of Asiatic hordes. We trace in his history of Sicily the same blindness to fact. Dionysius was for him, as he was for Dante, merely—

But, in truth, the same excess of liberty that left England a prey to the Normans had left Sicily, in her day, a prey to Carthage: the same internal jealousies paralysed her strength. And yet he could not forgive Dionysius, the man who gave Sicily what she lacked, the rule of a 'strong man armed', because, in a democrat's eyes, Dionysius was a 'tyrant'. That I am strictly just in my criticism of Mr Freeman's attitude at the Conquest, is, I think, abundantly manifest, when even so ardent a democrat as Mr Grant Allen admits that

a people so helpless, so utterly anarchic, so incapable of united action, deserved to undergo a severe training from the hard task-masters of Romance civilization. The nation remained, but it remained as a conquered race, to be drilled in the stern school of the conquerors.¹⁵⁹

Such were the bitter fruits of Old-English freedom. And, in the teeth of this awful lesson, Mr Freeman could still look back with longing to 'a free and pure Teutonic England',¹⁶⁰ could still exult in the thought that a democratic age is bringing England ever nearer to her state 'before the Norman set foot upon her shores'.

But the school of which he was a champion has long seen its day. A reactionary movement, as has been pointed out by scholars in America, as in Russia¹⁶¹ has invaded the study of history, has assailed the supremacy of the Liberal school, and has begun to preach, as the teaching of the past, the dangers of unfettered freedom.

Politics are not statesmanship. Mr Freeman confused the two. There rang from his successor a truer note when, as he traversed the seas that bind the links of the Empire, he penned those words that appeal to the sons of an imperial race, sunk in the strife of parties or the politics of a parish pump, to rise to the level of their high inheritance among the nations of the earth. What was the Empire, what was India—we all remember that historic phrase—to one whose ideal, it would seem, of statesmanship, was that of an orator in Hyde Park? Godwine, the ambitious, the unscrupulous agitator, is always for him 'the great deliverer'. Whether in the Sicily of the 'tyrants', or the England of Edward the Confessor, we are presented, under the guise of history, with a glorification of demagogy.

No man ever deserved a higher or a more lasting place in national gratitude than the first man who, being neither King nor Priest, stands forth in English history as endowed with all the highest attributes of the statesman. In him, in those distant times, we can revere the great minister, the unrivalled parliamentary leader, the man who could sway councils and assemblies at his will, etc., etc.¹⁶²

We know of whom the writer was thinking, when he praised that 'irresistible tongue';¹⁶³ he had surely before him a living model, who, if not a statesman, was, no doubt, an 'unrivalled parliamentary leader'. Do we not recognize the portrait?—

The mighty voice, the speaking look and gesture of that old man eloquent, could again sway assemblies of Englishmen at his will.¹⁶⁴

The voice which had so often swayed assemblies of Englishmen, was heard once more in all the fulness of its eloquence.¹⁶⁵

But it was not an 'irresistible tongue', nor 'the harangue of a practised orator', of which England stood in need. Forts and soldiers, not tongues, are England's want now as then. But to the late Regius Professor, if there was one thing more hateful than 'castles', more hateful even than hereditary rule, it was a standing army. When the Franco-German war had made us look to our harness, he set himself at once, with superb blindness, to sneer at what he termed 'the panic', to suggest the application of democracy to the army, and to express his characteristic aversion to the thought of 'an officer and a gentleman'.¹⁶⁶ How could such a writer teach the lesson of the Norman Conquest?

'The long, long canker of peace' had done its work—'vivebatur enim tunc pene ubique in Anglia perditis moribus, et pro pacis affluentia deliciarum fervebat luxus.'¹⁶⁷ The land was ripe for the invader, and a saviour of Society was at hand. While our fathers were playing at democracy, watching the strife of rival houses, as men might now watch the contest of rival parties, the terrible Duke of the Normans was girding himself for war. De nobis fabula narratur.

¹ Mr T. A. Archer (Contemporary Review, March 1893, p. 336).

² Mr Freeman saw nothing grotesque in Orderic's description of Exeter, as 'in plano sita' (Norm. Conq., iv. 153), though its site 'sets Exeter distinctly among the hill cities' (Freeman's Exeter, p. 6).

³ That I may not be accused of passing over any defence of Mr Freeman, I give the reference to Mr Archer's letter in Academy of November 4, 1893, arguing, as against Mr Harrison, that the story of a great 'naval engagement' in 1066 may probably be traced 'to the seaside associations of the name Hastings'. Unfortunately for him, Mr Freeman himself had quoted this wild story (iii. 729) and suggested quite a different explanation, namely, that it originated, not in the Battle of Hastings, but in some real 'naval operations'.

⁴ Since this passage appeared in print my opponents themselves have written of the Battle of Hastings [sic], and Mr Archer has admitted that 'to speak of Senlac in ordinary conversation, or in ordinary writing, is a piece of pedantry' (Academy ut supra). On my own use of the word before I had examined Mr Freeman's authority, see p. 273.

⁵ Norm. Conq., iii. 444.

⁶ Ibid., p. 757.

⁷ Mr Archer writes: 'Pel is literally "stake", and originally, of course, represented the upright or horizontal stakes which go to make a palisade' (English Historical Review, ix. 6).

⁸ Ibid., p. 10. The word which Mr Freeman (and others) rendered 'ash' is rendered 'windows of farm dwellings' by Mr Archer (see below, p. 308).

⁹ Mr Archer would have us believe that 'Mr Freeman really had in his mind ... a real wall of real shields and stakes' (English Historical Review, 16), and that the English would 'strap up their shields to the stakes', would combine 'their shields and poles', and so forth (20).

¹⁰ This is Mr Oman's third and (up to now) final explanation (Academy, June 9, 1894).

¹¹ English Historical Review, ix. 232.

¹² Ibid., ix. 232-3, 237-8, 240.

¹³ The difficulty of hauling timber even a short distance over broken and hilly ground 'in an October of those days' (N.C., iii. 446) must not be forgotten.

¹⁴ The italics are Mr Freeman's own.

¹⁵ He even spoke of it as 'the main castle' (Arch. Journ., xl. 359).

¹⁶ Miss Norgate (Angevin Kings) follows him, speaking of their assailants striving 'to assault them as if besieging a fortress'. One is reminded of Mr Freeman's remark as to Hastings, that Harold turned 'the battle as far as possible into the likeness of a siege' (see above).

¹⁷ 'Men ranged so closely together in the thick array of the shield-wall' (iii. 471).

¹⁸ Cont. Rev., March 1893.

¹⁹ English Historical Review, ix. 12.

²⁰ My detailed reply to Mr Archer's attempt to confuse the 'fosse' and the palisade will be found in Ibid., ix. 213, 214.

²¹ He paraphrased 'escuz de fenestres è d'altres fuz' as 'firm barricades of ash and other timber'.

²² I supply the passage in square brackets (the italics are my own) from the earlier volume to explain Mr Freeman's reference.

²³ Quarterly Review, July 1892, p. 14.

²⁴ I am loth to introduce into the text the wearisome details of controversy, especially where they are nihil ad rem, and have no bearing on my argument. But, lest I should be charged with ignoring any defence of Mr Freeman, I will briefly explain in this note the attitude adopted by his champions.

In the Contemporary Review of March 1893, Mr T. A. Archer produced a reply to my original article (Quarterly Review, July 1892), or rather, to that part of it which dealt with the Battle of Hastings. Declaring my attack on the palisade to be my 'only definite and palpable charge against Mr Freeman's account' (p. 273) which, it will be found, is not the case—he undertook to 'show Mr Freeman to have been entirely right in the view he took of the whole question' (p. 267). To do this, he deliberately suppressed the fatal passage (iii. 763-4) I have printed above—to which, in my article, I had prominently appealed—in order to represent me as alone in seeing a description of the shield-wall in Wace's lines (p. 267). He then insisted that 'there are six distinct objections to translating this passage as if it referred to a shield-wall' (p. 270).

Instantly reminded by me (Athenæum, March 18, April 8, 1893), that Mr Freeman himself had taken it as a description of the shield-wall, and challenged to account for the fact, again charged (Quarterly Review, July 1893, p. 88), with 'ignoring a fact in the presence of which his elaborate argument collapses like a house of cards', further challenged (Academy, September 16, 1893) to reconcile Mr Freeman's words (iii. 763-4), with his representation of the historian's position, Mr Archer continued to shirk the point, till in the English Historical Review of January 1894, he grudgingly confessed that 'the discovery that a shield-wall (of some sort or other) was implied in this so-called "crucial passage", is due to Mr Freeman' (p. 3), but he and Miss Norgate endeavoured to urge that it could not be as I imagined, the shield-wall that he had always spoken of (pp. 3, 16, 62). Even this feeble evasion, now seems to be dropped since I disposed of it (Ibid., 225-7).

²⁵ Quarterly Review, July 1892, p. 15.

²⁶ See below, p. 284.

²⁷ Quarterly Review, July 1893, p. 84.

²⁸ Athenæum, March 18, 1893.

²⁹ English Historical Review, ix. 40.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 58.

³¹ Cont. Rev., 351.

³² Quarterly Review, July 1893, pp. 93-4.

³³ Ibid., ix. 27, 28.

³⁴ English Historical Review, 219-25.

³⁵ Ibid., ix. 607. The italics are Mr Archer's own. His own trusted authority, Wace, posts the English in 'un champ' (ii. 7729, 7769)!

³⁶ Norman Conquest, iii. 419, 420.

³⁷ No one, of course, would treat the Tapestry like a modern illustrated journal; but if it be fairly treated, in Mr Freeman's spirit, one's real wonder is that, under such obvious limitations, the designer should have been so successful as he has. Nowhere, perhaps, is the painstaking accuracy of the Bayeux Tapestry better seen than in its miniature representation of the fortress at Dinan. It shows us the motte, or artificial mound, surrounded by its ditch, and even the bank beyond the ditch, together with the wooden bridge springing (as we know it did in such castles) from that bank to the summit of the mound.

As to Mr Archer's attempts to show that Mr Freeman in one or two instances did not value so highly as he did what he deemed the supreme authority for the battle, I need only print Mr Freeman's words, parallel with his own comments, to show how their character is distorted.

One would hardly imagine from Mr Archer's sneers that Mr Freeman had really vindicated the Tapestry from its 'seeming inconsistency', did one not know him, as a writer, to be capable de tout.

³⁸ Cont. Rev., p. 351.

³⁹ English Historical Review, ix. 607.

⁴⁰ I wish, as I have done throughout, to make it absolutely clear that I am here concerned only with Mr Freeman's rendering of Wace. If we are to go outside that rendering and discuss Wace de novo, it is best to do so in a fresh section. This I hope to do below, when I shall discuss the question of his authority (which has not yet arisen), and shall also propound my own explanation of the now famous disputed passage.

⁴¹ In my first article (Quarterly Review, July 1892, pp. 15-16) I pointed out that the great weight attached to Mr Freeman's statements had of course 'secured universal acceptance' for the palisade, and that it figures 'now in every history'. Mr Archer, in his latest paper, refers to these remarks (English Historical Review, ix. 602) and triumphantly charges me with self-contradiction in having myself once accepted it, like every one else. He refers to an incidental allusion by me in the Dictionary of National Biography so many years ago that I was unaware of its existence. I am particularly glad to be reminded of the fact that I did allude, in early days, to the 'palisade' and to 'Senlac', for it emphasizes the very point of my case, namely, that that mischievous superstition of Mr Freeman's unfailing accuracy must be ruthlessly destroyed lest others should be taught, as I was, to accept his authority as supreme.

My opponent writes:

'Mr Round ... in direct contradiction to the Quarterly reviewer, has found for it [the palisade] an authority in William of Poitiers, and has gone far beyond Mr Freeman himself in giving us the name of the man who first broke it down.'

How has Mr Archer produced the alleged 'contradiction'? He has taken a passage from my notice of Robert de Beaumont, written years before I had made any independent investigation of the Battle of Hastings, and when I thought, like the rest of the world, that I might, here at any rate, safely follow Mr Freeman, when it was only a matter of a passing allusion to the fight. The following parallel passages will prove, beyond the shadow of doubt, that I here merely followed Mr Freeman, accepting his own authority—William of Poitiers—for the incident. Any one in my place would have done the same. But Mr Archer asserts that, on the contrary, I went 'far beyond Mr Freeman himself in giving us the name of the man who first broke it down'. Let us see if this definite statement is true:

So much for Mr Archer's assertion that I made an independent statement not found in Mr Freeman's pages. It is obviously impossible to conduct a controversy with an opponent who does not restrict himself to fact.

⁴² William the Conqueror (1888), p. 90.

⁴³ 'Had they done so, they must have been set so close that they could not have used their weapons with any freedom' (Cont. Rev., p. 346).

⁴⁴ Short History, p. 79.

⁴⁵ Norm. Conq., iii. 763, ut supra.

⁴⁶ Ibid., iii. p. 471.

⁴⁷ Ibid., i. 271; cf. W.R., ii. 411.

⁴⁸ Ibid., iii. 732.

⁴⁹ Cont. Rev., 348.

⁵⁰ Norman Britain (S.P.C.K.), p. vi.

⁵¹ Ibid., pp. 79, 80.

⁵² Dict. Nat. Biography (1890), xxx. 424.

⁵³ English Historical Review, ix. 2.

⁵⁴ Cont. Rev., p. 348.

⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 346.

⁵⁶ Quarterly Review, July 1893, p. 90.

⁵⁷ Old English History, p. 335.

⁵⁸ Wace, of course, is the only one worth mentioning of the three last, and even his 'decisive words' prove to be only a personal opinion ('ço me semble') that the axeman's shield must have hampered him (see Cont. Rev., 348, and Norm. Conq., iii. 765).

⁵⁹ Q.R., July 1893, p. 91.

⁶⁰ English Historical Review, ix. 607.

⁶¹ Oman's Art of War in the Middle Ages, 24 (see Q.R., July 1893, p. 90).

⁶² Compare (as Mr Freeman does) Æthelred's description of the English array of the Battle of the Standard: 'lateribus latera conseruntur']

⁶³ Norm. Conq., iii. 491.

⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 471.

⁶⁵ Old English History, p. 334.

⁶⁶ Norm. Conq., iii. 764; cf. English Historical Review, ix. 18.

⁶⁷ 'This is the shield-wall, the famous tactic of the English and Danes alike. We shall hear of it in all the great battles down to the end.' (Freeman's Old English History, p. 112.)

⁶⁸ Ibid., p. 155.

⁶⁹ Ibid., p. 196.

⁷⁰ Norm. Conq., iii. viii.

⁷¹ Ibid., pp. 445-6.

⁷² Ibid., p. 472.

⁷³ Ibid., p. 480.

⁷⁴ Norm. Conq., iii. pp. 488, 490.

⁷⁵ Ibid., p. 490.

⁷⁶ 'The battle was lost through the error of those light-armed troops who, in disobedience to the King's orders, broke their line to pursue' (Ibid., 505).

⁷⁷ 'The day had now turned decidedly in favour of the invaders' (Ibid., 491). I am obliged to quote these two passages, because my opponents have not shrunk from impugning (Cont. Rev., 353; English Historical Review, ix. 70) the accuracy of the words in the text (which are from Q.R., July 1892, p. 17).

⁷⁸ Q.R., July 1893, 101.

⁷⁹ Norm. Conq., iii. 472.

⁸⁰ To have placed some of them as an advanced post on the 'small detached hill' in front would have been to leave them en l'air, exposed to certain destruction from an attack which they could not check. For Mr Freeman held that, even if occupied by an outpost, it was only by the 'light-armed'. (See Q.R., July 1893, pp. 99, 100.)

⁸¹ On what ground are the Bretons so described? Guy, quoted by Mr Freeman (iii. 459) writes of them here: 'Gensque Britannorum quorum decus exstat in armis, Tellus ni fugiat est fuga nulla quibus'.

⁸² I have replied in English Historical Review (ix. 255) to Miss Norgate's characteristic quibble (Ibid., p. 75) that these quotations apply to the Scottish army alone—for the principle applies alike to 'armati' and 'armatos', to 'milites' and to 'militibus'.

⁸³ Down to this point the present section is all reprinted from my original article (Q.R., July 1892), as not calling for any alteration or correction.

⁸⁴ 'The general mass of the less well-armed troops of the shire in the rear.' (England under the Angevin Kings, i. 290.)

⁸⁵ English Historical Review, ix. 611.

⁸⁶ When the Scotch, he writes, 'amentatis missilibus et lanceis longissimis super aciem equitum nostrorum loricatam percutiunt, quasi muro ferreo offendentes, impenetrabiles [compare the 'impenetrabiles' ranks of the English at Hastings, supra, p. 276] invenerunt.... Equitantes enim nulla ratione diu persistere potuerunt contra milites loricatos pede persistentes et immobiliter coacervatos' (pp. 264-5). Miss Norgate follows him, writing: 'The wild Celts of Galloway dashed headlong upon the English front, only to find their spears and javelins glance off from the helmets and shields of the knights as from an iron wall.'

⁸⁷ 'Tota namque gens Normannorum et Anglorum in una acie circum Standard conglobata, persistebant immobiles' (Hen. Hunt). 'Australes, quoniam pauci erant, in unum cuneum sapientissime glomerantur' (Æth. Riv.).

⁸⁸ It is no less interesting than curious that the Bayeux Tapestry enables us to see how the archers were combined with the mailed knights at the Battle of the Standard. It shows us (on its principle of giving a type) an English archer of whom Mr Freeman has well observed: 'He is a small man without armour crouching under the shield of a tall Housecarl, like Teukros under that of Aias' (iii. 472). So Æthelred writes that the mailed warriors 'sagittarios ita sibi inseruerunt ut, militaribus armis protecti, tanto acrius quanto securius vel in hostes irruerent, vel exciperent irruentes'.

⁸⁹ 'Proceres qui maturioris ætatis fuerunt ... circa signum regium constituuntur, quibusdam altius ceteris in ipsa machina collatis' (Æth. Riv.). 'Circum Standard in pectore belli condensantur' (Ric. Hex.).

⁹⁰ 'Reliqua autem multitudo undique conglomerata eos circumvallabat' (Ibid.).

⁹¹ Norm. Conq., i. 383.

⁹² Ibid., iii. 472.

⁹³ Old English History, p. 331.

⁹⁴ English Historical Review, ix. 75.

⁹⁵ Old English History, p. 333.

⁹⁶ Miss Norgate, unable to deny the glaring 'self-contradiction' involved in Mr Freeman's words, dismisses it as a 'matter of secondary importance' (English Historical Review, ix. 74).

⁹⁷ English Historical Review, ix. 74.

⁹⁸ Q.R., July 1892, p. 19.

⁹⁹ Q.R., July 1893, pp. 102-3; cf. Q.R., July 1892, p. 18; English Historical Review, ix. 254.

¹⁰⁰ It might, for all we know, have formed a crescent or semi-circle, its wings resting strongly on the rear-slopes of the hill; or even a 'wedge', as, indeed, Mr Freeman twice described it (i. 271, iii. 471).

¹⁰¹ English Historical Review, ix. 74.

¹⁰² Cont. Rev., p. 353.

¹⁰³ Q.R., July 1892, p. 19.

¹⁰⁴ Since this passage appeared (as it stands) in my original article (Q.R., July 1892, p. 19), I have noted a curious confirmation in Æthelred's words where he speaks of the archers at the Battle of the Standard as 'militaribus armis protecti [ut] tanto acrius quanto securius vel in hostes irruerent, vel exciperent irruentes'. For, as I wrote (p. 20), 'it would naturally be they who, like cavalry in modern times, would harass and follow up a retreating foe'.