PART II

HISTORICAL STUDIES

NORMANS UNDER EDWARD THE CONFESSOR

It is probable that in spite of all the efforts of that school which found in Mr Freeman its ablest and most ardent leader, the 'fatal habit', as he termed it at the outset of his _magnum opus_ 'of beginning the study of English history with the Norman Conquest itself', will continue, in practice, to prevail among those who have a choice in the matter. It was characteristic of the late Professor to assign the tendency he deplored to 'a confused and unhappy nomenclature', for to him names, as I have elsewhere shown,[1] were always of more importance than they are to the world at large. More to the point is the explanation given by Mr Grant Allen, who attributes to the unfamiliar look of Anglo-Saxon appellatives the lack of interest shown in those who bore them. And yet there must be, surely, a deeper cause than this, an instinctive feeling that in England our consecutive political history does, in a sense, begin with the Norman Conquest. On the one hand it gave us, suddenly, a strong, purposeful monarchy; on the other it brought us men ready to record history, and to give us--treason though it be to say so--something better than the arid entries in our jejune native chronicle. We thus exchange aimless struggles, told in an uninviting fashion, for a great issue and a definite policy, on which we have at our disposal materials deserving of study. From the moment of the Conqueror's landing we trace a continuous history, and one that we can really work at in the light of chronicles and records. I begin these studies, therefore, with the Conquest, or rather with the coming of the Normans. For, as Mr Freeman rightly insisted, it is with the reign of Edward the Confessor that 'the Norman Conquest really begins':[2] it was 'his accession' that marked, in its results, 'the first stage of the Conquest itself'.[3]

As he, elsewhere, justly observed of Edward:

Normandy was ever the land of his affection.... His heart was French. His delight was to surround himself with companions who came from the beloved land, and who spoke the beloved tongue, to enrich them with English estates, to invest them with the highest offices of the English kingdom.... His real affections were lavished on the Norman priests and gentlemen who flocked to his court as to the land of promise. These strangers were placed in important offices about the royal person, and before long they were set to rule as Earls and Bishops over the already half conquered soil of England.... These were again only the first instalment of the larger gang who were to win for themselves a more lasting settlement four and twenty years later. In all this the seeds of the Conquest were sowing, or rather ... it is now that the Conquest actually begins. The reign of Edward is a period of struggle between natives and foreigners for dominion in England.[4]

One has, it is true, always to remember that if Edward, on his mother's side, was a Norman, so was Harold, as his name reminds us, on his mother's side, a Dane. Nor is it without significance that, on the exile of his house (1051), he fled to the Scandinavian settlers on the Irish coast, and found, no doubt, among them those who shared his almost piratical return in 1052.[5] The late Professor's bias against all that was 'French', together with his love for the 'kindred' lands of Germany and Scandinavia, led him, perhaps, to obscure the fact that England was a prey which the Dane was as eager to grasp as the Norman. But this in no way impugns the truth of his view that 'the Norman tendencies of Edward' paved the way for the coming of William. Nor can we hesitate to begin the study of the Norman Conquest with the coming of those, its true forerunners--

'Ke Ewart i aveit menéz Et granz chastels è fieux dunez,'

and with whom may be said to have begun the story of Feudal England.

Professor Burrows is entitled to the credit of setting forth the theory, in his little book upon the Cinque Ports,[6] that Edward the Confessor 'had evidently intended to make the little group of Sussex towns, the "New Burgh" [? afterwards Hastings], Winchelsea, and Rye, a strong link of communication between England and Normandy', by placing them under the control of Fécamp Abbey. He holds, indeed, that Godwine and Harold had contrived to thwart this intention in the case of the latter; but this, as I shall show in my paper on the Cinque Ports, arises from a misapprehension. This theory I propose to develop by adding the case of Steyning, Edward's grant of which to Fécamp is well known, and has been discussed by Mr Freeman. It might not, possibly, occur to any one that Steyning, like Arundel, was at that time a port. But in a very curious record of 1103, narrating the agreement made between the Abbot and De Braose, the Lord of Bramber, it is mentioned that ships, in the days of the Confessor, used to come up to the 'portus S. Cuthmanni' [the patron saint of Steyning], but had been lately impeded by a bridge that had been erected at Bramber. Here then was another Sussex port placed in Norman hands. Yet this does not exhaust the list. Mr Freeman seems to have strangely overlooked the fact that the great benefice of Bosham, valued under the Confessor at £300 a year, had been conferred by Edward on his Norman chaplain, Osbern, afterwards (1073) Bishop of Exeter, whose brother, in the words of the Regius Professor, was the 'Duke's earliest and dearest friend', and who, of course, was of kin both to William and to Edward. Now this Bosham, with Thorney Island, commanded a third Sussex harbour, Chichester haven.[7]

But at London itself also we find the Normans favoured. The very interesting charter of Henry II, granted by him, as Duke of the Normans, in 1150 or 1151, to the citizens of Rouen, confirms them in possession of their port at Dowgate, as they had held it from the days of Edward the Confessor.[8] Here then we have evidence--which seems to have eluded the research of our historians, both general and local--that, even before the Conquest, the citizens of Rouen had a haven of their own at the mouth of the Walbrook, for which they were probably indebted to the Norman proclivities of the Confessor.

The building of 'Richard's Castle' plays a most important part in Mr Freeman's narrative of the doings of the Normans under Edward the Confessor. We hear of its building, according to him, in September 1051:

Just at this moment another instance of the insolence and violence of the foreigners in another part of the kingdom served to stir up men's minds to the highest pitch. Among the Frenchmen who had flocked to the land of promise was one named Richard the son of Scrob, who had received a grant of lands in Herefordshire. He and his son Osbern had there built a castle on a spot which, by a singularly lasting tradition, preserves to this day the memory of himself and his building. The fortress itself has vanished, but its site is still to be marked, and the name of Richard's castle, still borne by the parish in which it stood, is an abiding witness of the deep impression which its erection made on the minds of the men of those times.... Here then was another wrong, a wrong perhaps hardly second to the wrong which had been done at Dover. Alike in Kent and Herefordshire, men had felt the sort of treatment which they were to expect if the King's foreign favourites were to be any longer tolerated.[9]

Accordingly, Godwine, Mr Freeman wrote, demanded (September 8, 1051) 'the surrender of Eustace and his men and of the Frenchmen of Richard's Castle'. In a footnote to this statement, he explained that '"the castle" [of the Chronicle] undoubtedly means Richard's Castle, as it must mean in the entry of the next year in the same Chronicle'.[10] Of the entry in question (1052) he wrote: '"The castle" is doubtless Richard's Castle.... Here again the expressions witness to the deep feeling awakened by the building of this castle.'[11] So, too, in a special appendix we read:

A speaking witness to the impression which had been made on men's minds by the building of this particular Richard's Castle, probably the first of its class in England, is given by its being spoken of distinctively as 'the castle' even by the Worcester chronicler (1052; see p. 309), who had not spoken of its building in his earlier narrative.[12]

We have, thus far, a consistent narrative. There was in Herefordshire one castle, built by Richard and named after him. It had been the cause of oppression and ravage, and its surrender, as such, had been demanded by Godwine in 1051. A year later (September 1052) Godwine triumphs; 'it was needful to punish the authors of all the evils that had happened' (p. 333); and 'all the Frenchmen' who had caused them were at last outlawed. But now comes the difficulty, as Mr Freeman pointed out:

The sentence did not extend to all the men of Norman birth or of French speech who were settled in the country. It was meant to strike none but actual offenders. By an exception capable of indefinite and dangerous extension, those were excepted 'whom the King liked, and who were true to him and all his folk' (ii. 334).... We have a list of those who were thus excepted, which contains some names which we are surprised to find there. The exception was to apply to those only who had been true to the king and his people. Yet among the Normans who remained we find Richard, the son of Scrob, and among those who returned we find his son Osbern. These two men were among the chief authors of all evil (ii. 344).

That is to say, the Lord of Richard's castle, on whose surrender and punishment Godwine had specially insisted, was specially exempted, as guiltless, when Godwine returned to power.[13]

In me, at least, this discrepancy aroused grave suspicion, and I turned to see what foundation there was for identifying the offending garrison of 1051 with that of Richard's castle. I at once discovered there was none whatever.

We have here, in short, one of those cases, characteristic, as I think, of the late Professor's work, in which he first formed an idea, and then, under its spell, fitted the facts to it without question. The view, for instance, of the unique position of Richard's castle as '_the_ castle' at the time is at once rendered untenable by the fact that, on the return of Godwine, Normans fled 'some west to Pentecostes castle, some north to Robert's castle', in the words of the Chronicle.[14] Moreover, the former belonged to Osbern, 'whose surname was Pentecost' (_cognomento Pentecost_), who, as we learn from Florence, was forced to surrender it and leave the country, as was also the fate of another castellan, his comrade Hugh.[15]

It is important to observe the clear distinction between Richard, son of Scrob, of Richard's castle, and Osbern Pentecost, of Pentecost's castle, of whom the former was allowed to remain, while the latter was exiled. But it is another peculiarity of Mr Freeman's work that he was apt to confuse different individuals bearing the same name.[16] In this instance, he boldly assumed that 'Pentecost, as we gather from Florence [?] ... is the same as Osbern, the son of Richard of Richard's castle, of whom we have already heard so much' (ii. 329), although the latter, a well-known man, is always distinguished as a son of his father, and never as Pentecost. And he further assumes that 'Pentecost's castle' was identical with Richard's castle, 'the first cause of so much evil' (_ibid._). These identifications led him into further difficulty, because Osbern, the son of Richard, is found afterwards holding 'both lands and offices in Herefordshire' (ii. 345). To account for this, he further assumes as 'certain that Osbern afterwards returned' (_ibid._). This assumption led him on to suggest that others also returned from exile, and that 'their restoration was owing to special entreaties of the King after the death of Godwine' (ii. 346). The whole of this history is sheer assumption, based on confusion alone.

Now let us clear our minds of this confusion, and keep the two castellans and their respective castles apart. On the one hand, we have Richard, the son of Scrob, who was left undisturbed at his castle, and was succeeded there by his son Osbern;[17] on the other hand, we have Osbern, 'whose surname was Pentecost', and who had to surrender his castle, to which the guilty Normans had fled, and to go into exile. Can we identify that castle? I would venture to suggest that it was no other than that of Ewyas Harold in the south-west corner of Herefordshire, of which Domesday tells us that Earl William had _re_-fortified it ('hoc castellum refirmaverat'), implying that it had existed, and been dismantled before the Conquest. It heads, in the great survey, the possessions of Alfred of Marlborough, and although its holder T.R.E. is not mentioned, we read of the two Manors which follow it: 'Hæc duo maneria tenuit Osbernus avunculus Alveredi T.R.E. quando Goduinus et Heraldus erant exulati' (i. 186). Mr Freeman, of course, assumed that this Osbern was identical with Osbern, the son of Richard, the Domesday tenant-in-chief. This assumption is not only baseless, but also most improbable: for Alfred was old enough to be father-in-law to Thurstan (Mortimer), a Domesday tenant, and would scarcely therefore be young enough to be nephew to another Domesday tenant-in-chief. I would suggest that his uncle was that Osbern 'Pentecost' who had to surrender his castle and flee on the return of Godwine and Harold. This would exactly fit in with the Domesday statement, as also with the dismantling of Ewyas Castle.[18]

Ewyas Harold fits in also with the chronicle's mention of the Normans fleeing 'west' to Pentecost's castle.

We have now seen that Richard's castle did not stand alone, and that there is nothing to identify it with that Herefordshire castle ('ænne castel') of which the garrison had committed outrages in 1051, and which is far more likely, so far as our evidence goes, to have been 'Pentecost's Castle'. Mr Freeman rightly called attention to 'the firm root which the Normans had taken in Herefordshire before 1051, which looks very much as if they had been specially favoured in these parts' (ii. 562); and he argued from this that Earl Ralf had probably ruled the shire between 1046 and 1050. The Earl would naturally have introduced the foreign system of castles, as he did the foreign fashion of fighting on horseback. Indeed, speaking of the capture of Hereford in 1055, Mr Freeman wrote:

It is an obvious conjecture that the fortress destroyed by Gruffyd was a Norman castle raised by Ralph. A chief who was so anxious to make his people conform to Norman ways of fighting would hardly lag behind his neighbour at Richard's castle. He would be among the first at once to provide himself with a dwelling-place and his capital with a defence according to the latest continental patterns (ii. 391).

But if this is so, he would have built it while he ruled the shire (as Mr Freeman believed he probably did) from 1046 to 1050, and would, in any case, have done so on taking up its government in 1051.[19] Consequently he would have had a castle and garrison at Hereford in 1052. But Mr Freeman, describing Gruffyd's raid in that year into Herefordshire, and finding a castle mentioned, assumed that it could only be Richard's castle,[20] although, a few lines before, he had admitted the existence of other castles in the shire.[21] Even in 1067 he would have liked to hold that Richard's castle was the only one in Herefordshire, but the words of the chronicle were too clear for him.[22]

I have endeavoured to make clear my meaning, namely, that Mr Freeman's view that 'Richard's castle' stood alone as '_the_ castle', and that Richard and his garrison were the special offenders under Edward the Confessor, is not only destitute of all foundations, but at variance with the facts of the case. When we read of Herefordshire (1067) that

The Norman colony, planted in that region by Eadward and so strangely tolerated by Harold, was still doing its work. Osbern had been sheriff under Edward, even when Harold was Earl of the shire, and his father Richard, the old offender, still lived (iv. 64)--

we must remember that the conduct of Harold was only strange if Richard, as Mr Freeman maintained, was 'the old offender'. If, as Florence distinctly tells us, he was, on the contrary, void of offence, Harold's conduct was in no way strange.[23]

Let us now turn from the Herefordshire colony, planted, I think, not so much by King Edward as by his Earl Ralph, just as Earl William (Fitz Osbern) planted a fresh one after the Conquest.

Among the Normans allowed to remain, on the triumph of Godwine's party in 1052, Florence mentions 'Ælfredum regis stratorem'. On him Mr Freeman thus comments:

Several Ælfreds occur in Domesday as great landowners, Ælfred of Marlborough (Osbern's nephew) and Ælfred of Spain, but it is not easy to identify their possessions with any holder of the name in Edward's time. The names Ælfred and Edward and the female name Eadgyth seem to have been the only English names adopted by the Normans. The two former would naturally be given to godsons or dependants of the two Althelings while in Normandy [_i.e._ after 1013].[24]

An appendix, in the first volume, devoted to Ælfred the giant--who appears in Normandy, _circ._ 1030--claims that Ælfred is a name so purely English that the presumption in favour of the English birth of any one bearing it 'in this generation is extremely strong',[25] and that it was only adopted by 'a later generation of Normans'. Mr Freeman seems to have been unaware that in Britanny the name of Alfred enjoyed peculiar favour. I find it there as early as the ninth century,[26] while I have noted in a single cartulary seventeen examples between 1000 and 1150. Among these are 'Alfridus frater Jutheli' (_ante_ 1008) and Juthel, son of Alfred (1037). Now, at the Conquest, 'Judhael, who from his chief seat took the name of Judhael of Totnes, became the owner', in Mr Freeman's words, 'of a vast estate in Devonshire, and extended his possessions into the proper Cornwall also'. But we know from charters that this Judhael was the son of an Alfred, and was succeeded by another Alfred, who joined Baldwin of Redvers at Exeter in 1136.[27] In the same county, as Mr Freeman reminds us, we have another Breton tenant-in-chief, 'Alvredus Brito'. In all this I am working up to the suggestion that the well-known Alfred of Lincoln was not, as Mr Freeman holds, an Englishman,[28] but a Breton. We have not only the overwhelming presumption against any considerable tenant-in-chief being of English origin, but the fact that his lands were new grants. When we add to this fact that his heir (whether son or brother) bore the distinctively Breton name of Alan,[29] we may safely conclude that Alfred was not only a foreigner but a Breton. But the strange thing is that we do not stop there; we have a Jool (or Johol) of Lincoln, who died in 1051[30] after bestowing on Ramsey Abbey its Lincolnshire fief.[31] Thus we have an Alfred and a Juhel 'of Lincoln', as we have an Alfred and a Juhel 'of Totnes'; and in Juhel of Lincoln we must have a Breton settled in England under the Confessor.

The name of 'Lincoln' leads me to another interesting discovery. 'Both Alfred of Lincoln and the sheriff Thorold,' Mr Freeman wrote, 'were doubtless Englishmen.'[32] And speaking of Abbot Turold's accession in 1070, he observed that Turold was 'a form of the Danish Thorold, a name still [1070] familiar in that part of England, one which had been borne by an English sheriff'.[33]

Now this Thorold (_Turoldus_) has been the subject of much speculation by Mr Stapleton, Mr Freeman,[34] etc., in connection with William Malet and the mysterious Countess Lucy, but the facts about him are of the scantiest, nor, I believe, has any one succeeded in finding him actually mentioned in the Conqueror's reign, though he is referred to in Domesday. This, however, I have now done, lighting upon him in a passage of considerable interest _per se_. In the 'De miraculis sancti Eadmundi' of Herman we read that when Herfast, Bishop of Thetford, visited Baldwin, Abbot of St Edmund's, to be cured of an injury to his eye, the Abbot induced him to renounce his claim to jurisdiction over the Abbey:

In sacri monasterii vestiario, præsentibus ejusdem loci majoris ætatis fratribus, sed etiam accitis illuc ab abbate quibusdam regis primoribus, qui dictante justitia in eadem villa regia tenebant placita. Quorum nomina, quamvis auditoribus tædio, tamen sunt veræ rationis testimonio; videlicet Hugo de Mundford, et Rogerius cognomento Bigot, Richardus Gisleberti comitis filius, ac cum eis _Lincoliensis Turoldus_ et Hispaniensis Alveredus, cum aliis compluribus.[35]

The date of this incident can be fixed with certainty as 1076-79; and it is of great interest for its mention both of the eyre itself and of those 'barons' who took part in it; there can be no question that 'Turoldus' was the mysterious Thorold, sheriff of Lincolnshire, taking his name from Lincoln.[36] He was, therefore, not 'an English sheriff' of days before the Conquest, but a Norman--as were his fellows--who died before Domesday.[37]

The name of William Malet, connected with that of Thorold, reminds me of a suggestion I once made,[38] that he held Aulkborough in Lincolnshire, T.R.E., 'and was, to that extent, as M. le Prêvost held, "established in England previously to the Conquest"'.

Stapleton, whose name in such matters rightly carries great weight, maintained that because the Manor was held in 1086 by Ivo Tailbois, and is stated in Domesday 'to have previously belonged to William Malet', it must have been alienated by William by a gift in frank marriage with a daughter, who must, he held, have married Ivo. But I pointed out, firstly, that 'it is not the practice of Domesday to enter Manors held _in maritagio_ thus', and gave an instance (i. 197) 'where we find Picot holding lands from Robert Gernon, which lands are entered in the Gernon fief with the note: "Has terras tenet Picot Vicecomes de Roberto Gernon in maritagio feminæ suæ."' I can now, by the kindness of Dr Liebermann, add the instance of the Mandeville fief in Surrey, where we read of 'Aultone': 'De his hidis tenet Wesman vi. hidas de Goisfrido filio comitis Eustachii; hanc terram dedit ei Goisfridus de Mannevil cum filia sua' (i. 36).[39] In addition to this argument I urged that 'in default of any statement to the contrary, we must always infer that the two holders named in the survey are (_A_) the holder T.R.E., (_B_) the holder in 1086'. This would make William Malet the holder T.R.E.

Another 'Norman' on whom I would touch is 'Robert fitz Wimarc', so often mentioned by Mr Freeman. I claim him too as a Breton, on his mother's side at least, if Wimarc, as seems to be the case, was his mother, for that is a distinctively Breton name. Mr Freeman queried the Biographer's description of him as 'regis consanguineus', when at Edward's death-bed;[40] but he is clearly the 'Robertus regis consanguineus' of the Waltham charter.[41] He was also of kin to William.[42]

The last on my list is Regenbald 'the Norman chancellor of Edward', as Mr Freeman termed him throughout. He must have had, I presume, some authority for doing so: but I cannot discover that authority; and, in its absence, the name, from its form, does not suggest a Norman origin.[43] Of Regenbald, however, I shall have to speak in another paper.

[Footnote 1: _Quarterly Review_, June 1892, pp. 9, 10.]

[Footnote 2: _Norm. Conq._, i. 525, 526.]

[Footnote 3: _Ibid._]

[Footnote 4: _Norm. Conq._, ii, 29, 30.]

[Footnote 5: Mr Freeman admits that his crews 'probably consisted mainly of adventurers from the Danish Saxons of Ireland, ready for any enterprise which promised excitement and plunder' (_N.C._, ii. 313).]

[Footnote 6: _Historic Towns: Cinque Ports_, pp. 26-9.]

[Footnote 7: See for Osbern, Mr A. S. Ellis's _Domesday Tenants in Gloucestershire_, p. 18. May not Peter, William's chaplain, Bishop of Lichfield, 1075, have similarly been the Peter who was a chaplain of Edward?]

[Footnote 8: Chèruel's _Histoire de Rouen pendant l'époque communale_, i. 245.]

[Footnote 9: _Norm. Conq._, ii. 136-8.]

[Footnote 10: _Ibid._, p. 140.]

[Footnote 11: _Ibid._, p. 309.]

[Footnote 12: _Ibid._, p. 607.]

[Footnote 13: 'Norman Richard still held his castle in Herefordshire' (Hunt's _Norman Britain_, p. 69).]

[Footnote 14: Mr Clark refers to this passage, adding: 'So that these places, probably like Richard's castle, were in Norman hands' (_M.M.A._, i. 37).]

[Footnote 15: 'Osbernus vero, cognomento Pentecost, et socius ejus Hugo sua reddiderunt castella.']

[Footnote 16: I have noted several cases in point, that of Walter Giffard being the most striking. But we also read in _William Rufus_ (ii. 551) that 'Henry, son of Swegen, who comes so often under Henry the Second, is the unlucky descendant of Robert, son of Wymarc', that is to say, Henry 'of Essex', who was a son of Robert, not of Swegen, and who belonged to a wholly different family and district.]

[Footnote 17: 'Worse than all, the original sinners of the Herefordshire border, Richard and his son Osbern, were still lords of English soil, and holders of English offices' (iv. 53).]

[Footnote 18: Named, as Mr Freeman pointed out, after Harold, son of Earl Ralph, not after Harold, son of Godwine.]

[Footnote 19: 'That Ralph succeeded Swegen on his final banishment in 1051, I have no doubt at all' (ii. 562).]

[Footnote 20: '"The castle" is doubtless Richard's castle.... Here again the expressions witness to the deep feeling awakened by the building of this castle' (ii. 309).]

[Footnote 21: 'The Norman lords whom Eadward had settled in Herefordshire proved but poor defenders of their adopted country. The last continental improvements in the art of fortification proved vain to secure the land' (_ibid._).]

[Footnote 22: Florence (1067) speaks of the 'Herefordenses castellani et Richardus filius Scrob' as the opponents of Eadric. I could almost have fancied that the words 'Herefordenses castellani' referred to 'the castle' in Herefordshire (see vol. ii. p. 139); but the words of the Worcester chronicler 'þa castelmenn on Hereforda' seem to fix the meaning to the city itself' (iv. 64).]

[Footnote 23: I have no hesitation in offering these criticisms, because Mr Freeman's views have been embraced throughout by Mr Hunt, who has followed closely in his footsteps. For instance:

'A private fortress ... would 'It was the first fortress which seem even stranger to us now was raised in England for the than it seemed to our indulgence of private insolence forefathers when Richard the and greed, and not for the son of Scrob raised the first protection of Englishmen; it was castle on English ground' to be the first of many, and the (_Norm. Conq._, v. 640). evil deeds which Richard's men wrought were a foretaste of the evil times when fortresses such as his were common in the land' (_Norman Britain_, p. 64).

Mr Hunt, therefore, survives to defend the position.]

[Footnote 24: Vol. ii., p. 345.]

[Footnote 25: Vol. i., p. 747.]

[Footnote 26: About 849; Alfret Machtiern, 868; Alfritus tyrannus, 871; Alfrit presbyter, 872; filius Alurit, 879.]

[Footnote 27: Gesta Stephani.]

[Footnote 28: iii. (2nd ed.) 780; iv. 214.]

[Footnote 29: See the Lindsey Survey.]

[Footnote 30: _Ramsey Cartulary_, iii. 167.]

[Footnote 31: _Ramsey Cartulary_, i. 208, ii. 74. _Domesday_, i. 346_b_.]

[Footnote 32: iii. (2nd ed.) 780.]

[Footnote 33: iv. (1st ed.) 457.]

[Footnote 34: _Ibid._, 778-80. Mr Freeman spoke of him as 'a kind of centre' for the inquiry, and stated that in Domesday 346_b_ we have 'Turoldus vicecomes' as a benefactor of Spalding priory. This is an error, for the words there are 'dedit S. Gutlaco' (_i.e._ Crowland). He also urged that 'we must not forget the Crowland tradition' about him 'preserved by the false Ingulf'. But the fact is that 'Ingulf' made him into _two_ (1) 'Thuroldus Vicecomes Lincoln', whose benefaction to Crowland (D.B., i. 346_b_) was confirmed in 806 (!) and subsequently (pp. 6, 9, 15, 19), (2) 'quidam vicecomes Lincolniæ, dictus Thoroldus ... de genere et cognatione illius vicedomini Thoroldi qui quondam', etc. (p. 65). It is the one living in '1051', to whom the Spalding foundation was assigned.]

[Footnote 35: _Memorials of St Edmund's Abbey_, i. 63-4. Herman wrote from personal knowledge.]

[Footnote 36: There are plenty of instances of this practice, as at Exeter, Salisbury, Gloucester, Leicester, etc.]

[Footnote 37: It may be well here to allude to a still more remarkable commission, some twenty years later, namely in 1096, when William Rufus sent 'in quadragesima optimates suos in Devenesiram et in Cornubiam et Exoniam, Walcalinum, videlicet, Wyntonensem episcopum, Randulphum regalem capellanum, Willelmum Capram, Hardinum Belnothi filium (_i.e._ Elnoth or Eadnoth; _see_ Greenfield's _De Meriet pedigree_, p. 6) ad investiganda regalia placita. Quibus in placitis calumpniati sunt cuidam [_sic_] mansioni abbacie Taviensis,' etc. (Tavistock cartulary in _Mon. Ang._, ii. 497). This eyre cannot be generally known, for Mr T. A. Archer, in his elaborate biography of Ranulf Flambard, does not mention it. The association of Bishop Walkelin with Ranulf is specially interesting because they are stated to have been left by the king next year (1097) as joint regents of the realm. The name, I may add, of 'Willelmus filius Baldwini' among those to whom the consequent charter is addressed (_Mon. Ang._, ii. 497), is of considerable importance, because it is clearly that of the sheriff of Devon, and is proof therefore that Baldwin the sheriff (Baldwin, son of Count Gilbert) had left a son William, who had succeeded to his shrievalty by 1096, and who was in turn succeeded by his brother, Richard fitz Baldwin, sheriff under Henry I.]

[Footnote 38: _Genealogist_, viii. 4.]

[Footnote 39: Dr Liebermann asks whether Geoffrey's daughter was not thus 'the first wife, else unknown, of the future King of Jerusalem'.]

[Footnote 40: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 576.]

[Footnote 41: _Ibid._, ii. 673.]

[Footnote 42: _Ibid._, iii. 416.]

[Footnote 43: Mr A. S. Ellis has suggested that 'Elward filius Reinbaldi' (D.B., i. 170_b_) King's thegn in Glo'stershire 'was evidently a son' of the chancellor. This suggestion is highly probable, and in any case, the thegn bearing this English name, it may fairly be presumed that his father Reinbald was not of Norman birth.]

MR FREEMAN AND THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS

[Greek: Hotan ho ischyros kathôplismenos phylassê tên heautou aulên, en eirênê estin ta hyparchonta autou. epan de ischyroteros autou epelthôn nikêsê auton, tên panoplian autou airei eph' hê epepoithei.]

It might well be thought the height of rashness to attempt criticism, even in detail, of Mr Freeman's narrative of the Battle of Hastings. For its story, as his champion has well observed, is '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'.[1] And indeed, it may fairly be described as Mr Freeman's greatest achievement, the point where he is strongest of all. He himself described the scene as the 'battle which is the centre of my whole history', and reminded us that

on its historic importance I need not dwell; it is the very subject of my history.... Looking also at the fight simply as a battle, it is one of the most memorable in all military history.

That is the first point. The second is that in his battle pieces our author was always at his best. Essentially a concrete historian, objective as Macaulay in his treatment, he loved incident and action; loved them, indeed, so well, that he could scarcely bring himself to omit the smallest details of a skirmish:

E ripenso le mobili Tende, e i percossi valli, E 'l campo dei manipoli, E l'onda dei cavalli.

Precentor Venables has well described

that wonderful discourse, one of his greatest triumphs--in which, with flashing eye and thrilling voice, he made the great fight of Senlac--as he loved to call it, discarding the later name--which changed the fortunes of England and made her what she is, live and move before his hearers.

My third point is that his knowledge of the subject was unrivalled. He had visited the battlefield, he tells us, no less than five times, accompanied by the best experts, civil and military, he could find; he had studied every authority, and read all that had been written, till he was absolutely master of every source of information. He had further executed for him, by officers of the Royal Engineers, an elaborate plan of the battle based on his unwearied studies. Never was historian more splendidly equipped.

Thus was prepared that 'very lucid and quite original account of the battle', as Mr G. T. Clark describes it, which we are about to examine; that 'detailed account of the battle' that Mr Hunt, in his _Norman Britain_, describes as written 'with a rare combination of critical exactness and epic grandeur'.

THE NAME OF 'SENLAC'

Before we approach the great battle, it is necessary to speak plainly of the name which Mr Freeman gave it, the excruciating name of 'Senlac'. It is necessary, because we have here a perfect type of those changes in nomenclature on which Mr Freeman insisted, and which always remind one of Macaulay's words:

Mr Mitford piques himself on spelling better than any of his neighbours; and this not only in ancient names, which he mangles in defiance both of custom and of reason.... In such cases established usage is considered as law by all writers except Mr Mitford ... but he proceeds on no principle but that of being unlike the rest of the world. Every child has heard of Linnæus; therefore Mr Mitford calls him Linné. Rousseau is known all over Europe as Jean Jacques; therefore Mr Mitford bestows on him the strange appellation of John James.

None of Mr Freeman's peculiar 'notes' is more familiar than this tendency, and none has given rise to bitterer controversy or more popular amusement. 'Pedantry' was the charge brought against him, and to this charge he was as keenly sensitive as was Browning to that of 'obscurity'. Of both writers it may fairly be said that they evaded rather than met the charge brought against them. The Regius Professor invariably maintained that accuracy, not 'pedantry', was his true offence. Writing, in the _Fortnightly Review_, on 'The Study of History', he set forth his standing defence in these words:

I would say, as the first precept, Dare to be accurate. You will be called a pedant for doing so, but dare to be accurate all the same.

He who shall venture to distinguish between two English boroughs, between two Hadriatic islands when the authorized caterer for the public information thinks good to confound them, must be content to bear the terrible name of pedant, even if no worse fate still is in store for him.

Was, then, our author a mere pedant, or was this the name that ignorance bestowed on knowledge? For an answer to this question, 'Senlac' is a test-case. 'Every child', in Macaulay's words, had heard of the Battle of Hastings; it was known by that name 'all over Europe' from time immemorial. Unless, therefore, that name was wrong, it was wanton and mischievous to change it; and, even if changed, it was indefensible to substitute the name of Senlac, unless there is proof that the battle was so styled when it was fought.

As to the first of these points, the old name was in no sense wrong. Precisely as the battle of Poitiers was fought some miles from Poitiers, so was it with that of Hastings. Yet we all speak of the Battle of Poitiers, although we might substitute the name of Maupertuis more legitimately than that of Senlac. The only plea that Mr Freeman could advance was that people were led by the old name to imagine that the battle was fought at Hastings itself! Of those who argue in this spirit, it was finely said by the late Mr Kerslake that

instead of lifting ignorance to competence by teaching what ought to be known, they cut down what ought to be known to the capacity of those who are deficient of that knowledge. Instead of making them understand the meaning of the ancient and established word 'Anglo-Saxon', they disturb the whole world of learning with an almost violent attempt to turn out of use the established word, which has been thoroughly understood for ages.

The simple answer to Mr Freeman's contention is, that it is needless to make the change in histories, because those who read them learn that the fight was at Battle; while as to those who do not read histories, it is obvious that such a name as 'Senlac' will in no way lighten their darkness.

The change, therefore, was uncalled for. But it was not merely uncalled for; it was also absolutely wrong. 'To the battle itself,' Mr Freeman wrote, 'I restore its true ancient name of Senlac.' In so doing the writer acted in the spirit of those who 'restore' our churches and who gave that word so evil a sound in the ears of all archæologists, Mr Freeman himself included. I am reminded of the protest of the Society of Antiquaries on hearing 'with much regret that a fifteenth-century pinnacle' at Rochester Cathedral 'is in danger of destruction in order that a modern pinnacle, professing to represent that which stood in the place in the twelfth century, may be set up in its stead'. Precisely such a 'restoration' is Mr Freeman's 'Senlac'. Professing to represent the ancient name of the battle, it is substituted for that name which the battle has borne from the days of the Conqueror to our own. In William of Malmesbury as in Domesday Book we read of 'the Battle of Hastings' (_Bellum Hastingense_), and all Mr Freeman's efforts failed admittedly to discover any record or any writer who spoke of the Battle of Senlac (_Bellum Senlacium_) save Orderic alone. Now Orderic wrote two generations after the battle was fought; the name he strove to give it fell from his pen stillborn; and the fact that this name was a fad of his own is shown by what Mr Freeman suppressed, namely, that Orderic, in the same breath, tells us that Battle Abbey was founded as 'c[oe]nobium Sanctæ Trinitatis Senlac', whereas we learn from Mr Freeman himself that

the usual title is 'ecclesia Sancti Martini de Bello', 'ecclesia de Bello', or, as we have seen, in English 'þæt mynster æt þære Bataille'. The fuller form, 'Abbas Sancti Martini de loco Belli', appears in Domesday, 11_b_: but it is commonly called in the Survey 'ecclesia de Labatailge'.

So much for Orderic's authority.

So violent an innovation as this of our author's could not pass unchallenged. Mr Frederic Harrison threw down the gauntlet (_Contemporary Review_, January 1886), attacking, in a brilliant and incisive article, Mr Freeman's 'pedantry' along the whole line. But he chiefly complained of

a far more serious change of name that the 'Old English' school have introduced; which, if it were indefinitely extended, would wantonly confuse historical literature. I mean the attempt to alter names which are the accepted landmarks of history. It is now thought scholarly to write of 'the Battle of _Senlac_' instead of 'the Battle of _Hastings_'. As every one knows, the fight took place on the site of Battle Abbey, seven miles from Hastings; as so many great battles, those of Tours, Blenheim, Cannæ, Chalons, and the like, have been named from places not the actual spot of the combat.

But since for 800 years the historians of Europe have spoken of 'the Battle of Hastings', it does seem a little pedantic to rename it.... The sole authority for 'Battle of Senlac' is Orderic, a monk who lived and wrote in Normandy in the next century. Yet, on the strength of this secondary authority, the 'Old English' school choose to erase from English literature one of our most familiar names.

Mr Freeman's rejoinder must be noticed, because singularly characteristic. Treating Mr Harrison 'de haut en bas', he expressed surprise that his friends should expect him to reply to an article which had merely amused him, and--unable, of course, to adduce any fresh authority for 'Senlac'--denounced his critic for a 'reckless raid into regions where he does not know the road'. For this charge there was no foundation in the matter of which we treat. Mr Freeman persisted that he had given the battle 'the only name that I found for it anywhere' (which we have seen was not the case), and sarcastically observed that 'so to do is certainly "pedantic", for it conduces to accuracy'.

The truth is simply that the site of the battle had no name at all. As the professor himself wrote:

The spot was then quite unoccupied and untilled; nothing in any of the narratives implies the existence of any village or settlement; our own Chronicle only describes the site as by 'the hoar apple-tree' ('He com him togenes æt þære haran apuldran').

Consequently, when men wished to speak of the great conflict, they were driven, as in similar cases, to term it the Battle of Hastings, or, if they wished to be more exact, they had to describe it, by periphrasis, as fought on 'the site which is now called Battle'.

Henry of Huntingdon, our author tells us, is guilty, though otherwise well informed, of 'a statement so grotesquely inaccurate as that Harold "aciem suam construxit in _planis Hastinges_"'. Why 'grotesque'? It would be strictly accurate to describe a battle, even seven miles from Salisbury, as fought on Salisbury Plain; while, as to the word 'plain', his horror of field-sports may have caused Mr Freeman's ignorance of the fact that another such stretch of Sussex Down is known as 'Plumpton Plain'.[2] But the fact is that the whole difficulty arose from that singular narrowness that cramped our author's mind, and that lies at the root, when rightly understood, of his most distinctive tenets. For he was a pedant, after all. And, observe, this 'pedantry' did, in practice, conduce not to true accuracy, but to the very reverse. Paradoxical though this may sound, it is literally true. Let us take a striking instance. In his account of the attack on Dover in 1067, Mr Freeman argued, 'from the distinct mention of _oppidum_ and _oppidani_ in Orderic', that it was not the castle, as supposed, but the town that was attacked. And so convinced was he of this, that he forced his authorities into harmony with his view against their plain meaning. This was because he was not aware that Orderic--'my dear old friend Orderic', as in one place he terms him--was in the habit of using _oppidum_ for castle. He must have afterwards discovered this; for his theory was tacitly and significantly dropped, and the old version substituted, in a subsequent edition. Again, an article on 'City and Borough', which he contributed to _Macmillan's Magazine_, was based on the fundamental assumption that _civitas_, in the Norman period, must have had a specialized denotation. The fact that, on the contrary, the same town is spoken of as a _civitas_ and as a _burgus_, cuts the ground from under this assumption, and, with it, destroys the whole of its elaborate superstructure. Our author's method, in short, placed him in standing conflict with every authority for his period. Never was 'the sacredness of words' treated as of less account; never, indeed, were words more wantonly changed. What would Mr Freeman have said had he known that the compilers of that sacrosanct record, Domesday Book itself, revelled in altering the wording of the sworn original returns? Such was the spirit of the men whose language he strove to limit by a terminology as precise as that of modern philosophy.

I may have wandered somewhat from 'Senlac', but my object was to show that Mr Freeman misunderstood twelfth-century writers by assigning to them his own peculiarities. It did not in any way follow from their speaking of a 'Battle of Hastings' that they 'grotesquely' supposed it to have been fought at the town itself: they allowed themselves an elasticity, both in word and phrase, which was so alien to himself that he could not realize its existence, and therefore accused them of ignorance because their language was different from his. In the same spirit he would never admit that the 'Castellum Warham' of Domesday Book was no other than Corfe Castle, although, as Mr Eyton and Mr Bond have shown, the fact is certain.

But the _crux_ is yet to come. To any one acquainted with 'Old English' it must instantly occur that 'Senlac' is not an English name. Mr Freeman glided over this by simply ignoring the difficulty, but was he aware that the name in question, as 'Senlecque' (or 'Senlecques'), is actually found--in France? One is reminded of his own criticism on the name 'Duncombe Park':

When the lands of Helmsley were made to take the name of Duncombe, a real wrong was done to geography.... How came a _combe_ in Yorkshire? The thing is a fraud on nomenclature as great as any of the frauds which the first Duncombe, 'born to carry parcels and to sweep down a counting-house', contrived to commit on the treasury of the nation.

How came a French 'Senlac' in 'Old English' Sussex? The name is as obviously foreign as 'Senlis' itself, and the occurrence, in later days of 'Santlachæ' as a local field-name, cannot avail against this fact, or prove that this open down, in days before the Conquest, could have borne such a title. Therefore, when Mr Freeman wrote that the English king 'pitched his camp upon the ever memorable heights of Senlac', he was guilty, not only of anachronism, but of a 'real wrong to geography', and, in the name of accuracy, he introduced error.[3]

I have gone thus carefully into this matter because the name has been meekly adopted by historians, and even by journalists, thereby proving the power of that tendency to fashion and imitation on which, in his _Physics and Politics_, Mr Bagehot loved to insist. For my part I make an earnest appeal to all who may write or teach history to adhere to the 'true ancient name' of the Battle of Hastings, and to reject henceforward an innovation which was uncalled for, misleading, and wrong.[4]

THE PALISADE

The distinctive peculiarity of the English tactics, we learn from Mr Freeman at the outset, is found in an entirely novel device introduced on this occasion by Harold. Instead of merely forming his troops in the immemorial array known as the shield-wall, he turned 'the battle as far as possible into the likeness of a siege',[5] by building around them a 'palisade' of solid timber. How large a part this 'palisade' plays in Mr Freeman's story may be gathered from the fact that it is mentioned at least a score of times in his account of the great battle. This 'fortress of timber', with its 'wooden walls', had 'a triple gate of entrance', and was composed of 'firm barricades of ash and other timber, wattled in so close together that not a crevice could be seen'.

It would be easier for me to deal with this 'palisade' if one could form a clear idea of what it represented to Mr Freeman's mind. Judging from the passages quoted above, and from his praising Henry of Huntingdon for his 'admirable comparison of Harold's camp to a castle';[6] I was led to believe that he imagined precisely such a timber wall as crowned in those days a castle mound. Such a defence is well shown in the Bayeux Tapestry, crowning the castle mound which William threw up at Hastings. Now, this very parallel is suggested by Mr Freeman himself. Describing Harold's position as 'not without reason called a fortress' [where?] he suggested that 'its defences might be nearly equal to those of William's own camp at Hastings' (p. 447). Following up this parallel, we find Mr Freeman writing of this latter:

A portion of English ground was already entrenched and _palisaded_, and changed into a Norman fortress (p. 418).... He saw the carpenters come out with their axes; he saw the fosse dug, and the _palisade_ thrown up (p. 419). They had already built a fort and had fenced it in with a _palisade_ (p. 420).

Without binding Mr Freeman down to a defence precisely of this character--and, indeed, in this as in other matters, he may not even himself have formed a clear idea of what he meant--it gives us, I think we may fairly say, a general idea of his 'palisade'. It was certainly no mere row of stakes,[7] no heap of cottage window frames,[8] no fantastic array of shields tied to sticks,[9] no '_abattis_ of some sort'[10] that Mr Freeman had in view, whatever his champions may pretend. As for the defenders of the 'palisade', they cannot even agree among themselves as to what it really was. Mr Archer produces a new explanation, only to throw it over almost as soon as it is produced.[11] One seeks to know for certain what one is expected to deal with; but, so far as it is possible to learn, nobody can tell one. There is only a succession of dissolving views, and one is left to deal with a nebulous hypothesis.[12]

Mr Freeman wrote of his 'palisade' as a mere 'development of the usual tactics of the shield-wall'; but this is an obvious misconception. It might, indeed, be used as a substitute for the 'shield-wall', and would enable the troops behind it to adopt a looser formation; but to suppose that they were ranged 'closely together in the thick array of the shield-wall', with this second wall in front of them, is surely absurd. Till the 'wooden walls' were broken the 'shield-wall' was needless. To retain the disadvantages of its close order, when that order had been rendered needless, would have been simply insane. Yet this insanity, in our author's eyes, was 'the master-skill of Harold'. Was there time, moreover, to construct such a fortress, if 'the battle followed almost immediately', as we learn, 'on the arrival of Harold'? Lastly, would there be material on the spot for a palisade (see ground plan) about a mile in length?[13] These awkward points may not have occurred to Mr Freeman; but to others they will, I think, cause some uneasiness. Let us then examine Mr Freeman's authorities for the existence of this palisade.

MR FREEMAN'S AUTHORITIES FOR IT

In his note on 'The Details of the Battle of Senlac' (iii. 756), Mr Freeman explained that he had given the authorities on which his statements rested, adding:

Each reader can therefore judge for himself how far my narrative is borne out by my authorities.

Loyally keeping to this principle, I propose to test his statements by the authorities he gives for them himself. I therefore address myself to the passages in Henry of Huntingdon and in Wace.

(1) _Henry of Huntingdon_

The passage relied on by the historian is this:

Quum ergo Haroldus totam gentem suam in una acie strictissime locasset _et quasi castellum inde construxisset_[14] impenetrabiles erant Normannis (iii. 444, note).

Mr Freeman thus paraphrased Henry's words:

He occupied and fortified, as thoroughly as the time and the means at his command would allow, a post of great natural strength, which he made into what is distinctly spoken of as a castle (_ibid._).[15]

Although the writer made it his complaint against one of the editors in the Rolls series that he could not 'construe his Latin', we see that the same failing led him here himself into error. _Inde_ refers, and can only refer, to Harold's troops themselves. A fortress Harold wrought; but he wrought it of flesh and blood: it was behind no ramparts that the soldiers of England awaited the onset of the chivalry of France.

The metaphor, of course, is a common one. Henry of Huntingdon himself recurs to it, when describing that 'acies', at the Battle of Lincoln, which Stephen 'circa se ... strictissime collocavit' (p. 271), as Harold, he wrote, 'gentem suam in una acie strictissime locasset' (p. 203). For he shows us Stephen's 'acies' assailed 'sicut castellum'.[16] In the same spirit an Irish bard tells us how his countrymen, on the battlefield of Dysert O'Dea (May 10, 1318), closed in their ranks, 'like a strong fortress', as their enemies surged around them. It was felicitous, indeed, to describe as 'quasi castellum' that immovable mass of warriors girt by their shield-wall,[17] that 'fortress of shields', as Mr Freeman termed it, at Hastings itself (iii. 492), at Stamford Bridge (iii. 372), at Maldon (i. 272), and even in earlier days (i. 151).

It was Mr Freeman's initial error in thus materializing a metaphor (through misconstruing his Latin) that first led me to doubt the existence of the 'palisade'. His champion, Mr Archer, in his first article,[18] was ominously silent as to this error: in the second, he had to confess of this passage, the first of Mr Freeman's proofs, that he himself 'should never think of using it to prove a palisade'.[19] _Exit_, therefore, Henry of Huntingdon.

(2) _Wace_

Two passages, and two alone, are in question--

(A) ll. 6991-4, which Mr Freeman has paraphrased thus:

WACE MR FREEMAN

Heraut a le lieu esgarde, He occupied the hill; he Closre le fist de boen fosse, surrounded it on all its De treis parz laissa treis entrees accessible sides by a palisade, Qu'il a garder a commandees. with a triple gate of entrance, and defended it to the south by an artificial ditch (iii. 447).

My criticism on this has been from the first that Wace here speaks _only_ of a ditch, and that Mr Freeman has not only introduced here the alleged palisade, from which Wace's 'fosse' was quite distinct, but has also transferred to that palisade the 'treis entrees' of the fosse. That Mr Freeman did treat the 'palisade' and the 'fosse' as distinct and considerably apart is proved by this passage:

The Normans had crossed the [_sic_] English fosse, and were now at the foot of the hill with the palisades and the axes right before them (iii. 476).

The 'fosse' is that 'artificial ditch' of which Mr Freeman speaks in the above passage, the only one of which he does speak. Therefore, that 'artificial ditch' was, in his view, down in the valley to the south, and had nothing to do with that 'palisade' which he placed on the hill. There is thus no possible doubt as to Mr Freeman's view. On his own showing, the above lines make no mention of a palisade on the hill.[20]

(B) ll. 7815-26: The passage in question runs thus:

Fet orent devant els _escuz_ De fenestres è d'altres fuz, Devant els les orent levez, Come cleies joinz è serrez; Fait en orent devant closture, N'i laissierent nule jointure, Par onc Normant entr'els venist Qui desconfire les volsist. D'escuz e d'ais s'avironoent, Issi deffendre se quidoent Et s'il se fussent bien tenu, Ia ne fussent le ior vencu.

In his first edition, writing, I believe, under the influence of Taylor's version, Mr Freeman gave these lines in a footnote to his narrative of the battle, and appears to have then looked on them as describing his palisade.[21] But in his 'second edition, revised', in preparing which he went 'minutely through every line, and corrected or improved whatever seemed to need correction or improvement' (p. v), he transferred these lines to his appendix on the battle, where he wrote concerning them as follows:

[(At Maldon) the English stood, _as at Senlac_, in the array common to them and their enemies--a strong line, or rather wedge, of infantry, forming a wall with their shields (i. 271).][22]

Of the array of the shield-wall we have often heard already, as at Maldon (see vol. i. p. 271), but it is at Senlac that we get the fullest descriptions of it [_sic_] all the better for coming in the mouths of enemies. Wace gives his description, 12941:

'Fet orent devant els escuz De fenestres è d'altres fuz; Devant els les orent levez. . . . . . Et s'il se fussent bien tenu Ja ne fussent li jor vencu.'

So William of Malmesbury, 241. 'Pedites omnes cum bipennibus, conserta ante se scutorum testudine, impenetrabilem cuneum faciunt; quod profecto illis eâ die saluti fuisset, nisi Normanni simulatâ fugâ more suo confertos manipulos laxassent.' So at the battle of the Standard, according to Æthelred of Rievaux (343), 'scutis scuta junguntur, lateribus latera conseruntur' (iii. 763-4).

The unquestionable meaning of Mr Freeman's words is that Wace's lines (like the other passages) describe the time-honoured shield-wall, 'the fortress of shields, so often sung of alike in English and in Scandinavian minstrelsy' (iii. 372).

Appealing to this, his own verdict, in my original article,[23] I spoke of these lines as referring to the 'shield-wall', and maintained that 'escuz' meant shields, not 'barricades'. This also, it will be seen, must have been Mr Freeman's view, when he pronounced these lines to be a description of the shield-wall. I therefore declared that the only evidence he adduced for his palisade had been demonstrably obtained by misconstruing his Latin, and (on his own showing) by mistranslating his French.

This has been my case from the first: it remains my case now.

Unlike our forefathers on the hill of battle, I will not be decoyed into breaking 'the line of the shield-wall'.[24]

MY ARGUMENT AGAINST IT

In order to show clearly that I adhere to my original position, I need only reprint my argument as it appeared in the _Quarterly Review_.

It is clear that if he (Mr Freeman) found it needful, in his story of the great battle, to mention this barricade about a score of times, it must have occupied a prominent place in every contemporary narrative. And yet we assert without fear of contradiction that (dismissing the 'Roman de Rou') in no chronicle or poem, among all Mr Freeman's authorities, could he find any ground for this singular delusion; while the Bayeux Tapestry itself, which he rightly places at their head, will be searched in vain for a palisade, or for anything faintly resembling it, from beginning to end of the battle.[25]

On this passage we take our stand: it is the very essence of our case. We made our statement 'without fear of contradiction'; and it is not contradicted. Moreover, we can now further strengthen it by appealing to Baudri's poem,[26] an authority of the first rank, in which, as in the others, there is no allusion to the existence of any 'palisade'.

It will be observed that, in this passage, we expressly excluded Wace's poem. We did so because--although, as we have seen, Mr Freeman failed to produce from it any proof of a palisade--we preferred to leave it an open question whether Wace did or did not believe the English to have fought behind a palisade. In rebutting Mr Freeman's evidence, that question did not arise.

There is another argument that we refrained from bringing forward because we thought it superfluous. The Normans, of course, as Mr Freeman reminds us, magnified the odds against them: 'Nothing but the special favour of God could have given his servants a victory over their enemies, which was truly miraculous' (p. 440). William of Poitiers, he adds (p. 479), sets forth their difficulties in detail:--

'Angli nimium adjuvantur superioris loci opportunitate, quem sine procursu tenent, et maxime conferti; atque ingenti quoque numerositate suâ atque validissimâ corpulentiâ; præterea pugnæ instrumentis, quæ facile per scuta vel alia tegmina viam inveniunt.'

Now William who was not only a contemporary writer, but, says Mr Freeman (p. 757), 'understood' the site, had, obviously, every inducement to include, among the difficulties of the Normans, that special 'development', which according to Mr Freeman (pp. 444, 468), 'the foresight of Harold' had introduced on this occasion, and which, he assures us, involved 'a frightful slaughter' of the Normans. And yet this writer is absolutely silent, both here and throughout the battle, as to the existence of a barricade of any sort or kind.[27]

Here I would briefly refer to certain misrepresentations. Mr Archer claimed, in his original article (_Cont. Rev._, 344) to 'mainly rely' upon Wace, on the ground that I did so myself. I was obliged to describe this statement at once as 'the exact converse of the truth'.[28] For it will be seen, I expressly excluded Wace from the authorities on whom I relied, and specially rested my case, from the first, on the evidence of the Bayeux Tapestry. It is much to be regretted that Mr Archer has deliberately repeated his statement,[29] though even his ally reluctantly admits that it was 'not very happily worded'.[30]

Mr Archer might well seek to avoid the Bayeux Tapestry, for its evidence is dead against him, and he cannot explain it away. His first attempt was a brief allusion, accepting its authority without question, but suggesting that it might represent that part of the line where the barricade was absent.[31] Of this suggestion I at once disposed by showing that it is 'not only absolutely without foundation, but is directly opposed to Mr Freeman's theory, and, indeed, to his express statements'.[32] Forced to drop this explanation, my opponent, in his next article, fell back on the desperate device of repudiating the authority of the Tapestry,[33] 'the most authentic record' of the battle according to the late Professor, who was never weary of insisting on its 'paramount importance'. On my showing, beyond the possibility of question, that this amounted to rejecting everything that Mr Freeman had written on the subject,[34] Mr Archer once more shifts his tactics, and now writes thus:

If any fact in Hastings is more certain than another, it is that at the beginning of the battle the main body of the English was posted _on a hill_. Now 'the priceless record'--the Bayeux Tapestry--represents them _on a plain_. If the Tapestry could leave out this central feature--the hill of Senlac--from its picture of the _opening_ battle, still more easily could it leave out the intricate barriers upon the hill.[35]

This _ad captandum_ argument is disposed of as easily as the others. The Tapestry does not concern itself with landscape, and shows us neither a hill nor a plain. It could not, on a narrow strip, show us 'the hill of Senlac', but it could--and would--show us the alleged palisade. For not only does it strive under every difficulty to represent such objects as churches, castles and houses, but it faithfully shows us the 'palisade'[36] raised by William at Hastings itself. And if it be urged that it could not depict men fighting behind such a defence, let us turn to the scene at Dinan. If we compare it with the opening scene of the great battle itself, we see precisely similar horsemen advancing to the attack, similar infantry resisting that attack, and similar spears flying between them. But at Dinan the defenders have a palisade, and on the hill of battle they have not.[37]

But although the evidence of the Bayeux Tapestry, Mr Freeman's own supreme authority, remains absolutely unshaken, it must not be supposed that I rely on that evidence alone. I attach as much importance as ever--and so will, I think, all prejudiced persons--to the other portion of my argument, that if there had been a barricade playing so important a part in the battle that Mr Freeman found it needful to mention it at least a score of times, it is practically inconceivable that all the authorities I enumerate should have absolutely ignored its existence. Judging from Mr Freeman's own experience, it would be simply impossible to describe the battle without mentioning the 'palisade'.

It is very significant that when we turn to a real feature of the English line, namely its close array, we find the above authorities as unanimous in mentioning the fact as they are in ignoring that 'curious defence',[38] those 'intricate barriers', as Mr Archer terms them, 'upon the hill'.[39]

The fight has raged so fiercely around this 'palisade' that I have been obliged to discuss it at somewhat disproportionate length. But to sum up, we have now seen, firstly, that the alleged palisade was a new 'development', and needs, as such, special proof of its existence; secondly, that of Mr Freeman's proofs, one at least must admittedly be abandoned, while he himself has impugned the other;[40] thirdly, that the evidence, both positive and presumptive, is altogether opposed to the existence of a palisade. In the narrative of the battle we shall find Mr Freeman interpolating the alleged defence solely from his own imagination, such references proving, on inquiry, to be imaginary and imaginary alone.[41]

THE SHIELD-WALL

It is a pleasure to find myself here in complete agreement with Mr Freeman. In his very latest study of the battle Mr Freeman wrote as follows:

The English clave to the old Teutonic tactics. They fought on foot in the close array of the shield-wall.[42]

Mr Archer says they cannot have done so.[43] There was also, according to Mr Freeman, a barricade, in front of--and distinct from--the shield-wall, being a special development which, he tells us, 'the foresight of Harold' had introduced on this occasion (pp. 444, 468). The barricade is denied by me, the shield-wall by Mr Archer. Whichever of us is right, Mr Freeman's accuracy is, in either case, equally impugned.

It is essential to remember that Mr Freeman, throughout, treated the palisade and the shield-wall as _separate and distinct_. Thus he wrote so late as 1880:

Besides the palisade the front ranks made a kind of inner defence with their shields, called the shield-wall. The Norman writers were specially struck with the close array of the English.[44]

So in his great work we read of 'the shield-wall _and the_ triple palisade still unbroken' (iii. 467). Later still 'the shield-wall still stood _behind the_ palisade' (p. 487). Even when 'the English palisade was gone _the English shield-wall_ was still a formidable hindrance in the way of the assailants (p. 491). The array of the shield-wall was still kept, though now without the help of the barricades' (p. 491). Here we have the very phrase of note NN, 'the array of the shield-wall',[45] and it is shown beyond question that Mr Freeman's shield-wall, whatever Mr Archer may pretend, was quite distinct from the palisade, and was a shield-wall 'pure and simple'.

Let it also be clearly understood what Mr Freeman meant by that 'array of the shield-wall', of which the disputed passage in Wace was, he held, a description. He shows us the whole English army 'ranged so closely together in the thick array of the shield-wall, that while they only kept their ground the success of an assailant was hopeless'.[46] He describes them as, 'a strong line, or rather wedge, of infantry, forming a wall with their shields',[47] and he ascribes their defeat to their 'breaking the line of the shield-wall'.[48]

Of this shield-wall my opponent rashly wrote:

The Reviewer's [_sic_] theory of an extended shield-wall vanishes like smoke. If Wace is any authority ... the question is settled once and for all. There was no extended shield-wall at Hastings.[49]

Of course, 'the Reviewer's theory' here is no other than Mr Freeman's own.

If, in spite of the above evidence, it should still be pretended by anyone that the plain meaning of Mr Freeman's words is not their meaning, I will refer them not to my own interpretation, but to that of Mr Freeman's friend and colleague, the Rev W. Hunt, who wrote in the historian's lifetime, 'at his request' and by his 'invitation', and whose proofs were revised by Mr Freeman himself.[50] This is Mr Hunt's version:

Set in close array behind a palisade forming a kind of fortification, _shoulder to shoulder and shield to shield_, the army of Harold presented a steady and immovable front to the Norman attack ... Fatal was the national formation of the English battle, when _men stood in the closest order, forming a wall with their shields_. While no mode of array could be stronger so long as the line remained unbroken it made it hard to form the line again.[51]

So, again, in his life of Harold:

All the heavy-armed force fought in close order, _shield touching shield_, so as to present a complete wall to the enemy.[52]

Here we have no tortuous imaginings, but, in plain and straightforward words, 'what historians in general evidently mean' when they speak of a 'shield-wall', what it meant to Mr Freeman, what it means to Mr Hunt, and it is admitted, to myself.[53] Such was the English shield-wall, according to Mr Freeman, at 'Senlac'; it was what Mr Archer definitely declares it cannot possibly have been.

Lastly, as to the ground on which Mr Archer pronounces impossible a continuous shield-wall[54]--namely, that the English could not have fought in such close order,[55] and that the axe-men being 'shieldless ... could not have formed the shield-wall'; one need only confront him with Mr Freeman's words.

MR FREEMAN MR ARCHER

Referring to the mode of fighting It is enough for me that common of an English army in that age, sense, the tapestry, Wace,[58] and to 'the usual tactics of the our Italian chronicler, and his shield-wall', Mr Freeman wrote of later Old French translator all 'the close array of the show that the English axe-men battle-axe men' (p. 444). He had could not or did not form the already written of 'the English shield-wall (_English house carls with their ... huge Historical Review_, ix. p. 14). battle-axes', accustomed to Possibly they [the house carls] fight in 'the close array to the may have formed a genuine shield-wall.'[56] shield-wall; but while forming it they cannot have been _using_ 'They still formed their the 'bipennis', or the two-handed shield-wall and fought with axe (_Ibid._, p. 20, note). their great axes.'[57]

I am compelled to repeat what I said in the _Quarterly Review_.

We almost hesitate to waste our own and our readers' time on a writer who, professing to vindicate Mr Freeman's view as against us, devotes his energies to proving that view to be utterly absurd.[59]

Nor will Mr Archer derive comfort from 'our only English "specialist" on mediaeval warfare';[60] who holds, as I had pointed out, that 'the English axemen' did fight 'arranged in a compact mass'.[61]

It is significant that the fact Mr Archer so confidently rejects is precisely that on which I am at one with Mr Freeman, Mr Hunt, and Mr Oman, and to which the original authorities bear witness with peculiar unanimity. Thus William of Poitiers, an authority of the first rank, describes the English as 'maxime conferti', speaks of their 'nimia densitas', and proceeds to dwell on the terrible effect of their weapon, the famous battle-axe. William of Malmesbury tells us that the axemen 'impenetrabilem cuneum faciunt'. Even Mr Archer's authority, Wace, writes of these warriors:

A pie furent _serrement_.

Baudri describes the English as 'consertos',[62] and the _Brevis Relatio_ as 'spissum agmen'. Bishop Guy writes of the 'spissum nemus Angligenarum', and styles them 'densissima turba'; Henry of Huntingdon, we saw, tells us that they were arranged 'in una acie strictissime', and were thus 'impenetrabiles Normannis'.

No feature of the great battle is more absolutely beyond dispute. It was the denseness of the English ranks that most vividly struck their foes. 'Shield to shield, and shoulder to shoulder', as Æthelred describes them at the Battle of the Standard, they wedged themselves together so tightly that the wounded could not move, nor even the corpses drop. And so they stood together, the living and the dead.[63]

And we must remember that this mass of men was 'ranged so closely together in the thick array _of the shield-wall_, that while they only kept their ground the success of an assailant was hopeless'.[64] The Conqueror saw, Mr Freeman reminds us, 'that his only chance was to tempt the English to break their shield-wall'.[65] I need not insist on the point further: I need not even have said so much, but that some of those who read these pages may not have realized the true character of Mr Archer's phantasies. The 'scutorum testudo', as William of Malmesbury describes the famous shield-wall,[66] is depicted, with his usual painstaking care, by the designer of the Bayeux Tapestry. We read of the 'testudo' at Ashdown fight, even in the days of Alfred;[67] it was, again, with the shield-wall that 'glorious Æthelstan' won the day on the hard-fought field of Brunanburh (937);[68] we hear of it at Maldon (991), where Brihtnoth, we read, 'bade his men work the war-hedge',--'that is, had made his men form the shield-wall, a sort of fortress made by holding their shields close together'.[69] And we do, in Mr Freeman's words, meet with it 'down to the end', when the war-hedge of Maldon was wrought anew, by Harold, on the hill of battle, and stood once more as if a fortress--'quasi castellum'.

THE DISPOSITION OF THE ENGLISH

To render clear the problem involved, I must first sketch as briefly as possible the nature of the ground the English held. The hill of battle is so fully described in Mr Freeman's narrative that I here need only explain that it was a long narrow spur of the downs, running nearly east and west, of which the south front was defended by the English and attacked by the Normans. The one and only point that is certain is that 'on the very crown of the hill', the site of the high altar in the future, was erected the standard of Harold.[70] This, then, the centre of the hill, was the centre of the English host. But the ground to which our attention is directed, as having 'really played the most decisive part in the great event of the place', lay to the west of this, 'where the slope is gentlest of all, where the access to the natural citadel is least difficult'.[71] Mr Freeman assumes that this ground--the 'English right', as he terms it--where the 'ascent is easiest in itself', was allotted to 'the least trustworthy portion of the English army', to 'the sudden levies of the southern shires'.[72] For this assumption, I hasten to add, there is no authority whatever. He further assumes that the first English to leave their post, in pursuit of the enemy, 'were, of course, some of the defenders of the English right'.[73] William, he holds, at the crisis of the battle, resolved to draw them again from their post by a partial feigned retreat, that 'meanwhile another division might reach the summit through the gap thus left open'. Accordingly, tempted by this stratagem, 'the English on the right wing rushed down and pursued', and their error proved 'fatal to England'.[74]

The Duke's great object was now gained; the main end of Harold's skilful tactics had been frustrated by the inconsiderate ardour of the least valuable portion of his troops. Through the rash descent of the light-armed on the right, the whole English army lost its vantage-ground. The pursuing English had left the most easily accessible portion of the hill open to the approach of the enemy.... The main body of the Normans made their way on to the hill, no doubt by the gentle slope at the point west of the present buildings. The great advantage of the ground was now lost; the Normans were at last on the hill.[75]

Such is Mr Freeman's explanation of how the battle was won,[76] for in this episode he discovers the decisive turning-point of the day.[77]

Now, let us consider what is involved in the theory here set forth. 'Harold's skilful tactics', we find, consisted in entrusting his weakest point, the least defensible portion of his position, to 'the least trustworthy portion of the English army'. The natural result of these insane tactics was that his weak point was forced, and the English right turned.[78] And Mr Freeman, having made this clear, complains of 'the criticisms of monks on the conduct of a consummate general', and insists that 'nowhere is Harold's military greatness so distinctly felt as when ... we tread the battlefield of his own choice'. But there is worse to come. Such tactics as these would have been mad enough, even if these raw peasants had stood behind a barricade; but if, as I hold, that barricade is a purely imaginary creation, we ask ourselves what would have happened to these unhappy creatures, protected by no 'shield-wall', and armed with 'such rustic weapons as forks and sharp stakes',[79] when, first riddled by Norman arrows and then attacked by Norman infantry, they were finally, broken and defenceless, charged by heavy cavalry. The first onslaught would have scattered them to the winds, and have won, in so doing, the key of the English position.[80] Remembering this, it is strange to learn that 'the consummate generalship of Harold is nowhere more conspicuously shown than in this memorable campaign', and that his was 'that true skill of the leader of armies, which would have placed both Harold and William high among the captains of any age'. But if the generalship of Harold was shown by entrusting to his worst troops his weakest and most important point, while posting 'the flower of the English army' just where his ground was strongest, what are we to say of 'the generalship of William, his ready eye, his quick thought', if he failed to detect and avail himself of this glaring blunder? For instead of concentrating his attack upon Harold's weak point, he left it to be assailed, we learn, by 'what was most likely the least esteemed' portion of his host,[81] while he himself with his picked troops dashed himself against an impregnable position like a mad bull against a wall. 'We read,' says Mr Freeman, 'with equal admiration of the consummate skill with which Harold chose his position and his general scheme of action, and of the wonderful readiness with which William formed and varied his plans.' For myself, I should have thought that the tactics he describes--tactics which stirred him to a burst of admiration for 'the two greatest of living captains'--would have disgraced the most incompetent commander that ever took the field.

But Harold, after all, was no fool. Are we then justified in accusing him of this supreme folly? Mr Freeman held that 'the relative position of the different divisions in the two armies seems beyond doubt'. There is, however, as I said, absolutely no evidence for Mr Freeman's assumption that the English right was entrusted to the raw levies. Against it is the fact that in this quarter the first assault was soonest repulsed: against it also is all analogy drawn from the study of English tactics. Snorro's description of Stamfordbridge is evidence, at least, that 'the fortress of shields' had a continuous line of bucklers along its whole front: Æthelred gives us the reason in his story of the Battle of the Standard; namely, that it was the front line which had to meet the shock ('periculosum dicebant si primo aggressu inermes armatis occurrerent'). It was therefore an essential principle of tactics 'quatinus armati armatos impeterent, milites congrederentur militibus'.[82] Therefore on Cowton Moor (1138), as (I hold) on the hill of Battle (1066), we find the 'strenuissimi milites in prima fronte locati'.[83]

The words 'and the lighter troops behind them', which originally followed here, have been objected to by Miss Norgate, who had originally made the same statement,[84] but who now wishes to withdraw it.[85] Henry of Huntingdon, however--like Æthelred, a contemporary authority--agrees with him in describing the dismounted knights, men with shields and _loricæ_ like the 'housecarls' at Hastings, as forming an 'iron wall' along the English front.[86] If then mailed warriors formed the front line, it is difficult to see where the 'inermis plebs', as Æthelred terms it, could be but 'behind them'. The fact is that the Battle of the Standard, for which we have excellent authorities, is of no small value for the study of the Battle of Hastings, as my opponents seem to be uncomfortably aware. 'The tactics,' Mr Freeman admits, 'were English.' We find there again the same dense array,[87] the same tactics for defence, though now rendered less passive by the development of the bowman.[88] There can, I think, be little question, if we combine the several accounts, that the Standard, with the older chiefs around it, formed the kernel of the host;[89] that the rude levies of the shire were massed round about them;[90] and that the outer rim was formed by the mailed knights, with the archers crouching for shelter behind their 'iron wall'.

Harking back to Sherstone fight (1016), we encounter precisely the same formation. 'The King,' Mr Freeman writes, 'placed his best troops in front, and the inferior part of his army in the rear.'

And he added, 'we must remember these tactics when we come to the great fight of Senlac'.[91] This was, unhappily, just what he failed to do. 'William of Poitiers,' he strangely complained, 'has his head full of Agamemnon and of Xerxes, but this obvious analogy does not seem to have occurred to him.' Have we also the reason why our author himself overlooked these obvious analogies in the fact that to illustrate the Battle of Hastings he quotes some five and twenty times from the Odyssey and the Iliad, from Herodotus and Xenophon, from Æschylus, Plutarch, and Dio Cassius; from Livy, Tacitus, Ammianus, and even Ælius Spartianus? In his later edition, however, he inserted in a footnote the words: 'On placing the inferior troops in the rear, see the tactics of Eadmund at Sherstone.'[92] 'In the _rear_?' Yes, but that is precisely my contention. The assumption that I am assailing is that they formed the _wings_.

But we are not even here at the end of Mr Freeman's confusion. He had meanwhile, in another work, published about the same time as the first edition of his third volume, written thus:

As far as I can see, King Harold put these bad troops _in the back_ ... But his picked men he put _in front_, where the best troops of the enemy were likely to come.[93]

This is exactly my own view; it is that 'essential principle of tactics' on which I have insisted throughout, and on which Miss Norgate has rashly endeavoured to pour contempt.[94] Mr Freeman, moreover, further on, wrote of his 'light armed' as 'the troops _in the rear_',[95] which is again my contention. What seems to have happened is that he got into his head (I can imagine how) that the 'light-armed' formed the wings, and arranged the battle on that assumption. Then remembering, when it was too late, that, according to his own precedent, they ought to have been in the rear, he hesitated to introduce a change which would affect his whole theory of the battle, and compel him to approach it _de novo_.[96]

But indeed, even apart from this, it seems doubtful, examining Mr Freeman's narrative, whether he had formed a clear conception of how the English troops were arranged, and whether, if so, he kept it in view, consistently, throughout. If we honestly seek to learn what his conception was, a careful comparison of pp. 472, 473, 475, 490, and 505, with the ground-plan, will show that the whole right wing was composed of 'light-armed troops, who broke their line to pursue'. And this view seems to be accepted and defended by Miss Norgate, who, writing as his champion, declares that to her the conclusion embodied in his ground-plan 'seems irresistible'.[97] On the other hand, pp. 471, 480, 487, and 732 most undoubtedly convey the impression that, as I have maintained, the heavy-armed English were extended along the whole front,[98] and that their defeat, in Mr Freeman's words (p. 732), was 'owing to their breaking the line of the shield-wall'. I suspect that he was led thus to contradict himself by the obvious concentration of his interest on 'the great personal struggle which was going on beneath the standard' (p. 487). Here, as is often the case throughout his work, Mr Freeman's treatment of his subject was essentially dramatic. To bring his heroes into high relief, he thrust into the background the rest of his scene as of comparatively small account. In this spirit, for instance, he wrote:

A new act in the awful drama of that day had now begun. The Duke himself, at the head of his own Normans, again pressed towards the standard.... A few moments more and the mighty rivals might have met face to face, and the war-club of the Bastard might have clashed against the lifted axe of the Emperor of Britain (p. 483).

Homer, doubtless, would have made them meet; but a great dramatic opportunity was lost: the 'mighty rivals' seem never to have got within striking distance. Meanwhile, however, the warring hosts are left quite in the background; their fate is that of a stage crowd engaged in a stage battle. I do not mean, of course, that Mr Freeman ignores them, but that he was so engrossed in the personal exploits of his heroes as to be impatient of that careful study which the battle as a whole required, and comparatively careless of consistency in his allusions to the English array.

The charge, in short, that I have brought throughout against the disposition of the English in Mr Freeman's narrative is that his view, 'with all that it involves, was based on no authority, was merely the offspring of his own imagination, and was directly at variance with the only precedent that he vouched for the purpose'.[99] There is absolutely not a scrap of evidence that--as shown on the 'accurate' ground-plan--the English army was drawn up in three divisions, the 'housecarls' forming the centre, and the 'light-armed' the two wings. We do not even know that it formed an almost straight line.[100] The whole arrangement is sheer guesswork, and analogy, here our only guide, is wholly against it.

I cannot insist too strongly on the charge I have here made. It is no 'matter of secondary importance';[101] nor is it the case that my argument as to the 'palisade' is, as Mr Archer pretended, 'the only definite and palpable charge' that I bring 'against Mr Freeman's account of the great battle'.[102] For, as I wrote from the very first, 'rejecting Mr Freeman's views on the groupings of the English host, we reject with them _in toto_ the story he has built upon them'.[103]

My own view is based upon the fact that, in the military tactics as in the military architecture of the age, the defence trusted largely to its power of passive resistance: this was the essential principle of the ponderous Norman keep; and precisely as the walls of that keep were formed of an ashlar face of masonry backed by masses of rubble, so the fighting line of a force standing on the defensive was composed of a compact facing of heavily-armed troops backed by a rabble of half-armed peasants, or at best by what we may term the light infantry of the day. When the foe was advancing to the attack, these rear lines could discharge such weapons as they possessed--darts, arrows, stones, etc.--from behind the shelter of their comrades,[104] while at the moment of actual shock they would form a passive backing, which would save the front ranks from being broken by the enemy's impact. As the great object of the attack was to break through the line, a formation which virtually gave the advantage now possessed by a solid over a hollow square would naturally commend itself to the defence.

Now in these tactics we have the key to the true story of the battle. But, first, we must dismiss from our minds Mr Freeman's fundamental assumption, and understand that the English 'hoplites' were not massed in the centre, but were extended along the whole front, precisely as they were in battles fought both before and after. The fighting face of Harold's host was composed of this heavy soldiery, clad in helmets and mail. Arrayed in the closest order, they presented to an advancing enemy the aspect of a living rampart ('quasi castellum').

How the Normans attacked that rampart it will now be my task to show.

THE NORMAN ADVANCE

From Telham Hill Duke William scanned that living rampart, and saw clearly that 'his only chance was to tempt the English to break their shield-wall'.[105] It is chiefly from Baudri's poem that we learn how he set about it.[106]

There is no question that the fight began with an advance of the Norman infantry. William of Poitiers and Bishop Guy are in complete accordance on the fact.[107] But as my description of the infantry has been challenged,[108] I may show that it is quite beyond dispute.[109] To my argument, as reprinted below, it has been objected that I fail 'to take account of the distinction between light-armed and heavy-armed infantry'.[110] It will be seen that my argument turns, not on the armour, but on the _weapons_ of the foot. I have challenged my opponents to produce mention of any weapons but crossbows,[111] or bows and arrows, and need scarcely say that they cannot.

Describing the 'armour and weapons of the Normans', Mr Freeman, avowedly following the Tapestry, represented the infantry as all archers,[112] and divided them into two classes: (1) those 'without defensive harness'; (2) those who 'wore the defences common to the horse and foot of both armies ... the close-fitting coat of mail ... and the conical helmet'.[113] Now this division is exactly reproduced in the words of William of Poitiers, who divides his 'pedites' into two classes, distinguished only by the fact that in one were the 'firmiores et loricatos'. He does not say that the latter were _not_ archers, or crossbowmen, nor did Mr Freeman venture to assign them any other weapons.[114] Bishop Guy, moreover, distinctly tells us that they were crossbowmen (_vide infra_). The advance, therefore, in modern language, consisted of skirmishers, represented by archers and perhaps some crossbowmen; supports, namely, crossbowmen who, as a somewhat superior class, would mostly have defensive armour; and, lastly, the cavalry as reserve.[115]

Now what was the intention of this advance? Mr Freeman assumed, without hesitation, that the foot 'were to strive to break down the palisades ... and so to make ready the way for the charge of the horse' (p. 467); that 'the infantry were, therefore, exposed to the first and most terrible danger' (_ibid._); 'that the French infantry had to toil up the hill, and to break down the palisade' (p. 477).[116] But we find, on reference, that the above writers say nothing of any such intention, and do not even mention the existence of a palisade.[117] Moreover, the only weapons they speak of are crossbows and bows and arrows, which are scarcely the tools for pioneers. But William of Poitiers puts us on the track of a very different explanation: 'Pedites itaque Normanni propius accedentes _provocant_ Anglos, missilibus in eos vulnera dirigunt atque necem'. Here Baudri comes to our aid:

Nam neque Normannus consertos audet adire Nec valet a cuneo quemlibet excipere. Arcubus utantur dux imperat atque balistis; Nam prius has mortes Anglia tunc didicit. Tunc didicere mori quam non novere sagitta Creditur a cælo mors super ingruere Hos velut a longe comitatur militis agmen, Palantes post se miles ut excipiat.

The Normans dared not face the serried ranks of the English: the maxim that cavalry should not charge unbroken infantry was asserting itself already. But the only means of breaking those ranks, of throwing the English into confusion, was to gall them by archers and slingers till some of them should sally forth, when their assailants would turn tail and leave them to be caught in the open and ridden down. As Bishop Guy expresses it:

Præmisit pedites committere bella sagittis, Et balistantes inserit in medio, Quatinus infigant volitantia vultibus arma, Vulneribusque datis ora retro faciant, Ordine post pedites sperat stabilire Quirites

These tactics, says Baudri, were crowned with success; the maddened English, as they dashed forth to strike their tormentors to the ground, were cut off in every direction by the horsemen waiting their chance:

Tunc præ tristitia gens effera præque pudore Egreditur palans, insequiturque vagos. Normanni simulantque fugam fugiuntque fugantes, Intercepit eos undique præpes equus. Ilico cæduntur; sic paulatim minuuntur, Nec minuebatur callidus ordo ducis.

This account is both intelligible and consistent, but differs wholly from that of Mr Freeman. It had, however, been virtually anticipated by Mr Oman, who in his _Art of War in the Middle Ages_ (p. 25), points out, with much felicity, that

the archers, if unsupported by the knights, could easily have been driven off the field by a general charge. United, however, by the skilful tactics of William, the two divisions of the invading army won the day. The Saxon mass was subjected to exactly the same trial which befell the British squares in the battle of Waterloo: incessant charges by a gallant cavalry were alternated with a destructive fire of missiles. Nothing can be more maddening than such an ordeal to the infantry soldier, rooted to the spot by the necessities of his formation.

Let us compare the two theories. Mr Freeman's, here again, is not even consistent. He first tells us that for the knights to charge, with 'the triple palisade still unbroken, would have been sheer madness'; in fact it was 'altogether useless' for them to advance until the infantry had broken down the palisade.[118] But this the infantry failed to do,[119] whereupon--the cavalry charged 'the impenetrable fortress of timber' (p. 479)! One is surely reminded of the immortal Don, when 'a todo el galope de Rocinante', he charged the windmill.

My own theory involves no such inconsistencies. I hold--not as a conjecture based on a hypothetical palisade, but on the excellent authority of Baudri and William of Poitiers, that the infantry were used for the definite purpose of galling the English by their missiles, and so enticing them to leave their ranks and become a prey to the horse. As soon as their line had thus been broken, the cavalry were to charge.

Up to this point, the English army, as a whole, had kept its formation; but now the strain on its patience had become too great to be borne. Breaking its ranks, with one accord, the whole host rushed upon its foes, and drove them before it in confusion right up to the Duke's post:

Tandem jactura gens irritata frequenti, Ordinibus spretis irruit unanimis. Tunc quoque plus solito fugientum terga cecidit, Et miles vultum fugit ad usque ducis.

This explains what had always been to me a difficulty, namely, the panic-stricken flight of the Normans at this stage of the battle. That they should have 'lost heart' (p. 480) at the firmness of the English is natural enough; but that they should have 'turned and fled' (_ibid._) from a force which did not pursue them seemed improbable. The difficulty is solved by Baudri's mention of the wild onslaught by the English. Moreover, Bishop Guy's description of the rout of the assailants--which Mr Freeman assigned to this stage of the battle--agrees well with that of Baudri:

Anglorum populus, numero superante, repellit Hostes inque retro compulit ora dari; Et fuga ficta prius fit tunc virtute coacta; Normanni fugiunt, dorsa tegunt clipei.

Again, Baudri's poem suggests a novel view by its definite statement that the Normans in their flight reached the Duke's post. Mr Freeman imagined that the Duke himself had been fighting in the front line (pp. 479, 480), but a careful comparison of his two authorities, William of Poitiers and Bishop Guy (p. 482), will show that, on the contrary, they support Baudri's statement. Each speaks of the Duke as 'meeting' (_occurrens_--_occurrit_) the fugitives, a difficulty which Mr Freeman evaded by writing that 'he met _or pursued_ the fugitives'.

From this flight the Normans were rallied by the desperate efforts of the Duke himself, who, as is usual at such moments, was believed to have fallen. I deem this episode a fixed point, and it conveniently divides the battle. All our four leading authorities--the Tapestry, William of Poitiers, Bishop Guy, and Baudri--are here in complete agreement. William describes the Duke as 'nudato insuper capite'; Guy tells us that 'iratus galea nudat et ipse caput'; Baudri writes 'subito galeam submovet a capite'; in the Tapestry, 'William (writes Dr Bruce), when he wishes to show himself in order to contradict the rumour that he has been killed, is obliged to lift his helmet almost off his head' (p. 98). It is singular that so striking and well-established an episode is wholly ignored by Wace.

THE FOSSE DISASTER

The serious character of the assailants' flight is duly recognized by Mr Freeman.[120] We could have no more eloquent witness to the fact than the admission even by William of Poitiers that the Duke's Normans themselves gave way, or the description of them by Bishop Guy as 'gens sua victa'. The only point in question here is whether what I call 'the fosse disaster' was an incident of this headlong flight or happened at a later stage of the battle. Mr Freeman, discussing 'the order of events',[121] faced the difficulty frankly, observing that Guy had placed the feigned flight before what I have termed above the dividing incident of the day, and that this view 'may be thought to be confirmed by the Tapestry', etc., etc. We have here perhaps the most difficult problem raised in the course of the battle, and one which it would be easier and safer to pass over in silence. As to Guy, I suggest, as a possible solution--it does not profess to be more--that what he was describing was not the great feigned flight but the lesser man[oe]uvres of the same character described by Baudri above. He may, of course, have transferred to these the importance of the later episode. On the real flight, at least, he is sound. Of the Tapestry I would speak with more confidence. 'In the nature of things,' Mr Freeman wrote, 'exact chronological order is not its strongest point' (p. 768). But in this case there was nothing to make it depart from that order, no reason why it should not place the incident of 'the fosse disaster' after the central incident of the day, instead of before, if that were its right position. Moreover, it is here, we find, in the closest agreement with Wace; and though I claim, as did Mr Freeman, the right of rejecting his testimony when wholly unsupported (as still more, when opposed to probability), yet such marked agreement as this is not to be lightly cast aside.

In any case, nothing can be more unfortunate than Mr Freeman's treatment of what he describes as the 'great slaughter of the French in the western ravine' (p. 489). This is a scene invented by Mr Freeman alone, and illustrates the peculiar use he made, at times, of his authorities. There is no question that the Norman knights suffered, in the course of the day, at least one such disaster as the nobles of France at Courtrai (1302) or her cuirassiers at Waterloo. But five authorities, so far as one can see, place the incident in the thick of the battle, while three others assign it to the pursuit of the defeated English. It is not strange, therefore, that some writers should have held that there was but one such incident: Mr Freeman, however, holds that there were two; and I expressly disclaim questioning his view, the matter being one of opinion. Assuming then, as he does, that the episode occurred in the course of the battle, I turn to the spirited version of Wace, as Mr Archer defies me to 'impeach Wace's authority' (p. 346). The 'old Norman poet' is here very precise. He first tells us (ll. 7869-70, 8103-6) that the English had made a 'fosse', which the Normans had passed unnoticed in their advance.[122] These passages Mr Freeman accepts without question (p. 476). But then Wace proceeds to state (ll. 8107-20) that the Normans, driven back, as we have seen, by the English, tumbled, men and horses, into this treacherous 'fosse' and perished in great numbers. Now Wace, far from standing alone, is here in curiously close agreement with the Tapestry of Bayeux. Two successive scenes in that 'most authetic record' are styled 'Hic ceciderunt simul Angli et Franci in pr[oe]lio; hic Odo episcopus baculum tenens confortat pueros.' Wace describes these scenes in thirty-six lines (ll. 8103-38), devoting eighteen lines to the first and the same number to the second. Actual comparison alone can show how close the agreement is. Henry of Huntingdon, we may add, independently confirms the statement that English as well as French perished in the fatal fosse.[123]

Now all this is quite opposed to Mr Freeman's 'conception of the battle'. He had, therefore, to adapt, with no gentle hands, his authorities to his requirements. Cinderella's stepmother, when her daughter's foot could not be got into the golden shoe, armed herself, we read, with axe and scissors, and trimmed it to the requisite shape. With no less decision the late Professor set about his own task. Wace's evidence he simply suppressed; Henry of Huntingdon's he ignored; but that of the Bayeux Tapestry could not be so easily disposed of. I invite particular attention to his treatment of this, his 'highest authority'. Retaining in its natural place (pp. 481-2) the second of the two scenes we have described, he threw forward the one preceding it to a later stage of the battle (p. 490). Nor did his vigorous adaptation stop even here. The scene thus wrenched from its place depicts a single incident: mounted Normans are tumbling headlong into a ditch at the foot of a mound, on which 'light-armed' English stand assailing them with their weapons. The fight is hand to hand; the bodies touch. And yet the Professor treats this scene as a description of two quite separate events happening at a distance from each other. These he terms (p. 489) the 'stand of the English at the detached hill'; and the 'great slaughter of the French in the western ravine'. But on referring to his own ground-plan, we find that this 'ravine' and the 'detached hill' were a quarter of a mile apart, with the slopes of the main hill between them.

My criticism here is twofold. In the first place, Mr Freeman endeavoured to conceal the liberties he had taken with his leading authority. No one would gather from his narrative of the battle that any such violence had been used; nor would anyone who read of the 'hill' episode that 'the scene is vividly shown in the Tapestry' (p. 489), and, subsequently, of the 'ravine' disaster, that 'this scene is most vividly shown in the Tapestry' (p. 490), imagine that 'the incidents of the ravine and the little hill' (p. 768) are in the Tapestry one and the same. In the second place, the large part which the writer's own imagination plays in his narrative of the fight is here clearly seen. There is nothing, for instance, in any authority to connect 'the western ravine' with 'the great slaughter of the French'. It is placed by those who mention it in a 'fosse', 'fossatum', or 'fovea'. 'If Wace is any authority,' to quote Mr Archer's words, 'the question is settled once and for all';[124] the slaughter took place not in the 'ravine', but in a ditch which according to him, the English had dug to the south of the hill, and which, according to Henry of Huntingdon, they had cunningly concealed. Mr Freeman produces no authority in support of his own fancy; his only argument is that the slaughter

must have happened somewhere to the south or south-west of the hill. The small ravine to the south-west seems exactly what is wanted (p. 771).

The 'western ravine' however, does not fulfil these requirements (see ground-plan, where it lies to the north-west of the hill); while Wace's 'fosse', which--though here ignoring it--he had already accepted, lay, as required, to the south of the hill. Wace mentions another instance (ll. 1737-50) in which this stratagem was adopted,[125] but whether our ditch was dug, as he states, expressly or not, the fact of its existence does not depend on his evidence alone.

To resume: accepting provisionally Mr Freeman's view (iii. 770) that there were two disasters to the horse, one 'happening comparatively early in the battle', and the other 'which William of Poitiers, Orderic and the Battle chronicler place at the very end of the battle', as occurring in the pursuit of the defeated English, we find that the former is mentioned by five writers. The Tapestry and Wace agree absolutely in making it an episode of the real flight of the Normans before the great rally; Henry of Huntingdon assigns it to the great feigned flight, later in the battle; William of Malmesbury seems to make it happen during the pursuit by the Normans after their feigned flight; the anonymous writer quoted by Andresen (ii. 713) from Le Prevost may be left out of the question. Yet, in spite of all this contradiction, Mr Freeman assigns this striking episode, not as a conjecture, but as historic fact, to the pursuit of the English by the 'Bretons'[126] after the feigned flight (p. 489). Let me make my position clear. We expect an historian to weigh, as an expert, the evidence before him: we look to him for guidance where that evidence is conflicting. But we have a right to protest against the statement, as historic fact, of hypotheses which cannot be established, and which are quite possibly wrong. Where the evidence is flatly contradictory, the fact that it is so should be made clear; conflicting statements should not be evaded, nor evidence, such as that of the Tapestry, appealed to, when it proves to be opposed to, not in favour of, the writer's hypothesis. Dealing with the Conqueror's march on London, after his great victory, Mr Parker has insisted with much force, on the principle for which I am contending.

Though, by leaving out here and there the discrepancies, the residue may be worked up into a consecutive and consistent series of events, such a process amounts to making history, not writing it. Amidst a mass of contradictory evidence, it is impossible to arrive at any sure conclusion.... It is, however, comparatively easy to piece together such details as will fit of the various stories, and still more easy to discover reasons for the results which such mosaic work produces ... [but] it cannot be reasonably regarded as real history. The method by which the results are obtained bears too close a resemblance to that by which ... some of the legends described in the fifth chapter have come to be accepted as historical narratives.[127]

That is the danger. Such a narrative as that which Mr Freeman has given us must 'come to be accepted as historical' if allowed to pass current without a grave warning. It will doubtless be replied that in his appendices, he frankly admits that 'it is often hard to reconcile the various accounts'; but the question at issue is whether one is justified when, as here, the various accounts are not only 'hard' but impossible to reconcile, in constructing a definite narrative at all, instead of honestly admitting that the matter must be left in doubt.

THE GREAT FEIGNED FLIGHT

There is no feature of the famous battle more familiar or more certain than that of the feigned retreat. It is necessary here to grasp Mr Freeman's view, because he discovers in this man[oe]uvre and its results the decisive turning point of the day.[128]

That there was a great feigned flight, which induced a large portion of the English to break their formation and pursue their foes, is beyond question.[129] But Mr Freeman, on this foundation, built up a legend, for which, we shall find, there exists no evidence whatever. He first assumed that it was 'most likely' the left wing of the assailants which 'turned in seeming flight'[130] (p. 488), and that it was, consequently, 'the English on the right wing' who 'rushed down and pursued them'. Thus:

Through the rash descent of the light-armed on the right, the whole English army lost its vantage ground. The pursuing English had left the most easily accessible portion of the hill open to the approach of the enemy (p. 490).

The result, of course, was that 'the main body of the Normans made their way on the hill, no doubt by the gentle slope' at this point (_ibid._).

The great advantage of the ground was now lost; the Normans were at last on the hill. Instead of having to cut their way up the slope, and through the palisades, they could now charge to the east right against the defenders of the standard (_ibid._).

These words are most important. They set forth Mr Freeman's theory that Harold now found the Normans charging down upon his right flank instead of attacking him in front. It was in this sense I wrote 'that his weak point was forced, and the English right turned', as the natural result of the 'insane' tactics attributed to him by his champion.[131] The man[oe]uvre assigned by Mr Freeman to the Duke is, in fact, that by which Marlborough won the battle of Ramillies, where he got on to the hill by dislodging the French right, and then wheeled to his own right, outflanking the French centre.

When we turn from this elaborate theory to the authorities on which it is supposed to be based, we find, with some astonishment, that it is all sheer imagination. William of Poitiers, on whom the writer seemed mainly to rely for the feigned flight, states that:

Normanni sociaque turba ... terga dederunt, fugam ex industriâ simulantes--

words which distinctly imply that this feigned flight was general. Henry of Huntingdon merely writes: 'Docuit Dux Willelmus _genti suæ_ fugam simulare.' No one, certainly, says or implies that it was restricted to the left wing. As for the theory that 'the main body of the Normans' were, by this man[oe]uvre, enabled to seize the western portion of the hill, and thus attack Harold on his flank, it is more imaginary, if possible, still.

The fact is that, as I explained in my original article,[132] Mr Freeman had wholly misconceived the nature of William's man[oe]uvre. The feigned flight was not a simple (as he supposed), but a combined movement. The best account of that movement is found in the Battle Chronicle:

Tandem strenuissimus Boloniæ comes Eustachius clam, callida præmeditata arte--fugam cum exercitu duce simulante--super Anglos sparsim agiliter insequentes cum manu valida a tergo irruit, _sicque et duce hostes ferociter invadente ipsis interclusis utrinque_ prosternuntur innumeri.

This precise statement, which Mr Freeman omits,[133] affords the clue we seek, explaining the words of William of Poitiers, 'interceptos et inclusos undique mactaverunt'. The retreat of the pursuing English was cut off by the Count's squadrons, and, caught 'between two fires', they were cut down and butchered. The supposition that, while this was going on, the main body of the Normans was riding on to the hill is baseless. The whole host, we have seen, were below, surrounding the English who had left the hill. Had Mr Freeman kept in mind, as he had intended to do, the employment of this old Norman device at the relief of Arques (1053), he would have seen more clearly what really happened. But this, precisely as with his Sherstone precedent, he failed to do.

THE RELIEF OF ARQUES

To illustrate the feigned flight by analogy, I append this passage relating to the stratagem at Arques.

A plan was speedily devised; an ambush was laid; a smaller party was sent forth to practise that stratagem of pretended flight which Norman craft was to display thirteen years later [1066] on a greater scale. The Normans turned; the French pursued; presently the liers-in-wait were upon them, and the noblest and bravest of the invading host were slaughtered or taken prisoners before the eyes of their king (iii. 133).

The man[oe]uvre is elaborately described by Wace (ll. 3491-514) in a passage which ought to be compared, in places, with that on the great 'feinte fuie' itself (ll. 8203-70).

He carefully distinguishes the two parties essential to the stratagem:[134]

Partie pristrent des Normanz, Des forz e des mielz cumbatanz, . . . . . Puis pristrent une autre partie, etc., etc.

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 man[oe]uvre 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:

A cels kis alouent chazant Engleis les aloent gabant E quis alouent leidissant E de paroles laidissant Sunt enmi le vis tresturne, .... E Franceis sunt a els mesdle (ll. Torne lor sunt enmi le vis 3501-4); .... E as Engleis entremesler (ll. 8241-2, 8262-4);

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:

Les somiers fist apareilier, La garisun prendre e chargier, _À la tur d'Arches fist porter_, Il meisme fu al mener (II. ll. 3519-22).

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:

WACE MR FREEMAN

E Heraut out iloc geu, Mr Planché says that Wace lays E par la Lande fu passez, the scene at Avranches. He probably Quant il fu duc amenez, refers to the Roman de Rou, 13723, Qui a Aurenches donc esteit but the knighthood is not there E en Bretaigne aler deueit, spoken of (p. 229). _La le fist li dus chevalier_ [ll. 13720-5].

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 concerned[137] 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 man[oe]uvre 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 man[oe]uvre '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.

Dash'd on every rocky square, Their surging charges foam'd themselves away.

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 Hunt[140] 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

With woven paces and with waving hands;

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.' Sneering[145] 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]

[Greek: amphi d' ar' autô baine leôn hôs alki pepoithôs, prosthe de hoi dyry t' esche kai aspida pantos eisên, ton ktamenai memaôs hos tis tou g' antios elthoi, smerdalea iachôn.]

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--

Dionisio fero Che fe' Cicilia aver dolorosi anni.

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 Russia[161] 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._

[Footnote 1: Mr T. A. Archer (_Contemporary Review_, March 1893, p. 336).]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 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'.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 5: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 444.]

[Footnote 6: _Ibid._, p. 757.]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 10: This is Mr Oman's third and (up to now) final explanation (_Academy_, June 9, 1894).]

[Footnote 11: _English Historical Review_, ix. 232.]

[Footnote 12: _Ibid._, ix. 232-3, 237-8, 240.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 14: The italics are Mr Freeman's own.]

[Footnote 15: He even spoke of it as 'the main castle' (_Arch. Journ._, xl. 359).]

[Footnote 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).]

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

[Footnote 18: _Cont. Rev._, March 1893.]

[Footnote 19: _English Historical Review_, ix. 12.]

[Footnote 20: My detailed reply to Mr Archer's attempt to confuse the 'fosse' and the palisade will be found in _ibid._, ix. 213, 214.]

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

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

[Footnote 23: _Quarterly Review_, July 1892, p. 14.]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 25: _Quarterly Review_, July 1892, p. 15.]

[Footnote 26: See below, p. 284.]

[Footnote 27: _Quarterly Review_, July 1893, p. 84.]

[Footnote 28: _Athenæum_, March 18, 1893.]

[Footnote 29: _English Historical Review_, ix. 40.]

[Footnote 30: _Ibid._, p. 58.]

[Footnote 31: _Cont. Rev._, 351.]

[Footnote 32: _Quarterly Review_, July 1893, pp. 93-4.]

[Footnote 33: _Ibid._, ix. 27, 28.]

[Footnote 34: _English Historical Review_, 219-25.]

[Footnote 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)!]

[Footnote 36: _Norman Conquest_, iii. 419, 420.]

[Footnote 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.

MR FREEMAN MR ARCHER

The testimony of Florence is He rejects the Tapestry's account confirmed by a witness more of Harold's coronation, unexceptionable than all, by following Florence of Worcester's the earliest and most statement--that Harold was trustworthy witness on the crowned by Aldred, Archbishop Norman side, by the of York--in avowed contemporary Tapestry ... in opposition to his own reading of every statement but one.... the Tapestry, i.e. that Harold The Tapestry implies--_it can was crowned by Stigand. hardly be said directly to affirm_--that the consecrator was Stigand (iii. 582). The representation in the Tapestry is singular. _It does not show Stigand crowning or anointing Harold_ (iii. 620).

It has been remarked by Mr He rejects _in toto_ the Planché and others, that at Tapestry's version of Edward the this point the order of time Confessor's death, for that is forsaken; the burial of 'priceless record' makes _Edward Eadward is placed before his buried before he died!_ Mr deathbed and death. On this Freeman, and perhaps not Dr Bruce says _very truly_: altogether without reason, 'the seeming inconsistency follows the saner notion of other is very easily explained', authorities, that Edward died etc., etc. (iii. 587) ... I before he was buried (_English do not think that any one Historical Review_, ix. 607). who makes the comparison minutely (between the Tapestry and the Life) will attach much importance to the sceptical remarks of Mr Planché (_ibid._).

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_.]

[Footnote 38: _Cont. Rev._, p. 351.]

[Footnote 39: _English Historical Review_, ix. 607.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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:

MR FREEMAN MY ARTICLE

The new castle was placed in Of these [sons] Robert fought at the keeping of Henry, the Senlac ... [and] was _the first younger son of Roger of to break down the English Beaumont. A great estate in palisade_ ... he was rewarded the shire also fell to with large grants in Henry's elder brother, Warwickshire, and Warwick Castle Robert, Count of Melent, who, was entrusted to his brother at the head of the French Henry--_Dict. Nat. Biog._, iv. 64. auxiliaries, had been _the (Mr Freeman's works, of course, first to break down the are given among the authorities English palisade_ at for the article.) Senlac--_Norman Conquest_, iv. [1871] 191-2. See also iii. 486, and _Will. Rufus_, i. 185, ii. 135, 402.

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.]

[Footnote 42: _William the Conqueror_ (1888), p. 90.]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 44: _Short History_, p. 79.]

[Footnote 45: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 763, _ut supra_.]

[Footnote 46: _Ibid._, iii. p. 471.]

[Footnote 47: _Ibid._, i. 271; cf. _W.R._, ii. 411.]

[Footnote 48: _Ibid._, iii. 732.]

[Footnote 49: _Cont. Rev._, 348.]

[Footnote 50: _Norman Britain_ (S.P.C.K.), p. vi.]

[Footnote 51: _Ibid._, pp. 79, 80.]

[Footnote 52: _Dict. Nat. Biography_ (1890), xxx. 424.]

[Footnote 53: _English Historical Review_, ix. 2.]

[Footnote 54: _Cont. Rev._, p. 348.]

[Footnote 55: _Ibid._, p. 346.]

[Footnote 56: _Quarterly Review_, July 1893, p. 90.]

[Footnote 57: _Old English History_, p. 335.]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 59: _Q.R._, July 1893, p. 91.]

[Footnote 60: _English Historical Review_, ix. 607.]

[Footnote 61: Oman's _Art of War in the Middle Ages_, 24 (see _Q.R._, July 1893, p. 90).]

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

[Footnote 63: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 491.]

[Footnote 64: _Ibid._, p. 471.]

[Footnote 65: _Old English History_, p. 334.]

[Footnote 66: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 764; cf. _English Historical Review_, ix. 18.]

[Footnote 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.)]

[Footnote 68: _Ibid._, p. 155.]

[Footnote 69: _Ibid._, p. 196.]

[Footnote 70: _Norm. Conq._, iii. viii.]

[Footnote 71: _Ibid._, pp. 445-6.]

[Footnote 72: _Ibid._, p. 472.]

[Footnote 73: _Ibid._, p. 480.]

[Footnote 74: _Norm. Conq._, iii. pp. 488, 490.]

[Footnote 75: _Ibid._, p. 490.]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 78: _Q.R._, July 1893, 101.]

[Footnote 79: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 472.]

[Footnote 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.)]

[Footnote 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'.]

[Footnote 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'.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 84: 'The general mass of the less well-armed troops of the shire in the rear.' (_England under the Angevin Kings_, i. 290.)]

[Footnote 85: _English Historical Review_, ix. 611.]

[Footnote 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.']

[Footnote 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._).]

[Footnote 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'.]

[Footnote 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._).]

[Footnote 90: 'Reliqua autem multitudo undique conglomerata eos circumvallabat' (_ibid._).]

[Footnote 91: _Norm. Conq._, i. 383.]

[Footnote 92: _Ibid._, iii. 472.]

[Footnote 93: _Old English History_, p. 331.]

[Footnote 94: _English Historical Review_, ix. 75.]

[Footnote 95: _Old English History_, p. 333.]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 97: _English Historical Review_, ix. 74.]

[Footnote 98: _Q.R._, July 1892, p. 19.]

[Footnote 99: _Q.R._, July 1893, pp. 102-3; cf. _Q.R._, July 1892, p. 18; _English Historical Review_, ix. 254.]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 101: _English Historical Review_, ix. 74.]

[Footnote 102: _Cont. Rev._, p. 353.]

[Footnote 103: _Q.R._, July 1892, p. 19.]

[Footnote 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'.]

[Footnote 105: _Old English History_, p. 334.]

[Footnote 106: For Baudri's poem see _Q.R._, July 1893, pp. 73-5. As to Baudri's authority, I need only repeat what I wrote in the _English Historical Review_ (ix. 217): 'Mr Archer endeavours, of course, to pooh-pooh it. Now I call special attention to the fact that the test I apply to Baudri is that which Mr Freeman applied to the Tapestry, the obvious test of internal evidence. But Mr Archer's ways are not as those of other historians: instead of examining, as I did, Baudri's account in detail he dismisses it on the ground that the writer's "description _of the world_" at that date could not be accurate (_ibid._, 29). We are not dealing with his "description of the world"; we are dealing with his lines on the battle of Hastings.']

[Footnote 107: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 467, 477.]

[Footnote 108: _English Historical Review_, ix. 42-3, 603.]

[Footnote 109: Though I have already done so in _English Historical Review_, ix. 250.]

[Footnote 110: _English Historical Review_, ix. 42.]

[Footnote 111: Mr Freeman rendered the 'sagittis armatos et balistis' of William by 'archers, slingers, and crossbowmen'. 'Balistæ' can hardly mean slings _and_ crossbows, and I think, on consideration, it is best referred to the latter; but the question is not of much importance.]

[Footnote 112: So, too, in _Arch. Journ._, xl. 359: 'You may call up the march of archers and horsemen across the low ground between the hills.']

[Footnote 113: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 462. I regret that I must call attention to the fact that I gave (_English Historical Review_, ix. 250) this precise reference for my statement that, according to Mr Freeman, the infantry were all archers, explaining that in another passage (p. 467) William of Poitiers had led him to take a somewhat different view. Mr Archer, however, has printed (_English Historical Review_, ix. 603) the other passage (p. 467) in triumph by the side of my statement. He further denies that Mr Freeman held, even on p. 462, that the infantry were all archers. Anyone can test the value of Mr Archer's denial for himself by referring to _Norm. Conq._, iii. 462, where he will find that Mr Freeman, describing the Norman host, mentions no infantry but archers.]

[Footnote 114: As he had merely copied from the Tapestry on p. 462, so he copied William of Poitiers on p. 467.]

[Footnote 115: The distinction between archers and crossbowmen is of little or no consequence, the missile being common to both.]

[Footnote 116: My opponents complain that in the former passage Mr Freeman assigns this task to 'the heavier foot' only; but my point is that no palisade is here mentioned, and no attack on it by _any_ infantry, heavy or light, and no weapons assigned to that infantry of any use for the purpose.]

[Footnote 117: This is an excellent instance of what I said as to Mr Freeman's 'imaginary' references to the now famous palisade. I have challenged my opponents to disprove my statement that none of Mr Freeman's own authorities says anything here of a palisade. And, of course, they cannot do so.

Here is another instance in point. We read on pp. 486-7 that Robert of Beaumont was specially distinguished in the work of breaking down the 'barricade' (see also _supra_, p. 273). But when we turn to William of Poitiers, the authority cited, we find no mention of a 'barricade', but read only of him 'irruens ac sternens magnâ cum audaciâ'. As the writer had just described how the Duke '_stravit_ adversam gentem', we see that Robert, in his charge, laid low, not a barricade, but 'adversam gentem'.

This brings me to an extraordinary case of mediaeval plagiarism. The author of the Ely history has applied this description of Robert's exploits to the Conqueror himself at Ely (_Liber Eliensis_, pp. 244-5). The passages 'Exardentes Normanni--deleverunt ea', 'Egit enim quod--magna cum audacia', 'Scriptor Thebaidos vel Æneidos', _et seq._, are all 'lifted' bodily from William's narrative of the Battle of Hastings and applied to the storming of the Isle of Ely!]

[Footnote 118: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 467.]

[Footnote 119: 'The Norman infantry had now done its best, but that best had been in vain' (_ibid._, 479).]

[Footnote 120: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 481.]

[Footnote 121: _Ibid._, 767-8.]

[Footnote 122:

'Un fosse ont d'une part fait Qui parmi la champaigne vait

* * * *

En la champaigne out un fosse: Normanz l'aueient adosse En beliuant l'orent passé Ne l'aueint mie esgarde.'

I had followed Taylor in my rendering of this passage; but Miss Norgate (_English Historical Review_, ix. 46) would prefer to say that the Normans did not heed, than that they did not notice the fosse. 'The passage,' as she says, 'is somewhat obscure.']

[Footnote 123: Miss Norgate has rightly pointed out (ix. 47) that Henry places the disaster during the great feigned flight.]

[Footnote 124: _Cont. Rev._, p. 348.]

[Footnote 125: Compare the death of Robert Marmion, at Coventry, under Stephen, when he fell into one of the ditches he had dug to entrap the enemy's horse. The passage quoted by Andresen in his Wace (ii. 713) from Michel's notes to Benoit is very precise: 'Fecerant autem Angli foveam quandam caute et ingeniose, quam ipsi ex obliquo curantes maximam multitudinem Normannorum in ea præcipitaverant. Et plures etiam ex eis insequentes et tracti ab aliis in eadem perierunt.']

[Footnote 126: See below, p. 292.]

[Footnote 127: _Early Oxford_, pp. 191, 192. And see my preface.]

[Footnote 128: See above, p. 278, for Mr Freeman's view.]

[Footnote 129: 'Angli vero, illos putantes vere fugere, c[oe]perunt post eos currere volentes eos si possent interficere' (_Brevis Relatio_). 'Ausa sunt, ut superius, aliquot millia quasi volante cursu, quos fugere putabant urgere' (_Will. Pict._).]

[Footnote 130: Though admitting, in a footnote, that the 'Brevis Relatio' was opposed to this assumption.]

[Footnote 131: _Supra_, p. 278.]

[Footnote 132: _Q.R._, July 1892, p. 20.]

[Footnote 133: Miss Norgate has indignantly retorted (_English Historical Review_, ix. 50) that Mr Freeman 'only' omitted the words from 'sicque' onwards. But it is precisely on these words that my statement is based. Mr Freeman, moreover, did not even quote the rest _à propos_ of the feigned flight, where we should look for it.]

[Footnote 134: So does Will. Gem., as quoted by Mr Freeman (iii. 133): 'de suis miserunt si quos forte hostium a regio c[oe]tu abstraherent, quos illi in latibulis degentes incautos exciperent.' See also my Addenda.]

[Footnote 135: _Cont. Rev._, p. 354.]

[Footnote 136: See above, p. 251.]

[Footnote 137: See above, p. 259.]

[Footnote 138: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 763-4.]

[Footnote 139: _Social England_, i. 299. 'Mr Oman, like Mr J. H. Round, knows nothing of the famous "palisade", but only of the "shield-wall" of the English' (_Speaker_, December 2, 1893).]

[Footnote 140: _Norman Britain_, p. 79.]

[Footnote 141: _Ibid._, p. 80.]

[Footnote 142: _Social England_, p. 300.]

[Footnote 143: _Cont. Rev._, p. 353.]

[Footnote 144: _Ibid._, p. 335.]

[Footnote 145: _English Historical Review_, ix. 607.]

[Footnote 146: _Ibid._, ix. 219-25.]

[Footnote 147: _Ibid._, 224, 257.]

[Footnote 148: _Norm. Conq._, ii. 469; and _supra_, p. 356.]

[Footnote 149: _Cont. Rev._, 352.]

[Footnote 150: _Ibid._, 348.]

[Footnote 151: _Cont. Rev._, 335-6.]

[Footnote 152: 'The Reviewer ... tells us that ... Mr Freeman ... is wrong, completely wrong, in his whole conception of the battle.... His attack must be held to have failed' (_Cont. Rev._, pp. 335, 353).]

[Footnote 153: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 763.]

[Footnote 154: _Cont. Rev._, p. 349. Cf. Mr Archer's articles _passim_.]

[Footnote 155: _English Historical Review_, ix. 22.]

[Footnote 156: _English Historical Review_, ix. 607.]

[Footnote 157: _Ibid._, ix. 606. _Supra_, p. 269.]

[Footnote 158: _Ibid._, ix. 606, 607. My readers are invited to refer to this article and to that in the _Cont. Rev._ (March 1893), and test my statement for themselves.]

[Footnote 159: _Anglo-Saxon Britain_, p. 172.]

[Footnote 160: _Norman Conquest_, iii. 454.]

[Footnote 161: e.g. Vinogradoff and Dr Andrews.]

[Footnote 162: _Norm. Conq._, ii. 352.]

[Footnote 163: _Ibid._, 327.]

[Footnote 164: _Ibid._, 326.]

[Footnote 165: _Ibid._, 332.]

[Footnote 166: 'We shall get rid of the talk about "an officer and a gentleman".' (_Macmillan's_, xxiv. 10).]

[Footnote 167: _Vita Wlstani_.]

MASTER WACE

MR FREEMAN MR ARCHER

Of the array of the shield-wall Now, there are six distinct we have often heard already as objections to translating this at Maldon, but it is at Senlac passage [of Wace] as if it that we get the fullest referred to a shield-wall. These descriptions of it, all the objections are, of course, of better for coming in the unequal value; but some of them mouths of enemies. Wace gives would, by themselves, suffice to his description, 12941:--(_Norm. overthrow such a theory (_Cont. Conq._, iii. 763). Rev._, 349).

In discussing Mr Freeman's treatment of the great battle, we saw that the only passage he vouched for the existence of a palisade[1] consisted of certain lines from Wace's _Roman de Rou_, which he ultimately declared to be, on the contrary, a description of 'the array of the shield-wall'.[2] The question, therefore, as to their meaning--on which my critics have throughout endeavoured to represent the controversy as turning--did not even arise so far as Mr Freeman was concerned. Still less had I occasion to discuss the authority of Wace, Mr Freeman's explicit verdict on the lines (iii. 763-4) having removed them, as concerns his own narrative, from the sphere of controversy.

The case, however, is at once altered when Mr Archer insists on ignoring Mr Freeman's words, and makes an independent examination of the lines, quoting also other passages which were not vouched by Mr Freeman, as proving 'beyond the shadow of a doubt that Wace did mean to represent the English at Hastings as fighting behind a palisade'.[3] So long as I make it clearly understood that this question in no way affects the controversy as to Mr Freeman, I am quite willing to discuss the question thus raised by Mr Archer.

It is most naturally treated under these three heads:

(1) Did Wace believe and assert that there was a palisade?

(2) If so, what weight ought to be attached to his authority?

(3) If we reject it, can we explain how his mistake arose?

WACE'S MEANING

I have elsewhere[4] discussed 'the disputed passage' (_supra_, p. 267), and agreed with Mr Archer that there are 'four views which have been suggested' as to its meaning.[5] Two of them, I there showed, were successively held by Mr Freeman, and the two others successively advanced by Mr Archer. When I add (anticipating) that, according to M. Paris, 'le passage de Wace présente quelque obscurité',[6] and that M. Meyer introduced yet another element of doubt in a special kind of shield ('de grands écus') not previously suggested, it will be obvious, quite apart from any opinion of my own, that the passage presents difficulties.

So long as I only dealt with Mr Freeman's work, I found on his admission that the passage described the shield-wall.[7] Now that we are leaving his work aside, I fall back on my own conclusion, namely, that the passage is with equal difficulty referred either to a palisade or to a shield-wall. The word 'escuz', it will be seen, occurs twice in the passage. Mr Archer held, at first, that in neither case did it mean real 'shields',[8] but he afterwards assigned that meaning to the second of the two 'escuz', while still rendering the first 'in a metaphorical sense'.[9] It is obvious that when Mr Freeman took the lines to describe 'the array of the shield-wall', he must have done so on the ground that 'escuz' meant 'shields'. That is my own contention. While fully recognizing the obstacles to translating 'the disputed passage' as if it referred throughout to a shield-wall, I maintain that 'escu' means shield, as a term 'which is one of the commonest in Wace' and invariably means shield.[10] But to cut short a long story, it was decided by Mr Gardiner to settle this issue by submitting the disputed passage to the verdict of MM. Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer. In spite of my protest, this was done without my articles and my solution of the problem[11] being laid before them at the same time. A snap verdict was thus secured before they had seen the evidence. I am sure that Mr Gardiner must have thought this fair, and editors, we know, cannot err; but it seems to me quite possible that these distinguished French scholars were not familiar with the shield-wall, an Old English tactic, and were not aware that this information was the great feature of the battle. Had all this, as I wished, been duly set before them, their verdict would, of course, have carried much greater weight.

But having said this much, I frankly admit that their verdict is in favour of Mr Archer's contention, and, so far as the first 'escuz' is concerned, against my own.[12] They may not agree in detail with each other, or with either of Mr Archer's views, but, on the broad issue, he has a perfect right to claim that their verdict is for him so long as he does not pretend that it also confirms 'Mr Freeman's interpretation', by ignoring the historian's own latest and explicit words.[13] It must also be remembered that this admission in no way diminishes the obscurity of the passage, which, as we have seen, is beyond dispute, and which forms an important element in my own solution of the problem.[14]

Having now shown how the matter stands with regard to 'the disputed passage', I need not linger over those which Mr Freeman ignored, and which Mr Archer adduced to strengthen his views as to the main passage. I have dealt with these elsewhere,[15] and need here only refer to ll. 8585-90, because that passage raises a point of historical interest quite apart from personal controversy. I have maintained that it can only be accepted at the cost of 'throwing over Mr Freeman's conception of the battle',[16] and have proved, by quoting his own words, that he placed the standard with Harold at his foot 'in the very forefront of the fight'.[17] I do not say that he was right in doing so: he was, I think, very probably wrong, and was influenced here, as elsewhere, by his dramatic treatment of Harold. But as this can only be matter of opinion, I have not challenged his view; I only say that those who accept it cannot consistently appeal to a passage in Wace which places the standard in the rear of the English host.

WACE'S AUTHORITY

Assuming then, for the sake of argument, that Wace mentions a defence of some kind,[18] even though not consistently[19] in front of the English troops, let us see whether his statement is corroborated, whether it is in harmony with the other evidence, and whether, if it is neither corroborated nor in such agreement, his authority is sufficient, nevertheless, to warrant its acceptance.

As to corroboration, Mr Archer undertook 'to produce corroborative evidence from other sources';[20] but this at once dwindled down to one line--'tending in the same direction'[21]--from Benoît de St Maur, who does not even mention a palisade.[22] There is therefore, on his own showing, not a shred of corroborative evidence.

As to the second point, I may refer to my arguments against the palisade,[23] where I showed that none of our authorities is here in agreement with Wace.

We come, therefore, to our third point, namely, the weight to which Wace's testimony, when standing alone, is entitled. Here, as elsewhere, I adhere to my position. As I have written in the _Quarterly Review_:

Even if Wace, clearly and consistently, mentioned a palisade throughout his account of the battle, we should certainly reject the statement of a witness, writing a century after it, when we find him at variance with every authority (for that is our point), just as Mr Freeman rejected the bridge at Varaville,[24] or the 'falsehood' of the burning of the ships, or the 'blunder' of making the Duke land at Hastings, or his anachronisms, or his chronology. For, 'of course', in the Professor's own words, 'whenever he [Wace] departs from contemporary authority, and merely sets down floating traditions nearly a hundred years after the latest events which he records, his statements need to be very carefully weighed'.[25]

Let me specially lay stress upon the points on which, when Wace and the Tapestry differ, the preference is given by Mr Freeman himself to the Tapestry as against Wace:

Had the tapestry been a work of later date, it is hardly possible that it could have given the simple and truthful account of these matters which it does give. A work of the twelfth or thirteenth century[26] would have brought in, _as even honest Wace does in some degree_, the notions of the twelfth or thirteenth century. One cannot conceive an artist of the time of Henry II, still less an artist later than the French conquest of Normandy, agreeing so remarkably with the authentic writings of the eleventh century (iii. 573).

[In the Tapestry] every antiquarian detail is accurate--the lack of armour on the horses (iii. 574). [But] Wace speaks of the horse of William fitz Osbern as 'all covered with iron' (iii. 570).

Wace again, is 'hardly accurate' (iii. 765), we read, as to the English weapons, because he differs from the Tapestry. As to Harold's wound, 'Wace places it too early in the battle' (iii. 497); Mr Freeman follows the Tapestry. As to the landing of the Normans at Pevensey:

_Venit ad Pevenesæ_, says the Tapestry ... Wace ... altogether reverses the geography, making the army land at Hastings, and go to Pevensey afterwards' (iii. 402).

As to the 'Mora', the Duke's ship, the Tapestry shows 'the child with his horn'; Wace describes him 'Saete et arc tendu portant'. Mr Freeman adopts the 'horn' (iii. 382). Harold, says Mr Freeman, was imprisoned at Beaurain.

This is quite plain from the Tapestry: 'Dux eum ad Belrem et ibi eum tenuit'. Wace says, 'A Abevile l'ont mené....' This I conceive to arise from a misconception of the words of William of Jumièges (iii. 224).

This illustrates, I would remind Mr Archer, the difference between a primary authority and a mere late compiler.

To these examples I may add Wace's mention of Harold's _vizor_ (_ventaille_). Mr Freeman pointed out the superior accuracy of the Tapestry in 'the nose-pieces' (iii. 574), and observed that 'the vizor' was a much later introduction (iii. 497).[27] Here again we see the soundness of Mr Freeman's view that Wace could not help introducing 'the notions' of his own time into his account of the battle. Miss Norgate admits that he 'transferred to his mythical battles the colouring of the actual battles of his own day', but urges that these narratives illustrate the 'warfare of Wace's own ... contemporaries'.[28] Quite so. But the battle of Hastings belonged to an older and obsolete style of warfare. That is what his champions always forget. If Miss Norgate's argument has any meaning, it is that the men who fought in that battle were 'Wace's own contemporaries'.

But, even where Wace's authority is in actual agreement with the Tapestry, Mr Freeman did not hesitate to reject, or rather, ignore it, as we saw in the matter of the fosse disaster.

As to Wace's sources of information, and the _prima facie_ evidence for his authority, a question of considerable interest is raised. Mr Archer discusses it from his own standpoint.[29] On Wace's life, age and work, facts are few and speculations many. These have been collected and patiently sifted in Andresen's great work, with the following result:

Wace was certainly living not merely in 1170,[30] but in 1174, for he alludes to the siege of Rouen (August 1174) in his epilogue to the second part of the 'Roman'.[31] It is admitted on all hands, though Mr Archer does not mention it, that he did not even begin the third part till after the coronation of the younger Henry (June 14, 1170).[32] Allowing for its great length, he cannot have come to his account of the battle _at the very earliest_ till 1171, 105 years after the event. For my part, I think that it was probably written even some years later. But imagine in any case an Englishman, ignorant of Belgium, writing an account of Waterloo, mainly _from oral tradition_, in 1920.

Mr Archer contends that Wace was born 'probably between the years 1100 and 1110' (_ante_, p. 31). Andresen holds that the earliest date we can venture to assign is 1110,[33] forty-four years after the battle. Special stress is laid by Mr Archer on Wace's oral information:

He had seen and talked with many men who recollected things anterior to Hastings and the Hastings campaign. Among his informants for this latter was his own father, then, we may suppose, a well-grown lad, if not an actual participator in the fight (_ante_, p. 32).

'We may suppose'--where all is supposition--exactly the contrary. If Wace was born, as we may safely say, more than forty years after the battle, 'we may suppose' that his father was not even born before it. All this talk about Wace's father is based on ll. 6445-7, of which Andresen truly remarks, 'Die Verse "Mais co oi dire a mon pere, Bien m'en souient mais Vaslet ere, Que set cenz nes, quatre meins, furent", u.s.w., sind viel zu unbestimmt gehalten, so dass wir aus ihnen streng genommen nicht einmal entnehmen können, ob der Vater im Jahre 1066 schon auf der Welt war oder nicht' (p. lxx). I venture to take my own case. Born within forty years of Waterloo, I can say with Wace that I remember my father telling me, as a boy, stories of the battle. But he was born after it. The information was second-hand. Over and over again does Mr Archer lay stress on the fact (_ut supra_) that Wace gives us 'the reminiscences of the old heroes who fought at Hastings as no one else has cared to do'.[34] I must insist that Wace himself nowhere mentions having seen or spoken to them. He does mention having seen men who remembered the great comet (Mr Archer italicizes the lines[35]); but this exactly confirms my point. For when Wace _had_ seen eyewitnesses he was careful, we see, to mention the fact. Men would remember the comet, though little children at the time. One of my own very earliest recollections is that of a great comet, even though it did not create the sensation of the comet in 1066. Wace had talked with those who had been children, not with those who had been fighting men, in 1066.

I need only invite attention to one more point. Mr Archer assures us that 'Wace is a very sober writer', with 'something of the shrewd scepticism' of modern scholars.[36] What shall we say then, of his long story (ll. 7005-100) of the night visit, by Harold and Gyrth, to the Norman camp, to which Mr Archer appeals as evidence for the _lices_ (l. 7010)? 'Nothing,' replies Mr Freeman (iii. 449), 'could be less trustworthy.... No power short of divination could have revealed it.'[37] Mr Archer tells us he has only space for one instance[38] of Wace's conscientiousness. That instance is his story of the negotiation between William and Baldwin of Flanders on the eve of the Conquest. Of this story Mr Freeman writes:

Of the intercourse between William and Baldwin in his character of sovereign of Flanders Wace has a tale which strikes me as so purely legendary that I did not venture to introduce it into the text.... The whole story seems quite inconsistent with the real relations between William and Baldwin (iii. 718-19).

Comment is superfluous.

Having now shown that Wace's evidence is not corroborated, is not in accordance with that of contemporary witnesses, and cannot on the sound canons of criticism recognized by Mr Freeman himself, be accepted under these circumstances, I propose to show that my case can be carried further still, and that I can even trace to its origin the confused statement in his 'disputed passage' which is said to describe a palisade or defence of some sort or other.

WACE AND HIS SOURCES[39]

In studying the authorities for the Battle of Hastings, I was led to a conclusion which, so far as I know, had never occurred to any one. It is that William of Malmesbury's 'Gesta Regum' was among the sources used by Wace. Neither in Korting's elaborate treatise, 'Ueber die Quellen des Roman de Rou', nor in Andresen's notes to his well-known edition of the 'Roman' (ii. 708), can I find any suggestion to this effect. Dr Stubbs, in his edition of the 'Gesta Regum', dwells on the popularity of the work both at home and abroad, but does not include Wace among the writers who availed themselves of it; and the late Mr Freeman, though frequently compelled to notice the agreement between Wace and William, never thought, it appears, of suggesting the theory of derivation; indeed, he speaks of the two writers as independent witnesses, when dealing with one of these coincidences.[40] The more one studies Wace, the more evident it becomes that the 'Roman' requires to be used with the greatest caution. Based on a _congeries_ of authorities, on tradition, and occasionally of course, on the poetic invention of the _trouveur_ it presents a whole in which it is almost impossible to disentangle the various sources of the narrative. Before dealing with the passage which led me to believe that the 'Gesta Regum' must have been known to Wace, I will glance at some other coincidences. We have first the alleged landing of William at Hastings instead of Pevensey. On this Mr Freeman observed:

_Venit ad Pevenesæ_, says the Tapestry. So William of Poitiers and William of Jumièges. William of Malmesbury says carelessly, _Placido cursu Hastingas appulerunt_. So Wace, who altogether reverses the geography, making the army land at Hastings and go to Pevensey afterwards.[41]

Here William of Malmesbury, who was probably using 'Hastingas' as loosely as when he applied that term to Battle, appears to be responsible for the mistake of Wace, who may have tried to harmonize him with William of Jumièges by making the Normans proceed to Pevensey after having landed. Take again the hotly disputed burial of Harold at Waltham. On this question Mr Freeman writes:

William of Malmesbury, after saying that the body was given to Gytha, adds _acceptum itaque apud Waltham sepelivit_.... Wace had evidently heard two or three stories, and, with his usual discretion, he avoided committing himself, but he distinctly asserts a burial at Waltham.[42]

This, then, is another coincidence between the two writers, while, as before, Wace found himself in the presence of a conflict of authorities. On yet another difficult point, the accession of Harold, I see a marked agreement, though Mr Freeman did not. Harold, according to William of Malmesbury, _extorta a principibus fide, arripuit diadema_, and _diademate fastigiatus, nihil de pactis inter se et Willelmum cogitabat_. Wace's version runs:

Heraut ki ert manant è forz Se fist énoindre è coroner; Unkes al duc n'en volt parler, Homages prist è féeltez Des plus riches è des ainz nes.

Not only is the attitude of Wace and William towards Harold's action here virtually identical, but the mention of his exaction of homage seems special to them both.

The passages, however, on which I would specially rest my case are those in which these two writers describe the visit of Harold's spies to the Norman camp before the battle of Hastings. This legend is peculiar to William of Malmesbury and Wace, and though it may be suggested that they had heard it independently, the correspondence--it will, I think, be admitted--is too close to admit of that solution.

I print these passages side by side:

WILLIAM OF MALMESBURY WACE

Premisit tamen qui numerum Heraut enveia dous espies hostium et vires specularentur. Por espier quels compagnies E quanz barons e quanz armez Aueit li dus od sei menez. Ia esteient a l'ost uenu, Quant il furent aparceu Quos intra castra deprehensos A Guillaume furent mene, Willelmus circum tentoria duci, Forment furent espoente. moxque, largis eduliis pastos, Mais quant il sout que il quereient domino incolumes remitti jubet. E que ses genz esmer ueneient, Par tos les tres les fist mener E tote l'ost lor fist mostrer; Bien les fist paistre e abeurer, Pois les laissa quites aler, Nes volt laidir ne destorber. Redeuntes percunctatur Haroldus Quant il vindrent a lor seignor, quid rerum apportent: illi, verbis Del duc distrent mult grant enor. amplissimis ductoris magnificam Un des Engleis, qui out veuz confidentiam prosecuti, serio Les Normans toz res e tonduz, addiderunt pene omnes in exercitu Quida que tuit proueire fussent illo presbyteros videri, quod E que messes chanter peussent, totam faciem cum utroque labio Kar tuit erent tondu e res, rasam haberent; ... subrisit rex Ne lor esteit guernon remes. fatuitatem referentinum, lepido Cil dist a Heraut que li dus insecutus cachinno, quia non Aueit od sei proueies plus essent presbyteri, sed milites Que chevaliers ne altre gent; validi, armis invicti. (§ 239) De co se merueillout forment Que tuit erent res e tondu. E Heraut li a respondu Que co sunt cheualiers uaillanz, Hardi e proz e combatanz. 'N'ont mie barbes ne guernons,' Co dist Heraut, 'com nos auons.' (ll. 7101-34)

The story is just one of those that William of Malmesbury would have picked up, and Wace has simply, in metrical paraphrase, transferred it from his pages to his own.

Yet another story, on which Mr Freeman looked with some just suspicion, is common to these two writers, and virtually to them alone. It is that of 'the contrast between the way in which the night before the battle was spent by the Normans and the English' (iii. 760). Wace, says Mr Freeman, 'gives us the same account' as William 'in more detail', while William 'gives us a shorter account'. I here again append the passages side by side, insisting on the fact mentioned by Mr Freeman, that Wace expands the story 'in more detail':

Itaque utrinque animosi duces Quant la bataille dut ioster, disponunt acies.... Angli, ut La noit auant, c'oi conter, accepimus, totam noctem insompnem Furent Engleis forment haitie cantibus potibusque ducentes. Mult riant e mult enueisie. Tote noit maingierent e burent, . . . . . Onques la noit en lit ne jurent. Mult les veissiez demener, Treper e saillir e chanter. . . . . . Contra Normanni, nocte tota E li Normant e li Franceis confessioni Tote noit firent oreisons peccatorum vacantes, mane E furent en afflictions. Dominico corpore communicarunt. De lor pechiez confes se firent, (§§ 241, 242) As proueires les regehirent, E qui nen out proueires pres, À son ueisin se fist confes. . . . . . Quant les messes furent chantees, Qui bien matin furent finees.... (ll. 7349-56, 7362-8, 7407-8)

This brings me to my destination, namely, § 241 of the 'Gesta Regum'. We may divide this section into three successive parts: (1) the description of the way in which the English spent the night--which is repeated, we have seen, by Wace; (2) the array of the English, with which I shall deal below; (3) the dismounting of Harold at the foot of the standard. I here subjoin the parallels for the third, calling special attention to the phrases, 'd'or e de pierres (auro et lapidibus)' and 'Guil. pois cele victoire Le fist porter a l'apostoire (post victorium papae misit Willelmus).'

Rex ipse pedes juxta vexillum Quant Heraut out tot apreste stabat cum fratribus, ut, in E co qu'il uolt out commande commune periculo aequato, nemo Enmi les Engleis est uenuz, de fuga cogitaret. Vexillum Lez l'estandart est descenduz illud post victoriam papae Lewine e Guert furent od lui misit Willelmus, quod erat Frere Heraut furent andui, in hominis pugnantis figura, Assez out barons enuiron; auro et lapidibus arte Heraut fu lez son gonfanon. sumptuosa intextum. Li gonfanon fu mult vaillanz, D'or e de pierres reluissanz. Guill. pois cele victoire Le fist porter a l'apostoire, Por mostrer e metre en memoire Son grant conquest e sa grant gloire. (ll. 7853-66)

The only part of § 241 which remains to be dealt with is the second. The two passages run thus:

Pedites omnes cum bipennibus Geldons engleis haches portoent conserta ante se _scutorum_ E gisarmes qui bien trenchoent testudine, impenetrabilem Fait orent deuant els _escuz_ cuneum faciunt; quod profecto De fenestres e d'altres fuz, illis _ea die_ saluti fuisset, Deuant els les orent leuez, nisi Normanni, simulata fuga Comme cleies joinz e serrez; more suo confertos manipulos Fait en orent deuant closture, laxassent. N'i laissierent nule iointure, (§ 241) Par onc Normant entr'els venist Qui desconfire les volsist. D'escuz e d'ais s'auironoent, Issi deffendre se quidoent; Et s'il se fussent bien tenu, Ia ne fussent _le ior_ uencu. (ll. 7813-26)

Mr Freeman, of course, observed the parallel, but, oddly enough, missed the point. He first quoted the lines from Wace, and then immediately added, 'So William of Malmesbury' (iii. 764), thus reversing the natural order. The word that really gave me the clue was the _escuz_ of Wace. It was obvious, I held, that, here as elsewhere,[43] it must mean 'shield'; and Mr Freeman consequently saw in the passage an undoubted description of the 'shield-wall' (iii. 763). Moreover, the phrase _lever escuz_ is, in Wace, a familiar one, describing preparation for action, thus, for instance:

Mult ueissiez Engleis fremir . . . . . Armes saisir, escuz leuer. (ll. 8030, 8033)

On the other hand, there are, in spite of Mr Freeman, undoubted difficulties in rendering the passage as a description of the 'shield-wall', just as there are in taking _escuz_ to mean 'barricades' (iii. 471). The result was that, perhaps unconsciously, Mr Freeman gave the passage, in succession, two contradictory renderings (iii. 471, 763). Now, starting from the fact that the disputed passage supported, and also opposed both renderings, I arrived at the conclusion that it must represent some confusion of Wace's own. He had, evidently, himself no clear idea of what he was describing. But the whole confusion is at once accounted for if we admit him to have here also followed William of Malmesbury. His _escuz_--otherwise impossible to explain--faithfully renders the _scuta_ of William, while the latter's _testudo_, though strictly accurate, clearly led him astray. The fact is that William of Malmesbury must have been quite familiar with the 'shield-wall', if indeed he had seen the fyrd actually forming it.[44] Wace, on the contrary, living later, and in Normandy instead of England, cannot have seen, or even understood, this famous formation, with which his cavalry fight of the twelfth century had nothing in common. It is natural therefore that his version should betray some confusion, though his _Fait en orent deuant closture_ clearly renders William of Malmesbury's _conserta ante se scutorum testudine_. There is no question as to William's meaning, for a _testudo_ of shields is excellent Latin for the shield-wall formed by the Romans against a flight of arrows. Moreover, the construction of William's Latin (_conserta_) accounts for that use by Wace of the pluperfect tense on which stress has been laid as proof that the passage must describe a 'barricade'.[45] That Wace could, occasionally, be led astray by misunderstanding his authority, is shown by his taking Harold to Abbeville, after his capture on the French coast, a statement which arose, in Mr Freeman's opinion, 'from a misconception of the words of William of Jumièges (iii. 224)'. No one, I think, can read dispassionately the extracts I have printed side by side, without accepting the explanation I offer of this disputed passage in Wace, namely, that it is nothing but a metrical, elaborate, and somewhat confused paraphrase of the words of William of Malmesbury.

Passing from William of Malmesbury to the Bayeux Tapestry, we find a general recognition of the difficulty of determining Wace's knowledge of it. I can only, like others, leave the point undecided. On the other hand, his narrative, as a whole, does not follow the Tapestry; on the other, it is hard to believe that the writer of II. 8103-38 had not seen that famous work. His description of the scene is marvellously exact, and the Tapestry phrase, in which Odo _confortat pueros_--often a subject of discussion--is at once explained by his making the _pueri_ whom Odo 'comforted' to be--

Vaslez, qui al herneis esteient E le herneis garder deueient.

Of these varlets in charge of the 'harness' he had already spoken (ll. 7963-7). The difficulty of accounting for Wace, as a canon of Bayeux, being unacquainted with the Tapestry is, of course, obvious. But in any case he cannot have used it, as we do ourselves, among his foremost authorities.

In discussing his use of William of Jumièges, we stand on much surer ground. It certainly strikes one as strange that in mentioning the obvious error by which Wace makes Harold receive his wound in the eye early in the fight (l. 8185), before the great feigned flight, Mr Freeman does not suggest its derivation from William of Jumièges, though he proceeds to add (p. 771):

I need hardly stop to refute the strange mistake of William of Jumièges, followed by Orderic: 'Heraldus ipse in primo militum progressu ['Congressu', _Ord._] vulneribus letaliter confossus occubuit'.

But a worse instance of the contradictions involved by the patchwork and secondary character of Wace's narrative is found in his statement as to Harold's arrival on the field of battle. 'Wace,' says Mr Freeman, 'makes the English reach Senlac on Thursday night' (p. 441). So he does, even adding that Harold

fist son estandart drecier Et fist son gonfanon fichier Iloc tot dreit ou l'abeie De la Bataille est establie. (ll. 6985-8)

But Mr Freeman must have overlooked the very significant fact that when the battle is about to begin, Wace tells a different story, and makes Harold only occupy the battlefield on the Saturday morning:

Heraut sout que Normant vendreient E que par main se combatreient: Un champ out _par matin_ porpris, Ou il a toz ses Engleis mis. _Par matin_ les fist toz armer E a bataille conreer. (ll. 7768-72)

I have little doubt that he here follows William of Jumièges: '[Heraldus] in campo belli apparuit mane', and that he was thus led to contradict himself.

Mr Freeman had a weakness for Wace, and did not conceal it: he insisted on the poet's 'honesty'. But 'honesty' is not knowledge; and in dealing with the battle, it is not allowable to slur over Wace's imperfect knowledge. Mr Freeman admits that 'probably he did not know the ground, and did not take in the distance between Hastings and Battle' (p. 762). But he charitably suggests that 'it is possible that when he says "en un tertre s'estut li dus" he meant the hill of Telham, only without any notion of its distance from Hastings'. But, in spite of this attempt to smooth over the discrepancy, it is impossible to reconcile Wace's narrative with that of Mr Freeman. The latter makes the duke deliver his speech at Hastings, and then march with his knights to Telham, and there arm. But Wace imagined that they armed in their quarters at Hastings ('Issi sunt as tentes ale'), and straightway fought. The events immediately preceding the battle are far more doubtful and difficult to determine than could be imagined from Mr Freeman's narrative, but I must confine myself to Wace's version. I have shown that his account is not consistent as to the movements of Harold, while as to the topography, 'his primary blunder', as Mr Freeman terms it, 'of reversing the geographical order, by making William land at Hastings and thence go to Pevensey', together with his obvious ignorance of the character and position of the battlefield, must, of course, lower our opinion of his accuracy, and of the value of the oral tradition at his disposal.

To rely 'mainly'[46] on such a writer, in preference to the original authorities he confused, or to follow him when, in Mr Freeman's words, he actually 'departs from contemporary authority, and merely sets down floating traditions nearly a hundred years after the latest events which he records'--betrays the absence of a critical faculty, or the consciousness of a hopeless cause.

[Footnote 1: Dismissing _ut supra_ the 'fosse' passage, which neither mentions nor implies it, together with the passage from Henry of Huntingdon.]

[Footnote 2: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 763-4. I have shown in the _English Historical Review_ (ix. 225) that he meant here by the shield-wall 'exactly what he meant by it elsewhere', a shield-wall and nothing else.]

[Footnote 3: _Cont. Rev._, 344.]

[Footnote 4: _English Historical Review_, ix. 231-40.]

[Footnote 5: _English Historical Review_, ix. 2.]

[Footnote 6: _Ibid._, 260.]

[Footnote 7: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 763-4.]

[Footnote 8: _Cont. Rev._, p. 348.]

[Footnote 9: _English Historical Review_, ix. 17-20.]

[Footnote 10: I explained, in one of my replies to Mr Archer, that this statement applied _only_ to its usage '_in Wace_' (_Academy_, September 16, 1893), but, characteristically, he has not hesitated to suppress this explanation, and renew his sneers at my knowledge of 'Old French', on the ground of a statement which, I had explained, was not my meaning (_English Historical Review_, ix. 604). It is difficult to describe such devices as these.

Common as the word is in Wace, I have never found any other instance of its use (_i.e._ by him) in a metaphorical sense, nor, if there is one, has Mr Archer attempted to produce it.]

[Footnote 11: _Infra_, pp. 313-18.]

[Footnote 12: _English Historical Review_, ix. 260.]

[Footnote 13: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 736-7.]

[Footnote 14: The word 'fenestres', for instance, which Mr Archer first rendered 'ash', out of deference to Mr Freeman and his predecessors, but subsequently 'windows' (_English Historical Review_, ix. 18), is either a corruption or quite inexplicable. 'If it pleases Mr Archer,' as I wrote (_ibid._, 236), 'to construct a barricade, of which "windows" are the chief ingredient, on an uninhabited Sussex down, in 1066, he is perfectly welcome to do so.' I may add that the rendering adopted by the two French scholars does not in the least alter my view as to the improbability, or rather absurdity, of the suggestion.]

[Footnote 15: _Ibid._, ix. 244.]

[Footnote 16: _Q.R._, July 1893, p. 95.]

[Footnote 17: _English Historical Review_, ix. 251-3. I was careful to add that 'if it be claimed that his text is contradictory, this would but prove further how confused his mind really was as to the battle' (p. 252). Mr Archer, as I anticipated, now prints, as a conclusive reply (_ibid._, ix. 603), words which look the other way, ignoring, as usual, the quotations on which I explicitly relied. He has thereby, as I said, only proved how confused, here as elsewhere, Mr Freeman's conception was.]

[Footnote 18: Mr Archer now prefers to leave its details doubtful (_English Historical Review_, ix. 606).]

[Footnote 19: As I have shown in _ibid._, ix. 244-5.]

[Footnote 20: _Cont. Rev._, 344.]

[Footnote 21: _Ibid._, 346.]

[Footnote 22: I have shown (_Academy_, September 16, 1893) by reference to Godefroi and Michel that either Mr Archer or they must here have been ignorant of Old French. The former alternative seems to be accepted.]

[Footnote 23: _Supra_, pp. 269-70.]

[Footnote 24: The case of the battle of Varaville, in 1058, is precisely similar in this respect to that of the Battle of Hastings. Of the former Mr Freeman writes: 'Wace alone speaks, throughout his narrative, of a bridge. All the other writers speak only of a ford' (iii. 173). Now Wace's authority was better for this, the earlier battle, because, says Mr Freeman, he knew the ground. Yet the Professor did not hesitate to reject his 'bridge'. So again, in 'the campaign of Hastings', Mr Freeman rejects 'the falsehood of the story of William burning his ships, of which the first traces appear in Wace' (iii. 408). So much for placing our reliance upon Wace, when he stands alone.]

[Footnote 25: _Q.R._, July 1893, p. 96.]

[Footnote 26: Mr Archer's limit is 1066-1210.]

[Footnote 27: We have, I suspect, a similar instance, in Wace's _gisarmes_ (ll. 7794, 7814, 8328, 8332, 8342, 8587, 8629, 8656). An excellent vindication of the Bayeux Tapestry--oddly enough overlooked by Mr Freeman--namely, M. Delauney's 'Origine de la Tapisserie de Bayeux prouvée par elle-même' (Caen, 1824)--discusses the weapons, the author observing: 'La hache d'armes ressemble à celle de nos sapeurs; celle des temps postèrieurs au xi^{e} siècle à, dans les monuments, une espèce de petite lance au-dessus de la douille du côté opposé au tranchant' (see Jubinal, _La Tapisserie de Bayeux_, p. 17). This exactly describes the true _gisarme_, a later introduction. So again, Wace makes the _chevalier_ who has hurried from Hastings exclaim to Harold:

'Un chastel i ont ia ferme De _breteschese_ de fosse' (ll. 6717-8),

whereas _bretasches_ of course were impossible at the time. One is reminded of the description, by Piramus, of the coming of the English, when 'over the broad sea Britain they sought':

'Leuent bresteches od kernels, Ke cuntrevalent bons chastels, De herituns [? hericuns] e de paliz Les cernent, si funt riulez Del quer des cheygnes, forze e halz, Ki ne criement sieges ne asalz.'

(_Vie Seint Edmund le Rey_, ll. 228-33.)]

[Footnote 28: _English Historical Review_, ix. 66.]

[Footnote 29: _Ibid._, 31-7, 17-18, and throughout his paper.]

[Footnote 30: _Ibid._, ix. 32.]

[Footnote 31: 'Al siege de Rouen le quidierent gaber' (l. 62).]

[Footnote 32: 'Demn nicht etwa am Schlusse, sondern gleich zu Anfang des genannten Theiles' (l. 179) 'spricht er von den drei Königen Heinrich die er gesehen und gekannt' (p. xciv).]

[Footnote 33: 'Nimmt man das Jahr 1110 als Geburtsjahr des Dichters an', etc. (p. xciv).]

[Footnote 34: _English Historical Review_, ix. 33. It need scarcely be said that these 'old heroes' would be found rather in England than in Normandy.]

[Footnote 35: _Ibid._, ix. 17.

'Assez vi homes qui la virent, Qui ainz e pois longues vesquirent.']

[Footnote 36: _Ibid._, ix. 33.]

[Footnote 37: Compare his scornful rejection (iii. 469-71) of Wace's tales in ll. 7875-950.]

[Footnote 38: _English Historical Review_, ix. 34.]

[Footnote 39: Reprinted from _ibid._, October 1893.]

[Footnote 40: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 783.]

[Footnote 41: iii. 402, note 2.]

[Footnote 42: iii. 782.]

[Footnote 43: I mean, as I explained above, elsewhere in Wace.]

[Footnote 44: He describes, as Mr Freeman observed, King Henry bidding the English 'meet the charge of the Norman knights by standing firm in the array of the ancient shield-wall' (_William Rufus_, ii. 411).]

[Footnote 45: _Cont. Rev._, March 1893, p. 351.]

[Footnote 46: 'It is upon Wace that we shall mainly rely.' _Cont. Rev._, p. 344.]

NOTE ON THE PSEUDO-INGULF

I owe to my friend Mr Hubert Hall the suggestion that the great battle described by the Pseudo-Ingulf as taking place between the English and the Danes in 870--and all accepted as sober fact by Turner in his _History of the Anglo-Saxons_--may be a concoction based on the facts of the battle of Hastings. This is also the theory Mr Freeman advanced as to Snorro's story of the battle of Stamford Bridge. The coincidence is very striking. In both narratives the defending force is formed with 'the dense shield-wall';[1] in both it breaks at length that formation; in both it is, consequently, overwhelmed; and in both cases the attacking force consists of horsemen and archers. But the most curious coincidence is found in the principal weapon of the defending force. In Snorro's narrative, as Mr Freeman renders it, 'a dense wood of spears bristles in front of the circle to receive the charge of the English horsemen';[2] in the Pseudo-Ingulf the defending force 'contra violentiam equitum densissimam aciem lancearum prætendebant'.[3] Such a defence savours of the days when the knight, fighting on foot with his lance,[4] had replaced the housecarl with his battle-axe: it was not that of Harold's host, but one which we meet with in the twelfth century.

There are marks, however, in the Pseudo-Ingulf, of study, not merely of the Battle of Hastings, but of William of Malmesbury's account of it. From him, it would seem, are taken the words 'testudo' and 'tumulus'. The first parallel passages are these:

WILLIAM 'INGULF'

Conserta ante se _scutorum In unum cuneum conglobati, testudine_, impenetrabilem ... _testudinem clypeorum_ cuneum faciunt. prætendebant.

Again, after the disaster caused, in each case, by a feigned flight, we have the rally thus described:

WILLIAM 'INGULF'

nec tamen ultioni suæ defuere, in quodam campi _tumulo_ cetera quin crebro consistentes ... planitie aliquantulum altiore occupato _tumulo_, Normannos, in orbem conferti, barbaros calore succensos acriter ad arietantes diutissime superiora nitentes, in vallem sustinuerunt ... suum sanguinem dejiciunt. vindicantes.

The Pseudo-Ingulf alludes but briefly to the Battle of Hastings itself. Yet here again we have traces of William of Malmesbury's words in 'nec de toto exercitu, præter paucissimos eum aliquis concomitatur' and 'more gregarii militis manu ad manum congrediens', which phrases are applied to Harold.

[Footnote 1: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 367.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, p. 365.]

[Footnote 3: Ed. 1684, p. 21.]

[Footnote 4: _Vide supra_, p. 279. Cf. the fight at Jaffa, August 5, 1192.]

REGENBALD, PRIEST AND CHANCELLOR

No better illustration could be given of the fact that valuable historical evidence may lurk, even in print, unknown, than the charters printed, from the Cirencester Cartulary, by Sir Thomas Phillips in _Archæologia_ (1836).[1] One can imagine how highly prized they would have been by Mr Freeman, had he only known of their existence.

Regenbald, of whom Sir Thomas would seem never to have heard, was the first Chancellor of England.[2] Mr Freeman called him, I know not on what authority, 'the Norman chancellor of Eadward'. Whatever his nationality, it is well established that he was that king's chancellor. He occurs repeatedly in Domesday, where he is distinguished as 'Canceler', 'Presbyter', and 'de Cirencestre'. We learn also from its pages that he held land in at least three counties--Berkshire, Herefordshire, and Dorset T.R.E.--and that he seems to have received further grants from King William in his return.[3]

The three charters of which I treat are found in the Cirencester Cartulary and are in Anglo-Saxon. The first is one of King Edward's in favour of 'Reinbold min preost', and is a confirmation to him of soc and sac, toll and team, etc., as his predecessors had enjoyed it 'on Cnutes kinges daie'. The third is a notification from King William that 'ic hæbbe geunnen Regenbald minan preoste eall his lond' as 'he hit under Ed[w]earde hædde mine meie'. The chief points to be noticed here are that the land is granted _de novo_, not confirmed, and that the Conqueror speaks of Regenbald as 'minan preoste', implying that he has taken him into his service.

It is the second of these charters that is of quite extraordinary importance. I here append it _in extenso_ as printed by Sir Thomas Phillips:

'Vyllelm king gret Hereman b. & Wulstan b. & Eustace eorl & Eadrich & Bristrich & ealle mine þegenes on [W]yltoneshyre & on Glouc'shyre fronliche & ic cuþe eo[w] ic habbe geunnan Reinbold mina preost [þt] land æt Esi & [þt] land æt Latton & ealle þæra þinge [þt] þar to lið binnan port & buten mið sace & mið socne s[w]a full and s[w]a forð s[w]a his furmest on hondan stodan Harald kinge on ællan þingan on dæge & æfter to atheonne s[w]a s[w]a ealra lefest ys & ic nelle nenna men geþafian [þt] him fram honda teo ænig þære þinga þæs þa ic him geunne habbe bi minan freonshype.'

The relevant entry in Domesday speaks for itself:

Reinbaldus presbyter tenet Latone et Aisi. Duo taini tenuerunt pro II. Maneriis T.R.E. Heraldus comes junxit in unum. Geldabat pro ix. hidis (68_b_).

If the charter were nothing more than a grant from the Conqueror to a private individual of lands duly entered in Domesday, it would, I believe, as such be unique. Historians have long and vainly sought for any genuine charter of the kind; and here it has been in print for nearly sixty years.

But the document, I hope to show, does far more for us than this: it opens a new chapter in the history of the Norman Conquest.

We first notice that the writ is addressed not to Norman, but to English authorities. The only exception is Count Eustace, who was, of course, not a Norman, and who was known in England before the Conquest as brother-in-law to Edward the Confessor. The obvious inference is that, at the time this writ was issued, Norman government had not yet been set up in the district. Urse d'Abetot, for instance, the dreaded sheriff of Worcestershire, would probably have been addressed in conjunction with Bishop Wulstan had he been then in power. But we know that he came into power soon after the Conquest, for he had time to be guilty of oppression and to be rebuked for it by Ealdred before that Primate's death in 1069. But as our writ is of this early date, it must be previous to the treason of Count Eustace in 1067. It must therefore belong to the beginning of that year, when William had only recently been crowned king.

We see then here, I think, the Conqueror, in his first days as an English king, addressing his subjects, in a part of the realm not yet under Norman sway, and doing so in their own tongue and in the forms to which they were accustomed. As King Edward in his charter to Regenbald had greeted bishops, earls, and sheriffs, so here his successor greets two bishops, 'Eustace Eorl', and two Englishmen representing the power of the sheriff. And so again in his charter to London he began by greeting the Bishop and the Portreeve.[4]

The writ, it will be seen, is addressed to the authorities of Gloucestershire and Wilts. The estate lay in the latter county, but the connection of Regenbald de 'Cirencestre' with Glo'stershire may account for the inclusion of that county. Can we identify 'Eadrich' and 'Bristrich' with any local magnates? With some confidence I boldly suggest that the latter was no other than the 'Bristricus' of the Exon Domesday, that famous Brihtric, the son of Ælfgar, who, to quote from the appendix Mr Freeman devotes to him, 'appears distinctly as a great landowner in most of the western shires', one from whose vast domains was carved out later the great Honour of Gloucester. Until now, all we have known of him has been derived from the Domesday entries of his estates T.R.E. and from the legend which associates his name with that of Queen Matilda. But this charter enables us to say that he was living and still holding his great position in the west in the early days of William's reign.[5]

From 'Bristric' I turn to 'Eadric', and ask if we may not here recognize 'Eadric the Wild' himself? This can only be matter of conjecture, but it is certain that these two Englishmen are here assigned the place that would be given to a sheriff, and that 'Eadric the Wild'--'quidam præpotens minister', as Florence terms him--was a magnate in the west (Herefordshire and Shropshire) at the time of the Conquest. Mr Freeman terms him 'a man about whom we should gladly know more'. It is stated by Orderic that he was one of those who came in and submitted to William at the outset. But Mr Freeman held it 'far more likely that he did not submit till a much later time', because Florence says of him in William's absence: 'se dedere Regi dedignabatur'. Orderic's statement, however, is not denied, and Florence's words seem to me quite explicable by the hypothesis that Eadric had refused the 'dangerous honour', as Mr Freeman terms it, of following William to Normandy in 1067 among 'his English attendants or hostages'. Harried, in consequence, by his Norman neighbours, he retaliated by ravaging Herefordshire in August of that year; while Count Eustace also threw off his allegiance and made his descent on Dover.

If the identity of 'Eadric' is matter of conjecture, that of 'Eustace eorl' is certain. But no one has known, or even suspected, that he held, at this period, high position in the west. It may be that, as I have already hinted, he was sent by William to a district, as yet only nominally subject, as being, from his previous connection with England, less obnoxious than a Norman was likely to prove. It would be refining overmuch to suggest that William might also intend to establish him as far as possible from his base of operations at Boulogne.

In any case, we have in this charter a welcome addition to our scanty knowledge of that obscure period when William, as it were, was feeling his feet as an English king. Nor is it its least important feature that it shows us William, contrary to what Mr Freeman held to be his fundamental rule, speaking of his predecessor as 'Harald kinge'.

Before taking leave of Regenbald, we may glance at one of the Domesday entries relating to his lands. Mr Freeman, in two distinct passages, wrote as follows:

An entry in 99 reads as if the The rights of the antecessor are same Regenbald had been defrauded handed on to the grantee of his of land by a Norman tenant of his land.... So in Exon 432. own. 'Ricardus tenet in Rode i. 'Ricardus interpres habet hidam, quam ipse tenuit de i. hidam terræ in Roda quam ipse Rainboldo presbytero licentia emit de Rainboldo sacerdote regis, ut dicit. Reinbold vero [Eadward's chancellor?] per tenuit T.R.E.' licentiam regis, ut dicit qui (_Norm. Conq._, v. 751) tenuit eam die qua Rex E. fuit[6] et mortuus.' (_Ibid._, p. 784)

Although these two passages are found in two different appendices, the entries thus diversely adduced, are, of course, one and the same. But, it will be seen, the 'tenuit' of Domesday is equated by the 'emit' of the Exon book. One of the two must be wrong. I should accept the Exon text because 'emit licentia regis' is the right Domesday phrase, because it makes better sense, and because it is a sound principle of textual criticism that the Exchequer scribe was more likely to write the usual 'tenuit' for the exceptional 'emit' than the Exon scribe to do the converse. I should then read the passage thus: 'emit de Rainboldo sacerdote--per licentiam regis, ut dicit--qui tenuit eam die', etc.

If my view be adopted, we here detect noteworthy error in our great and sacrosanct record.

The charter of Henry I to Cirencester Abbey--in which he had placed Canons Regular, and of which he claimed to be the founder--sets, as it were, the coping-stone on the story of Regenbald.[7] In it we read:

Dedi et concessi ... totam tenuram Reimbaldi presbyteri in terris et ecclesiis, et ceteris omnibusquæ subscripta sunt....

De rebus autem predictis quæ fuerunt Rembaldi hec statuimus.

The details of Regenbald's possessions are given, and are of special value for collation with Domesday. They set him before us not only as a landowner in five different counties, but also as the first great pluralist. Sixteen churches, rich in tithes and glebe--one might really term them 'fat livings'--had passed into the hands of Regenbald 'the priest'. From the king's phrase, '_dedi_ et concessi', he would seem to have been not merely confirming an endowment by Regenbald, but granting lands which had escheated to himself.[8]

And this conclusion is confirmed by the fact that the king, while granting them, especially reserved the life interest of the Bishop of Salisbury and of two others--one of them, alas! a bishop's nephew--who must have acquired their rights since Regenbald's death.

This charter, apart from its contents, is of great interest from its mention of the place where and the time when it was granted, together with its list of witnesses. These were the two Archbishops, the Bishops of Salisbury, Winchester, Lincoln, Durham, Ely, Hereford, and Rochester: Robert 'de Sigillo', Robert de Ver, Miles of Gloucester, Robert d'Oilli, Hugh Bigot, Robert de Curci, Payne 'filius Johannis et Eustacio et Willelmo fratribus ejus, et Willelmo de Albini Britone'. The charter was granted 'apud Burnam in transfretatione mea anno incarnationis Domini MCXXXIII. regni vero mei XXXIII.'; and 'Burna', as I have elsewhere shown,[9] was Westbourne in Sussex, on the border of Hampshire, then in the king's hands by forfeiture and near the coast. Here therefore we see the king, when leaving England for the last time, surrounded by his prelates and ministers, and are enabled to say positively who were with him. I would note the predominance of the official class represented by the Bishops of Salisbury, Lincoln, and Ely, by the late chancellor, the Bishop of Durham, and by laymen who are found specially entrusted with administrative work. A long list of witnesses such as this is specially characteristic of the closing period of the reign,[10] and, of course, always possesses biographical value.[11]

Another English writ of the Conqueror, which may be profitably compared with that we have discussed, is found in one of the cartularies of Bury St Edmund's.[12] Its address, as rendered in the transcript, runs:

William [_sic_] kyng gret Ægelmær Bischop and Raulf Eorl and Nordman and ealle myne thegnaes on Sudfolke frendliche.

This writ is obviously previous to the deposition of Bishop Æthelmær in April, 1070, but how far previous it is not easy to say. 'Nordman' is clearly the sheriff of Suffolk, who appears in Domesday as 'Normannus Vicecomes' (II. 438). His name affords presumption, though not proof, that he was of English birth;[13] and as his Domesday holding consisted only of rights over two Ipswich burgesses (which he may have acquired during his shrievalty) he is hardly likely to have been one of the conquering race. Of the third official, Earl Ralf, we know a good deal. Mr Freeman was much puzzled by this 'somewhat mysterious person',[14] but eventually came to the conclusion that 'there were two Ralfs in Norfolk, father and son, the younger being the son of a Breton mother: the elder was staller under Edward and Earl under William'. The younger was the Earl of Norfolk (or 'of the East Angles'), who rebelled and was forfeited in 1075; the elder was that 'Rawulf' who, in the words of the chronicle, 'wæs Englisc and wæs geboren on Norðfolce'. Putting our evidence together, I lean strongly to the view that we have here, as in the case of Regenbald, a writ addressed to English authorities before Norfolk had passed into the hands of Norman authorities. Mr Freeman held that a passage in Domesday (II. 194), to which he had given much attention, should be read--'Hanc terram habuit A[rfastus] episcopus in tempore utrorumque [Radulforum]', and that therefore 'the elder Ralph was living as late as 1070, in which year the episcopate of Erfast begins'. But the context clearly shows that we should read 'A[ilmarus] episcopus', and that, therefore, the elder Ralf died before Æthelmær was deposed. Moreover, Norwich, we are specially told, was entrusted by the Conqueror to William fitz Osbern before his departure from England in March 1067. William was placed, some two years later, in charge of York castle, and we read in Mr Freeman's work that 'the man who now (autumn, 1069) commanded at Norwich, and who was already, or soon afterwards, invested with the East-Anglian Earldom, was the renegade native of the shire, Ralf of Wader'.[15] This, it will be seen, contradicts his own, and supports my reading of the Domesday passage quoted above. Everything therefore points to the 'Raulf Eorl' of our writ dying or being deposed shortly after the Conquest.

Before taking leave of this writ we may note that, dealing as it does with Suffolk, it is addressed to Earl Ralf as Earl, not merely of Norfolk, but of East Anglia. This is of some importance, because Mr Freeman wrote, speaking of the Regents appointed in 1067:

There was no longer to be an Earl of the West Saxons or an Earl of the East Angles.... Returning in this to earlier English practice, the Earl under William was to have the rule of a single shire only, or if two shires were ever set under one Earl they were at least not to be adjoining shires. The results of this change have been of the highest moment. (iv. 70.)

Yet on page 253, as we have seen, we read of 'the East Anglian Earldom', and on page 573 that the younger Ralph 'had received the Earldom of East Anglia'--Florence of Worcester distinctly terming him 'East-Anglorum comite'. Mr Freeman, indeed, was led by this passage to style him 'Earl of Norfolk or of the East Angles'.[16] I believe this latter style to be perfectly correct, and, as I have shown in my _Geoffrey de Mandeville_ (p. 191), to apply even to the Bigod earldom in the days of Stephen.

The curious English writ that has suggested these considerations ought to be compared with a Latin one, also in favour of St Edmund's, on which I lighted in examining the 'Registrum Album' of the Abbey. It is one of those exceedingly rare documents that find their correlatives in Domesday. The words of the writ are these:

W. rex Anglor' E. epo. B. Abbi W. Malet salm. sciatis vos mei fideles me concessisse servitium de Liuremere quam Werno hactenus de me tenuit sancto Ædmundo Et filia Guernonis in vita sua de Abbate B. tenuit.[17]

The last clause is clearly an addition by the cartulary scribe. Now this charter being addressed, like the other, to Æthelmær ('Ethelmerus'), Bishop of the East Angles, is, of course, previous to April 1070. I should, therefore, also place it previous to the capture of William Malet at York in September 1069. But this, unlike the other date, is matter of probability rather than of proof. Mr Freeman believed that William returned, and died 'in the marshes of Ely' (1071), but this is only a guess in which I cannot concur.[18] In any case, we have evidence here of this well-known man having held a position in Suffolk (where he owned the great Honour of Eye) analogous to that of sheriff. He may have succeeded Northman in that office.

The relevant Domesday entry is as follows:

Hujus terram rex accepit de abbate et dedit Guernoni depeiz [de Peiz]. Postea licencia regis deveniens monachus reddidit terram. (363_b_.)

The charter records, I take it, the 'licencia regis' of Domesday.[19]

[Footnote 1: Vol. xxvi., p. 256.]

[Footnote 2: Not counting Leofric, styled 'regis cancellarius' by Florence in 1046.]

[Footnote 3: See my life of him in _Dictionary of National Biography_.]

[Footnote 4: It might even be suggested that not only this charter but the Essex writ in favour of Deorman (addressed to Bishop William and Swegen the sheriff) belonged to the same early period. Compare, however, the Conqueror's Old English writ that I have discussed ('Londoners and the Chase') in the _Athenæum_ of June 30, 1894.]

[Footnote 5: It is a noteworthy coincidence that 'Brihtricus princeps' and 'Eadricus princeps' are among the witnesses to Harold's Waltham charter in 1062, which Regenbald himself also attests as Chancellor.]

[Footnote 6: _sic._]

[Footnote 7: See _Monast. Anglic._, ii. 177.]

[Footnote 8: It is possible, I think, that the only endowment entered to the church at Cirencester in Domesday, viz., two hides at Cirencester, had been originally given by Regenbald.]

[Footnote 9: Henry I, at 'Burne' (_English Historical Review_, 1895).]

[Footnote 10: As in the charters to Aubrey de Vere (_Baronia Anglica_, 158) and William Mauduit.]

[Footnote 11: Here, it would seem, is further proof of the Bishops of Ely and Durham assuming their styles before consecration (_infra_, pp. 366-7).]

[Footnote 12: Harl. MS., 743, fo. 8_d_.]

[Footnote 13: Mr Freeman held him to be an Englishman.]

[Footnote 14: _Norm. Conq._ (2nd Ed.), iii. 773. Cf. 1st Ed., iii. 752-3; iv. 277.]

[Footnote 15: _Ibid._ (1st Ed.), iv. 252-3.]

[Footnote 16: _Ibid._ (2nd.), iii. 773.]

[Footnote 17: Add. MS., 14,314, fo. 32_b_ (pencil).]

[Footnote 18: See my letter on 'the death of William Malet' in _Academy_ of August 26, 1884.]

[Footnote 19: Since this paper was written, there has appeared the valuable Bath Cartulary (Somerset Record Society) containing a most remarkable charter (p. 36), which should be closely compared with those to Regenbald. It is issued by William the King and William the Earl, and must undoubtedly be assigned to the former's absence from England, March-December 1067. It shows us therefore William fitz Osbern acting as Regent and anticipating the office of the later Great Justiciar by inserting in the document his own name. This charter, like that to Regenbald, is addressed to the still English authorities of an unconquered district.]

THE CONQUEROR AT EXETER

'And y seide nay, and proved hit by Domesday.'[1]

For a companion study to the Battle of Hastings, one could not select a better subject than the Siege of Exeter by William in 1068. It is so, because, in the tale of the Conquest, 'No city of England', in Mr Freeman's words, 'comes so distinctly to the front as Exeter':[2] and because, as editor of 'Historic Towns', he chose Exeter, out of all others, as the town to be reserved for himself.[3] 'Its siege by William', we are told, 'is one of the most important events of his reign';[4] but it was doubtless the alleged 'federal' character of Exeter's attitude at this crisis that gave its story for him an interest so unique. This episode, moreover, has many advantages: it is complete in itself; it is rich in suggestion; it is taken from the period in which the Professor described himself as 'most at home'; and its scene is laid within his own borders, his own West Saxon land. It presents an admirable test of Mr Freeman's work at the point where he was admittedly strongest, and his thoroughly typical treatment of it affords a perfect illustration of the method he employed.

The year 1067 was drawing to its close when the Conqueror, summoned back from Normandy by the tidings of pressing danger, returned to spend his Christmas at Westminster amidst 'the sea of troubles which still awaited him in his half-conquered island-kingdom'.[5] Threatened at once by foes within and without the realm, he perceived the vital necessity of severing their forces by instant suppression of the 'rebellions' at home, _swift_ suppression before the invaders were upon him, _stern_ suppression before the movement spread. Let us bear in mind these twin motives, by which his policy must at this juncture have been shaped, the need for _swiftness_, with invasion in prospect, and the need for _sternness_ as a warning to 'rebels'.

Of all the 'rebellious' movements on foot, that at Exeter, as Mr Freeman admits, was 'specially hateful in William's eyes'.[6] It was against Exeter, therefore, that the Conqueror directed his first blow. In the depths of winter, in the early days of the new year, 'he fared to Devonshire'. Such is the brief statement of the English Chronicle.

We hear of William at Westminster; we next hear of him before the walls of Exeter: all that intervenes is a sheer blank. Of what happened on this long westward march not a single detail is preserved to us in the Chronicle, in Orderic or in Florence. Now it is precisely such a blank as this that, to Mr Freeman, was irresistible. We shall see below how, a few months later, we have, in William's march from Warwick to Nottingham, a blank exactly parallel.[7] There also Mr Freeman succumbed to the temptation. He seized, in each case, on the empty canvas, and, by a few rapid and suggestive touches, he has boldly filled it in with the outlines of historical events, not merely events for which there is no sufficient evidence, but events which can be proved, by demonstration, to have had no foundation in fact.

The scene elaborated by Mr Freeman to enliven the void between the departure from London and the entrance into Devonshire is THE RESISTANCE AND THE DOWNFALL OF 'THE CIVIC LEAGUE'.[8] This striking incident in the Exeter campaign I propose to analyse without further delay.

It must, in the first place, be pointed out that we have no proof whatever of this 'Civic League' having even existed. To apply Mr Freeman's words to his own narrative:

The story is perfectly possible. We only ask for the proof. Show us the proof;... then we will believe. Without such a proof we will not believe.[9]

For proof of its existence Mr Freeman relies on a solitary passage in Orderic.[10] But Orderic, it will at once be seen, does not say that any such league was effected; he does not even say that the league which was contemplated was intended to be an exclusively Civic League. What he does say is that the men of Exeter sought for allies in the neighbouring coasts (_plagæ_)[11] and in other cities. The Dorset townlets, such as Bridport, with its 120 houses, would scarcely represent these 'cities'. Mr Freeman assumed, however, that 'the Civic League' was formed, assumed that the Dorset towns had 'doubtless' joined it, and finally assumed that they were 'no doubt' besieged by William in consequence.[12] These assumptions he boldly connected with the entries on the towns in Domesday, entries which we shall analyse below, and which are not only incorrectly rendered, but are directly opposed to the above assumptions.

What, then, is the inference to be drawn? Simply this. The 'Civic League' must share the fate of the 'palisade on Senlac'. The sieges which took place 'probably' never took place at all; the League never resisted; the League never fell; in short, there is not a scrap of evidence that there was ever such a League at all. The existence of such a League would be, unquestionably, a fact of great importance. But its very importance imperatively requires that its existence should be established by indisputable proof. Of such proof there is none. One can imagine how severely Mr Freeman would have handled such guesses from others. For he wrote of a deceased Somersetshire historian who boldly connects the story of Gisa with the banishment of Godwine:

One is inclined to ask with Henry II, 'Quære a rustico illo utrum hoc somniaverit?' But these things have their use. Every instance in the growth of a legend affords practice in the art of distinguishing legend from history.

It should, however, in justice be at once added that this story did not originate wholly with Mr Freeman himself. He refers us on the subject of the League to his predecessor, Sir Francis Palgrave. The brilliant imagination of that graceful writer was indeed led captive by the fascinating vision of 'the first Federal Commonwealth', yet he did not allow himself, when dealing with the facts, to deviate from the exact truth. His statement that Exeter '_attempted to form_ a defensive confederation' reproduces with scrupulous accuracy Orderic's words. And even when he passed from fact to conjecture, there was nothing in his conjecture at variance from fact. From him we have no suggestion that the Dorset towns resisted William or 'stood sieges'. It was left for Mr Freeman to carry into action Palgrave's line of thought, and, by forcing the evidence of the Domesday Survey into harmony with the story he had evolved, to show us, in his own words, 'the growth of a legend'. For, as he observed with perfect truth:

What we call the growth of a story is really the result of the action of a number of human wills. The convenient metaphor must not delude us into thinking that a story really grows of itself as a tree grows. In a crowd of cases ... the story comes of a state of mind which does not willingly sin against historical truth, but which has not yet learned that there is such a thing as historical truth.

Had Mr Freeman done so himself? Did he ever really learn to distinguish conjecture from fact? One asks this because within the covers of a single work, his _English Towns and Districts_, that Civic League which in the _Norman Conquest_ is said to have existed 'no doubt', is in one place said to have existed 'perhaps', and in another is set forth as an undoubted historic fact:

Exeter stood forth for one moment ... the chief of a confederation of the lesser towns of the West.... A confederation of the western towns, with the great city of the district at their head, suddenly started into life to check the progress of the Conqueror.

Finally, in his 'Exeter' (1887), the same story again appears, without a word of caution, as absolute historic fact. Exeter, we read, was

the head of a gathering of smaller commonwealths around her; ... the towns of Dorset were in league with Exeter.... We have no record of the march, but it is plain that the towns of Dorset were fearfully harried.

Through all Mr Freeman's work we trace this same tendency to confuse his own conjectures with proved historic fact.

For the details of this fearful harrying we are referred to the Domesday Survey. It was 'no doubt', we learn, when William marched on Exeter (1068), that

Dorchester, Bridport, Wareham, and Shaftesbury underwent that fearful harrying, the result of which is recorded in Domesday. Bridport was utterly ruined; not a house seems to have been able to pay taxes at the time of the Survey. At Dorchester, the old Roman settlement, the chief town of the shire, only a small remnant of the houses escaped destruction. These facts are signs, etc., etc.

'These facts', we find, will not bear investigation. To refute them in the case of Bridport, 'there is nothing to be done but to turn to the proper place in the great Survey'. Following this, his own, precept, we learn that there is nothing in Domesday of our author's 'utter ruin'; and that so far from 'not a house' being 'able to pay taxes', Domesday tells us that four-fifths of the houses then existing could and did pay them. Here, again, the errors arose from not reading Domesday 'with common care'. The entry runs: 'Modo sunt ibi c. domus, et xx. sunt ita destitutæ', etc. The meaning, of course, is that twenty houses were impoverished. Mr Freeman must have hurriedly misconstrued his Latin, and read it as a hundred and twenty. No error that he detected in Mr Froude could be worse than representing Bridport, on the authority of Domesday, as the greatest sufferer among the Dorset towns, when Domesday itself proves that it suffered least of all. And so, too, with Dorchester. On turning to Domesday, we learn with surprise that the 'small remnant' of houses remaining there was eighty-eight as against one hundred and seventy-two in the days of King Edward. From an appendix of our author's to which we are referred, we glean the fact that

at Dorchester, out of a hundred and seventy-two houses no less than a hundred and twenty-eight were 'penitus destructæ a tempore Hugonis vicecomitis usque nunc'.

Here, again, Mr Freeman's error can be traced beyond the possibility of question, to a misreading of Domesday: the entry runs, 'modo sunt ibi quater xx. et viii. [88] domus, et c. [sunt] penitus destructæ'. Mr Freeman must have hurriedly ignored the 'quater', and then added the 'twenty-eight' thus evolved to the hundred houses that were destroyed. All this Mr Freeman did, and we have in 'that great record, from which there is no appeal', the proof of the fact. Clearly, in the notable words of M. Bémont (_Revue Historique_), 'il est prudent de revoir après lui les textes qu'il invoque'.[13]

The strange thing is that Sir Henry Ellis's work, though 'far from being up to the present standard of historical scholarship', could have saved him, here also, from error, as it gives the correct figures from Domesday.

But passing from 'facts' to theories, we find Mr Freeman holding that 'no doubt', 'doubtless', 'probably', the destruction recorded in Domesday was wrought by the Conqueror himself in 1068. Why should this guesswork be substituted for history, when we have 'always the means', as our author himself wrote, 'of at once turning to the law and testimony to see whether these things are so'? A glance at Domesday effectually disposes of Mr Freeman's theory; for the Survey is here peculiarly explicit: with anxious care, with painful iteration, it assures us that, in the case of Wareham, the devastation was wrought 'a tempore Hugonis vicecomitis', and that, in the case of Shaftesbury and in the case of Dorchester, it was wrought 'a tempore Hugonis vicecomitis usque nunc'. These categorical statements are conclusive: they place the whole of the devastation subsequent to the accession of the Norman sheriff, Hugh FitzGrip. Mr Eyton, in his work on the Dorset Domesday, held that they fix it as having occurred between 1070 and 1084; the words, however, 'usque nunc' carry it on down to 1086, and, but that I must now come to Exeter, I could show the real bearing of these allusions to Sheriff Hugh.

The breakdown, when tested, of the alleged 'Civic League' strangely vindicates the sound insight of that sagacious historian who explicitly asserted that the English boroughs

never, as was the case in Scotland and in Germany, adopted a confederate bond of union, or organized themselves in leagues.[14]

Yet, in his _English Towns and Districts_, Mr Freeman was led by his own tale of the resistance of the western lands and their capital to argue from it as from a proved historic fact:

When Exeter stood forth for one moment ... _the chief of a confederation of the lesser towns of the West_ ... we see that the path was opening by which Exeter might have come to be another Lübeck, the head of a Damnonian Hanse, another Bern, the mistress of the subject-lands of the western peninsula. Such a dream sounds wild in our ears.[15]

It does indeed. But it does so for the reason that it is founded on a fact which has no historic existence. Yet, for Mr Freeman, with his fertile imagination afire with the glories of ancient Greece and of countless mediaeval Commonwealths, this same 'wild dream' possessed an irresistible fascination. 'It is none the less true', he hastened to add, that

when a confederation of the western towns, with the great city of the district at their head, suddenly started into life to check the progress of the Conqueror, it shows that a spirit had been kindled, etc., etc.... It is worth while to stop and think how near England once was to running the same course as other lands, etc., etc.[16]

Returning now to sober fact, let us ask how the city of Exeter came into William's hands. This is the pivotal point on which the whole story revolves. On this point Mr Freeman spoke with no uncertain sound: the city was 'taken by means of a mine'.[17] It was, he wrote, 'by undermining the walls that William at last gained possession of the city', the citizens being thus forced 'to submit unreservedly'.[18] He added, contrasting the success of William with the failure, in 1003, of Swend:

William might have been beaten back from Exeter as Swend had been, if the military art of Normandy in William's days had not been many steps in advance of the military art of Denmark in the days of Swend.

This allusion to 'Swend' involves a perfect tangle of confusion. Turning back a couple of pages, we are reminded that on Penhow, 'sixty-seven years before (1001), Swend, of Denmark, driven back from the city, had found his revenge' (p. 154). Guided by a footnote, we turn for information to the earlier volume to which the author refers us, only to learn that it was not Swegen, but the adventurer Pallig who was driven back from Exeter in 1001 (i. 307), while 'of Swegen himself we hear nothing in English history for nine years (994-1003)'.[19] Moreover, when Swegen did come--in 1003--invading England to avenge the massacre of Saint Brice, he was not 'driven back from the city', but, on the contrary, 'stormed and plundered it' (p. 315), for 'the citizens who had beaten back Pallig had no chance of beating back Swegen' (_Exeter_, p. 27). Moreover, the suggestion that the Danes would not have been able to attack and breach the city wall is in direct conflict with the evidence quoted by Mr Freeman himself. Not only did Pallig, in 1001, direct his attack against the wall,[20] but 'Swegen', we read, in 1003, 'Civitatem Exanceastram infregit'.[21] Now, speaking of 1063, Mr Freeman wrote that 'the expression of Florence "infregit" seems to fall in with' his view that William breached the wall. That is to say that, according to Mr Freeman, 'Swend' was 'beaten back' (which he was not), because he could not breach the walls, which is precisely what, on his showing, Swegen succeeded in doing. Could confusion further go?

For his statement that 'William's mine advanced so far that part of the wall crumbled to the ground, making a practicable breach' (p. 156), Mr Freeman relied on an ingenious combination of Orderic's statement that the Conqueror 'obnixe satagit cives desuper impugnare et subtus murum suffodere' with William of Malmesbury's assertion that he triumphed 'divino scilicet adjutus auxilio, quod pars muralis ultro decidens ingressum illi patefecerit'. He argued that, on the supposition that 'Exonia' is the right reading in William of Malmesbury, his 'story, allowing for a little legendary improvement, fits so well into Orderic's as to support the theory of a breach'. The argument is ingenuous and plausible, nor can it be lightly dismissed. But whether the words of Orderic imply, of necessity, a mine or not,[22] the real point is that he does not mention a breach. He speaks of William's efforts, but he does not say they were successful. It is difficult to suppose that William of Poitiers, of whom Orderic is here the mouthpiece, would not have mentioned his hero's success, had success rewarded his efforts. We are reduced then, as the sole and unconfirmed authority for Mr Freeman's absolute statement--or rather as the legend from which he 'infers' the facts he states--to the words of William of Malmesbury. Now William was classed, by Mr Freeman himself, among those writers whose 'accounts are often mixed up with romantic details', so that 'it is dangerous to trust them' (i. 258); and he pointed out of the murder of Edward that:

In the hands of William of Malmesbury the story becomes a romance.... The _obiter dictum_ of William of Malmesbury that Ælfhere had a hand in Edward's death is contrary to the whole tenor of the history ... (i. 265).

If there is thus, on Mr Freeman's showing, need for accepting with some caution a statement made by William alone, there is further, in this special case, the consideration that even if his story does refer to Exeter, the phrase, '_leviter_ subegit' is justly queried by Mr Freeman;[23] and that William here deals in hyperbole and miracle. Indeed, when we find Mr Freeman writing: 'I infer this from William of Malmesbury', we are reminded of his words on his predecessor's treatment of the legend of Siward: 'Such stuff would not be worth mentioning, had not Sir Francis Palgrave inferred from it the existence of an historical Tostig, Earl of Huntingdon' (iv. 768-9). I will not express an opinion of my own, but will quote from Mr Freeman's able essay on 'The Mythical and Romantic Elements in Early English History'.[24] In it he expressly disclaimed

sympathy with the old pragmatizing or euhemeristic school of mythological interpretation.... The pragmatizers take a mythical story; they strip it by an arbitrary process of whatever seems impossible; they explain or allegorize miraculous details; and having thus obtained something which possibly may have happened, they give it out as something which actually did happen.... It will never do to take the tale of Troy, to leave out all intervention of the gods, and to give out the remnant as a piece of real Grecian history (p. 3).

This criticism would seem to apply to the 'legendary' tale that the walls of Exeter fell down, like those of Jericho, by supernatural intervention. At least, we may say of the breaching of the walls, when given out 'as something which actually did happen', what was said of the possible siege of Oxford, this same year, by Mr Freeman:

The direct evidence for a siege of Oxford is so weak that the tale cannot be relied on with any certainty (iv. 188).

Having now examined the direct evidence for the statement that the citizens were forced to surrender unconditionally to William by the successful breaching of their walls, I propose to show that the acceptance of this statement does violence not only to the facts of the case, but to all that is known of William's character, to the English Chronicle, and to Domesday; and I shall prove that it rests beyond dispute 'on the foundation of a single error'.

Assuming for the moment the accuracy of Mr Freeman's version, namely, that the city had been placed, by a breach, absolutely at William's mercy, what treatment of its citizens would his character and his whole career lead us to expect? 'At all stages of his life,' as Mr Freeman observed, paraphrasing the famous words of the English Chronicle (1087), 'if he was _debonnair_ to those who would do his will, he was beyond measure stern to all who withstood it' (ii. 167). Again, speaking of his march on Exeter, the Professor insisted on the fact that 'the policy of William was ever severity to those who withstood him, and gentleness to those who submitted to his yoke'.[25] How he applied this principle in practice was shown at Romney and at Dover in 1066. Romney had successfully resisted the landing of a party of Normans,[26] and William was resolved to avenge the deed.

It was his policy now, as ever, to be harsh whenever he met with resistance, and gentle to all who submitted easily.... Harrying then as he went, William reached Romney. The words which set forth his doings there are short, pithy, and terrible. He took what vengeance he would for the slaughter of his men (iii. 533-4).

Dover, on the contrary, made no resistance, but surrendered before he 'had thrown up a bank, or shot an arrow'. It was, therefore, 'plainly his policy to show himself mild and _debonnair_ as it had been his policy at Romney to show himself beyond measure stark'.[27]

Such being William's settled principle, what might the citizens of Exeter expect? Even before the siege began the fear that they had sinned too deeply for forgiveness made them disown the capitulation their leaders had arranged.[28] The reference is doubtless to conduct similar to that which had brought upon Romney William's merciless vengeance.[29] But how stood the case at its close?

(1) They were rebels. And for these 'rebels, as they were deemed in Norman eyes' (iv. 135), confiscation was the penalty (iv. 127-8).

(2) 'The movement at Exeter' was not merely a rebellion, but one which was 'specially hateful in William's eyes' (iv. 140).

(3) They had been guilty of 'cruel and insulting treatment' to William's earlier emissaries (iv. 138).

(4) They had offered William himself an 'insult as unseemly as it was senseless' (iv. 155).

(5) They had flung to the winds their own capitulation with such audacity that William 'ira repletus est' (iv. 152).

(6) They had offered a prolonged and desperate resistance, costing the lives of many of his men (iv. 156).

Verily, in William's eyes, the cup of Exeter's iniquities must have been exceedingly full.

Even in cases of ordinary resistance his practice, we learn, was so uniform that Mr Freeman could take it for granted, 'after the fall of Exeter', that

the heavy destruction which fell on the town of Barnstaple, in the north-western part of Devonshire, and the still heavier destruction which fell on the town of Lidford, might seem to show that these two boroughs were special scenes of resistance (iv. 163).[30]

Therefore, in the aggravated case of Exeter, we could but expect him to deal with its citizens as he had dealt with those of Alençon,[31] and as he was to deal, hereafter, with the sturdy defenders of Ely.[32] A fearful vengeance was their certain doom. There was, moreover, as I stated at the outset, a need for sternness at this juncture that might justify William, apart from vengeance, in inflicting such signal punishment as should deter all other 'rebels'.

Yet what do we find? The citizens, we read, were 'favourably received', and 'assured of the safe possession of their lives and goods'. Nay, William even 'secured the gates with a strong guard of men whom he could trust in order to preserve the goods of the citizens from any breaches of discipline'.[33] The dreaded Conqueror, 'post tot iras terribilesque minas', had suddenly become mild as a lamb, and Mr Freeman accepts it all quite as a matter of course.

Such conduct would, surely, have been a positive premium on revolt.

A castle, of course, was raised; but this was inevitable, whether a town submitted peaceably or not. For instance, 'it is plain', Mr Freeman wrote, 'that Lincolnshire submitted more peaceably, and was dealt with more tenderly, than most parts of the kingdom' (iv. 216); but 'a castle was, of course, raised at Lincoln, as well as elsewhere', and 'involved the destruction of a large number of houses' (217-8), very many more than at Exeter.

One 'penalty', however, remains as the price that Exeter was called upon to pay for all her guilt. This, we read, was 'the raising of its tribute to lessen the wealth which had enabled it to resist'.[34] For its wealth is admitted. Now, before criticizing Mr Freeman's view, let us clearly understand what that view was. Taking, as is right, his latest work--though his view had not altered--we read of Exeter in 1050:

The city which had been the morning-gift of Norman Emma was now, along with Winchester, part of the morning-gift of English Edith, daughter of Godwine, sister of Harold. At Exeter she was on her own ground; the royal revenues within the city were hers.[35]

In 1086, we learn:

The whole payment was eighteen pounds yearly. Of this sum six pounds--that is the earl's third penny--went to the Sheriff Baldwin.... The other twelve pounds had formed part of the morning-gift of the lady, and though Edith had been dead eleven years, they are entered separately as hers.[36]

So far, all is consistent and clear enough. But we find it immediately added that:

This regular yearly payment of eighteen pounds had taken the place of various uncertain payments and services.... Thus the citizens of Exeter, who had offered to pay to William what they had paid to former kings, found their burthens far heavier than they had been in the old time. And the lady, while she lived, reaped her full share of the increased contributions of her own city.[37]

Or, as expressed in his great work:

The money payment was now raised from an occasional half-marc of silver to eighteen pounds yearly. The rights of the old lady were not forgotten, and Eadgyth received two-thirds of the increased burthen laid upon her morning-gift.[38]

If the 'twelve pounds had formed part of the morning-gift of the lady', and were accordingly received by her, as we learn,[39] in the days of King Edward, how could they possibly form part of a new 'burthen' laid upon Exeter, as a punishment for its resistance, by William? And if the only payment due, under Edward, was an occasional half-marc of silver 'for the use of the soldiers'[40] what were 'the royal revenues' from Exeter that Edith was drawing in 1050? A moment's thought is enough to show that Mr Freeman's statements contradict themselves, as, indeed, he must have seen, had he stopped to think. But this he sometimes failed to do.

The whole source of Mr Freeman's confusion was his inexplicable misunderstanding of the Domesday entry on the city.[41] We must first note that both his predecessors--Palgrave, who was lacking in 'critical faculty', and Ellis, who was 'far from being up to the present standard of historical scholarship'--had read this entry rightly, and given, independently, its gist. It will best enable my readers to understand the point at issue if I print side by side the paraphrases of Exeter's offer given by Palgrave and by our author.

PALGRAVE FREEMAN

Tribute or gafol they would We are ready to pay to him the proffer to their king such as tribute which we have been used was due to his predecessors.... to pay to former kings.... The They (1) would weigh out the city paid in money only when eighteen pounds of silver; (2) London, York, and Winchester the geld would be paid, if paid, and the sum to be paid was London, York, and Winchester a single half-marc of silver. submitted to the tax; and (3) When the king summoned his _fyrd_ if war arose, the king should to his standard by sea or by land, have the quota of service Exeter supplied the same number of imposed upon five hydes of men as were supplied by five hides land.... But the citizens of land.... But the men of Exeter refused to become the men ... of would not, each citizen personally, their sovereign; they would become his men; they would not not ... allow the Basileus to receive so dangerous a visitor enter within their walls. within their walls.[42]

I have numbered the clauses in Palgrave's paraphrase which render the three successive clauses in the Domesday Book entry. The first refers to the _firma_ of the town, payable to its lord (the king);[43] the second to the 'geld' (tax), payable to the king _qua_ king;[44] the third to its military service.[45] The distinction between the three clauses is admirably seen under Totnes (i. 108, _b_), and the sense of Domesday is absolutely certain to any one familiar with its formulas.[46]

The 'commutation of geldability' (as Mr Eyton termed it) was by no means peculiar to Exeter. Totnes paid, 'when Exeter paid', the same sum of half a marc 'pro geldo'. Bridport paid the same 'ad opus Huscarlium regis' (75), Dorchester and Wareham a marc each, and Shaftesbury two marcs (Eyton's _Dorset Domesday_, 70-72). In these Dorset instances, one marc represented an assessment of ten hides.

What Mr Freeman did was to confuse the first clause with the second, and to suppose that both referred to the 'money payment' of the town, the first under William, the second under Edward. He thus evolved the statement that under William 'the money payment was raised from an occasional half-marc of silver to eighteen pounds yearly'. This is roughly equivalent to saying of a house rented at fifty pounds, and paying a tax of one pound, that its 'money payment' was raised from one pound to fifty.

But this confusion, with all its results, is carried further still. Edith's share of the eighteen pounds is entered in Domesday as 'xii. lib[ras] ad numerum'. This Mr Freeman rightly gave as the amount in 1086;[47] but turning back a few pages, we actually read that

In Domesday twelve houses in Exeter appear as 'liberæ ad numerum in ministeriis Edid reginæ'.[48]

This is, of course, the same entry, only that here our author changed pounds into houses, and _libras_ into _liberæ_. What idea was conveyed to his mind by a house 'libera ad numerum' I do not profess to explain. But, oddly enough, as he here turned pounds into houses, so in a passage of his _William Rufus_ he turned houses into pence.[49]

The essence of the whole matter is that the 'burdens' to which Exeter was subject were not raised at all, but remained precisely the same as had been paid to former kings. And this fact is the more notable, because, as Mr Freeman had to admit, 'even the tribute imposed by William' [on his own hypothesis] 'was not large for so great a city', and, one may add, a rich one.[50] Indeed, it was so small as to fairly call for increase.[51] Even Lincoln, which, according to Mr Freeman, received 'favourable' treatment from William, had its 'tribute largely raised'[52] in fact, more than trebled.[53] What we have to account for, therefore, is the fact that a city which had defied, insulted, and outraged William, received not only 'a free pardon',[54] but peculiar favour at his hands.

The paradox itself is beyond dispute, whatever may be said of my solution.

For a solution there is. Only it is not to miracles or legends, nor to the flatterings of courtly chaplains that we must look to learn the truth, but, in the words of a memorable essay, to 'the few unerring notices in Domesday and the chronicles'.[55] As yet we have not, it must be remembered, heard the story from the English side. Let us turn, therefore, to the English version, to what Mr Freeman described as 'the short but weighty account in the Worcester Chronicle, which gives hints which we should be well pleased to see drawn out at greater length'.[56] These hints I shall now examine, though I doubt if Mr Freeman's friends will be well pleased with the result.

We have in the Chronicle a straightforward story, not only intelligible in itself, but also thoroughly in harmony with the known facts of the case. The king finds himself compelled to lay formal siege to Exeter ('besæt þa burh'); he is detained before its walls day after day ('xviii. dægas') in the depth of an English winter, 'and þær wearð micel his heres forfaren'. The need for sternness was there indeed; but swiftness was to him, for the moment, a matter of life and death. Held at bay by those stubborn walls, learning the might of those 'two generals'--January and February--in whom the Emperor Nicholas put his trust, William was in sore straits. Take Mr Freeman's own words:

The disaffected were intriguing for foreign help;... there was a chance of his having to struggle for his crown against Swend of Denmark;... men were everywhere seeking to shake off the yoke, or to escape it in their own persons. Even where no outbreak took place local conspiracies were rife.[57]

Swend was in his rear, half England on his flank; before him reared their head the walls of dauntless Exeter.[58] In that bleak wilderness of frost and snow his men were falling around him, and, in very bitterness of spirit, the Conqueror bowed himself for need. So, at least, I boldly suggest. He fell back on his 'arts of policy', and set himself to win by alluring terms the men whom he could not conquer. In the words of the Chronicle, he promised them well ('ac he heom well behet').

This solution, of course, differs _toto cælo_ from Mr Freeman's narrative. We have seen that he blindly accepted the statements of that 'abandoned flatterer', William of Poitiers (whom Orderic had here 'doubtless followed'[59])--against whom he elsewhere warned us--and combined them with a miracle from William of Malmesbury, which he euhemerized in the style that he himself had ridiculed in Thierry.[60] And as he could not harmonize the courtly version with the 'short but weighty account' in the Chronicle he cut the knot by dismissing the latter, and pronouncing his own version 'the most likely'.[61]

Resuming the narrative, we learn that the thegns--the party of non-resistance from the first--must have seized this opportunity for impressing on their 'concives' the necessity of embracing the offer, whereupon the latter, in the words of the Chronicle, 'gave up the town because the thegns had betrayed them'. It is just possible that the word 'geswicon' may point to some direct treachery, but it seems best and most naturally explained as referring to their unpatriotic advice, which would naturally appear to English eyes a 'betrayal' of the national cause. There can be little doubt, from the admissions of William of Poitiers (through the mouth of Orderic), that the terms of agreement included not only a free pardon for all past offences, and for the city's aggravated resistance, but also security for person and property from plunder by the Norman soldiery. And the witness of 'the great record' implies that 'the Exeter patricians', as Mr Freeman styled them[62]--'the civic aristocracy'[63]--gained their original selfish aim, and secured an undertaking that they should not pay a penny more than their 'tributum ex consuetudine pristina'.

What security, it may be asked, could they obtain for the terms they seem to have exacted? Bold as it may seem, I would here venture to read between the lines, and to make the suggestion--it is nothing more--that when there issued from the gates 'the clergy of the city, bearing their sacred books and other holy things' (as Mr Freeman rendered the words of Orderic), the real object of their coming forth was to make the king swear upon their relics[64] to the observance of the terms they had obtained. It was indeed the irony of fate if William, who was ever insisting on the breach of Harold's oath, was driven, by the force of circumstances, to take such an oath himself.

But, it may be urged, should we be justified in treating thus drastically the witness of Orderic, or rather, of William of Poitiers? At Alençon, I reply, in Mr Freeman's words:

William of Poitiers is silent altogether, both as to the vengeance and as to the insult. Neither subject was perhaps altogether agreeable to a professed panegyrist (_Norm. Conq._, ii. 285).

Stronger, however, is the case of Le Mans, and more directly to the point. 'William,' we read, 'followed the same policy against Exeter (1068) which he had followed against Le Mans' (1063);[65] and so, in 1073, we find him 'calling on the men of Le Mans, as he had called on the men of Exeter', to submit peacefully, and escape his wrath.[66] Unlike 'the Exeter patricians', indeed, 'the magistrates of Le Mans' did receive the king peacefully within their walls; they did not incur the guilt of offering armed resistance. But the essential point at Le Mans is that

the Norman version simply tells how they brought the keys of the city, how they threw themselves on William's mercy, and were graciously received by him. The local writer speaks in another tone. The interview between the king and the magistrates of Le Mans is described by a word often used to express conferences--in a word, _parliaments_--whether between prince and prince, or between princes and the estates of their dominions. They submitted themselves to William's authority as their sovereign, but they received his oath to observe the ancient customs and _justices_ of the city. Le Mans was no longer to be a sovereign commonwealth, but it was to remain a privileged municipality.[67]

The words 'acceptis ab eo sacramentis, tam de impunitate perfidiæ quam de conservandis antiquis ejusdem civitatis consuetudinibus'[68] would apply exactly to the case of Exeter, and William may well have done there what he actually did, we here read, at Le Mans. There would have been at Exeter even greater need for an oath, in that its 'perfidia' had been so much the worse.

But now comes the curious parallel. Though quoting and scrutinizing so closely the meagre accounts of the Exeter campaign, Mr Freeman seems to have oddly overlooked the significant words of Florence, although, of course, familiar with his narrative. Florence, we find, employs a phrase corresponding with that in the _Vetera Analecta_.

FLORENCE 'VET AN'

Cives autem _dextris acceptis_ _Acceptis ab eo sacramentis_ regi se dedebant. ... sese et sua omnia dederunt.

Mr Freeman argues from the case of Le Mans that _dedere_ in these times did not imply the fulness of a Roman _deditio_.[69] But we are not merely dependent upon this. The words, 'dextris acceptis', I contend, imply a promise and a pledge for its performance, and cannot therefore be reconciled with an unconditional surrender.

Now if it were not for the fortunate preservation of the _Vetera Analecta_ in the case of Le Mans, Mr Freeman would there also, as at Exeter, have been hoodwinked by 'the Norman version'.[70] I am anxious not to employ a phrase which might be deemed offensive or unjust, so I restrict myself to that which he himself applied to his predecessor, Palgrave, when, speaking of the story of Eadric and his brother, he wrote that Sir Francis Palgrave 'swallowed the whole tale'.[71] Whether my solution be accepted or not, it is, I repeat, conjectural. I have, at least, shown that there is a mystery to be solved, that Mr Freeman's version fails to solve it, and that, so far from Domesday recording the punishment inflicted upon Exeter, it actually heightens the mystery of the case by proving that Exeter obtained exceptionally favourable treatment.

It is not merely a question of how Exeter fell. The issue illustrates the policy and affects the character of William. The lame manner in which Mr Freeman accounts for his sudden conversion from fury to lamb-like gentleness is no less unsatisfactory than his treatment of the 'weighty account' in the Chronicle when he found that this, his valued authority, rendered the problem difficult. Even at Le Mans more was needed than merely to print both stories. The fact that we find in 'the Norman version' the truth conveniently glossed over ought to be insisted on and duly applied. Time after time in Mr Freeman's work we find him paraphrasing patches of chronicles, under the impression that he was writing history. The statements of witnesses are laid before us, neatly pieced together, but they are not subjected to more than a perfunctory cross-examination. Even if the accurate reproduction of testimony were all that we sought from the historian, we should not, so far as Domesday is concerned, obtain it in this instance. But the case of Exeter is one where something more is needed, where even accuracy is not sufficient without the possession of that higher gift, the power of seizing upon the truth when the evidence is misleading and contradictory. The paraphrasing of evidence is the work of a reporter; from the historian we have a right to expect the skilled summing-up of the judge.

[Footnote 1: Letter from John Shillingford, Mayor of Exeter, 1447.]

[Footnote 2: _Exeter_ (1887), p. 34.]

[Footnote 3: It was also the subject of a special paper in his 'Historic Towns and Districts' (1883) reprinted from _Arch. Journ._, xxx. 297, pp. 49 _et seq._, and _Sat. Rev._, xxix. 764-5.]

[Footnote 4: _Sat. Rev._, xxix. 765.]

[Footnote 5: _Norman Conquest_, iv. 123. The metaphor of a 'sea' waiting in an 'island' is sufficiently original to be deserving of notice.]

[Footnote 6: _Ibid._, iv. 140.]

[Footnote 7: See 'The alleged destruction of Leicester', _infra_, p. 347.]

[Footnote 8: iv. 151. 'It is certain', Mr Freeman had written, 'that what William had to strive against in the West was a league of towns' (_Sat. Rev._, xxix. 765).]

[Footnote 9: _Cont. Rev._, June 1877, p. 22. See also Preface.]

[Footnote 10: 'Hi nimirum socios e plagis finitimis inquiete arcessebant ... alias quoque civitates ad conspirandum in eadem legationibus instigabant.' _Ord. Vit._, 510 A (quoted in _Norman Conquest_, iv. 140).]

[Footnote 11: Mr Freeman rendered it 'neighbouring shires', but I am not at all sure that, taken in conjunction with the words just before about the accessibility of Exeter from Ireland and Brittany, and those just after, about 'mercatores advenas', _plagæ_ does not refer to the shores from which these merchants came.]

[Footnote 12: The boroughs of Dorset were doubtless among the towns which had joined in the Civic League. Probably they stood sieges and were taken by storm (_Norm. Conq._, iv. 151).]

[Footnote 13: Mr Archer deemed it sufficient reply to all these 'trifling blunders' to admit that 'Mr Freeman did misread 128 for 100' (_Cont. Rev._, March 1893, p. 337). I invite comparison of the errors I have corrected, and of all the edifice built upon them, with this disingenuous attempt to represent them as unimportant 'slips' (_ibid._, p. 354).]

[Footnote 14: Stubbs' _Const. Hist._, i. 625.]

[Footnote 15: Stubbs' _Const. Hist._, i. 71.]

[Footnote 16: _Ibid._]

[Footnote 17: _Norm. Conq._, iv. xiii, and marginal note on p. 156.]

[Footnote 18: _Ibid._, p. 156.]

[Footnote 19: _Ibid._, i. 289.]

[Footnote 20: 'Dum murum illius destruere moliretur' (quoted from Florence, on i., p. 309).]

[Footnote 21: Quoted from Florence, on i., p. 315.]

[Footnote 22: It seems possible, at least, that they might describe a direct attack on the foot of the walls.]

[Footnote 23: I would here compare William's description of the Conqueror's 'peaceful progress' to London after his great victory, which better evidence, Mr Freeman observed, 'quite upsets' (iii. 533).]

[Footnote 24: _Essays_, 1st series.]

[Footnote 25: _Exeter_, p. 36.]

[Footnote 26: _Norm. Conq._, iii. 412.]

[Footnote 27: _Ibid._, iii. 536-7.]

[Footnote 28: 'Supplicia pro reatu nimis metuebant.']

[Footnote 29: 'Militibus crudeliter et contumeliose illuserant quos ipse de Normannia miserat et tempestas ad portum illorum appulerat.']

[Footnote 30: So too we read of Torkesey, a little later on, that it suffered so 'severely as to suggest the idea that William met with some serious resistance at this point' (_Ibid._, iv. 217); while speaking of the 'Fall of Chester', Mr Freeman wrote: 'We know that the resistance which William met with in this his last conquest was enough to lead him to apply the same stern remedy which he had applied north of the Humber. A fearful harrying fell on city and shire, and on the lands round about' (_Ibid._, iv. 314-5).]

[Footnote 31: 'The Conqueror, faithful to his fearful oath, now gave the first of that long list of instances of indifference to human suffering', etc. (_Ibid._, ii. 285).]

[Footnote 32: 'At Ely, as at Alençon, the Conqueror felt no scruple against inflicting punishments which to our notions might seem more frightful than death itself' (_Ibid._, iv. 476).]

[Footnote 33: _Ibid._, iv. 160.]

[Footnote 34: _English Towns and Districts_.]

[Footnote 35: _Exeter_ (1887), p. 32.]

[Footnote 36: _Ibid._, pp. 43-4.]

[Footnote 37: _Ibid._, p. 44.]

[Footnote 38: _Norm. Conq._, iv. 162.]

[Footnote 39: _Exeter_, p. 32.]

[Footnote 40: _Exeter_, p. 44; _Norm. Conq._, iv. 147.]

[Footnote 41: This grave confusion, with all that it involves, was one of the 'trifling slips', as Mr Archer terms them (_Cont. Rev._, p. 354), exposed in my original article (_Q.R._, July 1892). Such a description is either dishonest, or must imply that Mr Archer, who boasts that he has 'a sterner criterion' than myself (_English Historical Review_, ix. 606), deems such errors of no consequence.]

[Footnote 42: _Norm. Conq._, iv. 146-7.]

[Footnote 43: 'Hec reddit xviii. lib. per annum' (100).]

[Footnote 44: 'Hæc civitas T.R.E. non geldabat nisi quando Londonia et Eboracum et Wintonia geldabant, et hoc erat dimidia marka Argenti ad opus militum' (100).]

[Footnote 45: 'Quando expeditio ibat per terram aut per mare, serviebat hæc civitas quantum v. hidæ terræ' (100).]

[Footnote 46: The practice in the Survey of Devon was to state the render in 1086, and, if it had been different formerly, to add a note to that effect. Thus we read on 100_b_: 'Reddit xlviii. lib. ad pensam. Ante Balduinum reddebat xxiii. lib.' So, too, of Totnes: 'Inter omnes redd' viii. lib. ad numerum. Olim reddebant iii. lib. ad pensam et arsuram' (108_b_).]

[Footnote 47: _Norm. Conq._, iv. 162.]

[Footnote 48: _Ibid._, 139.]

[Footnote 49: Reading 'Eudo Dapifer [tenet] v. denarios', where Domesday (ii. 106) has, of course, 'v. d[omus]'.]

[Footnote 50: Mr Freeman held that Domesday hinted it might be classed with London, York, and Winchester (_Norm. Conq._, iv. 147; _Exeter_, 45), and quotes William of Malmesbury's description of its wealth and importance. Even in earlier days, he wrote, 'both the commercial and the military importance of the city were of the first rank' (i. 308).]

[Footnote 51: The _firma_ of Gloucester had been raised to £60, and that of Chester to over £70, while at Wallingford, where the king had about as many houses as at Exeter, it was £80.]

[Footnote 52: _Norm. Conq._, iv. 213.]

[Footnote 53: 'T.R.E. reddebat civitas Lincolia regi xx. libras et comiti x. libras. Modo reddit c. libras ad numerum inter regem et comitem' (D.B., i. 336_b_).]

[Footnote 54: _Norm. Conq._, iv. 160.]

[Footnote 55: Mr Freeman's 'Pedigrees and Pedigree-makers' (_Cont. Rev._, June 1887, p. 33).]

[Footnote 56: _Norm. Conq._, iv. 151.]

[Footnote 57: _Ibid._, iv. pp. 103, 118. So too _ibid._, p. 126: 'There was the imminent fear of an invasion from Denmark, and the threatening aspect of the still independent west and north. William had need of all his arts of war and policy to triumph over the combination of so many enemies at once.']

[Footnote 58: 'Cives eam tenebant furiosi, copiosæ multitudinis, infestissimi mortalibus Gallici generis.'--_Ord. Vit._]

[Footnote 59: _Norm. Conq._, iv. 146.]

[Footnote 60: It is curious to see how Thierry waters down the miracle: 'Son cheval, glissant sur le pavé, s'abattit et le froissa dans sa chute.' Of course this is likely enough to have been the kernel of truth in the legend, but no man has a right to tell the tale in this shape as if it were undoubted fact.--_Norm. Conq._, iv. 291.]

[Footnote 61: _Norm. Conq._, iv. 151-2.]

[Footnote 62: _Ibid._, 146.]

[Footnote 63: _Ibid._, p. 147.]

[Footnote 64: Cf. the familiar phrase, 'Tactis sacris evangeliis', with Orderic's words here, 'sacros libros'.]

[Footnote 65: _Norm. Conq._, iv. 151.]

[Footnote 66: _Ibid._, 559.]

[Footnote 67: _Ibid._, 560.]

[Footnote 68: _Ibid._]

[Footnote 69: _Norm. Conq._, iv. 560.]

[Footnote 70: 'Edicta regalia suis opportune intimavit, et urbanis imperiose mandavit, ut prudenter sibi consulerent' (_Ord Vit._, ii. 255).]

[Footnote 71: _Ibid._, i. 662.]

THE ALLEGED DESTRUCTION OF LEICESTER (1068)

This question was raised and discussed by Mr Freeman in his _History of the Norman Conquest_ (iv. 196-7). We there read as follows:

Is it possible that in the case of Leicester, at least, no power was left either to follow or to resist? While we have no evidence either way on which we can rely with confidence, one of those secondary and local records, which sometimes contain fragments of authentic tradition, suggests, in a perfectly casual way, that a doom fell upon Leicester, which might, doubtless, with some exaggeration, be spoken of as utter destruction. And this incidental hint may perhaps draw some indirect confirmation from the highest evidence of all [Domesday] ... and it may be that Leicester earned its overthrow by a defence worthy of a borough which was to give its name to the greatest of England's later worthies.

The 'record' referred to is quoted in a footnote, and is a history of the foundation of Leicester Abbey, one of a class of narratives notoriously inaccurate and corrupt:

Robertus Comes Mellenti, veniens in Angliam cum Willelmo Duce Normanniæ, adeptus consulatum Leycestriæ, ex dono dicti Ducis et Conquestoris Angliæ, _destructa prius civitate Leicestriæ_ cum castello et ecclesia infra castellum tempore prædicti Conquestoris, reædificavit ipsam æcclesiam Sancta Mariæ infra castellum.

Now, it strikes one in the first place as somewhat unlikely that William, on his arrival at Leicester, should find a castle to destroy. But, further, how could Robert have obtained the 'consulatus' of Leicester from the Conqueror, when he is well known to have first obtained it (under very peculiar circumstances) from Henry I? If this known event has been so glaringly ante-dated, may not the alleged 'destruction' be so likewise? These it may be said are only doubts. But, as it happens, we can not only discredit the suggested 'destruction' in the days of the Conqueror: we can actually fix its date as the reign of Henry I.

We learn from Orderic that the town of Leicester ('urbs Legrecestria') was divided into four quarters, of which Ivo de Grantmesnil possessed two, one in his own right, and one (which was the King's share) as the King's reeve and representative. We also learn that he was among the 'seditiosi proceres', who rebelled against Henry in 1101, and that of these, 'aliqui contra fideles vicinos guerram arripuerunt et gremium almæ telluris rapacitatibus et incendiis, cruentisque cædibus maculaverunt'. Ivo is again mentioned by Orderic in 1102, not only among the 'proditores' of the previous year, who were now called to account, but also as a special ringleader in that internecine conflict to which he had already referred. He tells us that Henry

Ivonem quoque, quia guerram in Anglia c[oe]perat et vicinorum rura suorum incendia combusserat (quod in illa regione crimen est inusitatum nec sine grave ultione fit expiatum), rigidus censor accusatum nec purgatum ingentis pecuniæ redditione oneravit, et plurimo angore tribulatum mæstificavit.

In short, as Dr Stubbs reminds us, Ivo 'has the evil reputation of being the first to introduce the horrors of private warfare into England'. Bearing in mind the divided authority from which Leicester suffered, and the statement that Ivo, ruling half the town, plundered and made fierce war upon his neighbours, we arrive at the conclusion that the 'destruction', which, in the _Monasticon_ narrative, precedes the accession of the Count of Meulan to the _comitatus_ of Leicester, may be assigned, without a shadow of doubt, to the struggle of 1101.

On Ivo's disgrace, as is well known, the wily Count stepped at once into his shoes, 'et auxilio regis suâque calliditate totam sibi civitatem mancipavit, et inde consul in Anglia factus'. There is no reason to doubt the statement that St Mary 'de Castro' was rebuilt and refounded by Count Robert after his obtaining this position at Leicester.

It is singular that just as the _Monasticon_ seems to have misled Mr Freeman at Leicester, so it is responsible for Thierry's 'story of the fighting monks of Oxford', at about the same time, a story of which Mr Freeman wrote that 'the whole story is a dream', and 'would not have been allowable even in an historical novel' (iv. 779-80).

ELY AND HER DESPOILERS (1072-5)

The elaborate record of this trial is only found, I believe, in the Trinity College (Cambridge) MS., O. 2, 1 (fos. 210_b_-213_b_) from which it has been printed by Mr Hamilton in his _Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiensis_ (pp. 192-5). This 'placitum', therefore, would seem to have remained unknown till the publication of that work (1876).

The date of this important document can be fixed within a few years. It mentions Earl Waltheof among those before whom the plea was held, so that it cannot be later than 1075; and as it also mentions 'Rodulfus comes', it is evidently previous to the revolt of the earls in that year. On the other hand, it is later than the death of William Malet, for it mentions his son Robert as in possession, and later, therefore, than the restoration of Waltheof at the beginning of 1070. Moreover, it is subsequent to the death of Stigand ('post obitum illius'). Now Stigand was not even deposed till the spring of 1070; and we know from Domesday and other sources that he lived some time afterwards. We may safely say, therefore, that this 'placitum' did not take place till after the suppression of the Ely revolt in the autumn of 1071. Practically, therefore, our document belongs to the years 1072-1075. Now, as Abbot Thurstan did not die till 1076--the date given in the _Liber Eliensis_, and accepted by Mr Freeman--it follows that this great act of restitution in favour of the Abbey took place under Abbot Thurstan himself, a fact unmentioned by the chroniclers, and unsuspected by Mr Freeman, who held that he found no favour in William's eyes.

The great length of this document--so important for its bearing on Domesday--precludes its discussion in detail. But its opening clause must be given and some of its features pointed out.

Ad illud placitum quo pontifices Gosfridus et Remigius, consul vero Waltheuus, necnon vicecom[ites] Picotus atque Ilbertus jussu Willelmi Dei dispositione Anglor[um] regis, cum omni vicecomitatu sicut rex preceperat, convenerunt, testimonio hominum rei veritatem cognoscentium determinaverunt terras que injuste fuerant ablate ab ecclesia sancte Dei genitricis Marie de insulâ ely ... quatinus de dominio fuerant, tempore videlicet regis Ædwardi, ad dominium sine alicujus contradictione redirent quicunque eas possideret.

The mention of Count Eustace among those withholding lands proves that at the date of this document he was already restored to his possessions. Another individual whose name occurs several times in this document is Lisois ('De Monasteriis'), the hero of the passage of the Aire. Collating its evidence with that of Domesday, we find that Lisois had been succeeded, at the date of the great record, by the well-known Eudo Dapifer in a fief, ranging over at least five counties--Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex--in all of which Domesday records his name as the predecessor of Eudo. This is of the more interest because Mr Freeman wrote:

The only notice of this Lisois which I can find in Domesday is in ii. 49_b_, where he appears in possession, but seemingly illegal possession, of a small holding in Essex.

So again we have in our document this passage relating to Stigand:

He sunt proprie ville monasterii insule Ely quos Stigandus archipresul tenebat, unde per annum victum fratribus reddidit tantum quantum pertinet ad hoc. Has vero tenet rex noster W. post obitum illius, Methelwald et Crokestune et Snegelwelle et Dictun.

Now Stigand, according to the _Liber Eliensis_ 'quasdam illius optimas possessiones sicut Liber Terrarum insinuat, ad maximum loci dispendium retinuit'. Our document identifies these 'possessiones' with Methwold and Croxton in Norfolk, Snailwell and Ditton in Cambridgeshire, and thus disposes of Mr Freeman's very unfortunate suggestion--advanced, of course, to justify Stigand--that the _Liber Eliensis_ here referred to a tiny Hampshire estate, which the Abbey had held under Stigand T.R.E.[1]

In my paper on Domesday I have pointed out the importance of this document in its bearing on socmen and their services, while we saw in investigating knight service that its language affords, in this matter, a valuable gloss on that of Domesday. Close examination of its details shows that the aggressions on the Abbey's property which it records, were, in spite of the verdict on this occasion, persisted in, if not increased. Those, for instance, of Hardwin may be recognized in the duplicate entries in Domesday Book, representing the conflicting claims.[2] On persons as on lands we have some fresh information. Ilbert the Sheriff was, I believe, identical with that 'Ilbert de Hertford', who is alluded to in Domesday (i. 200), and would thus be a pre-Domesday Sheriff of Herts.[3] The entry, 'tenet Rotbertus homo Bainardi in Reoden de soca', when compared with the holding of 'Rienduna' by Ralf 'Baignardi' in Domesday (ii. 414), suggests that we have in Bainard the father (hitherto unknown) of this Domesday tenant-in-chief. Bainard would thus be a Christian name, as was also Mainard, which occurs in this same document.

[Footnote 1: D.B., i. 40_b_.]

[Footnote 2: See p. 32 _supra_.]

[Footnote 3: Domesday (i. 200_b_) styles him, 'Ilbertus de Hertford', and connects him with 'Risedene', a Hertfordshire Manor. On the other hand, the I.C.C. makes him 'Ilbertus de Hereforda' (p. 56), and 'Ilbertus vicecomes' is actually found in Herefordshire (D.B., i. 179_b_). But what could he be doing in Cambridgeshire?]

THE LORDS OF ARDRES

In the _History of the Norman Conquest_ (2nd ed.) we read of Eustace of Boulogne:

An incidental notice of one of his followers throws some light on the class of men who flocked to William's banners, and on the rewards which they received. One Geoffrey, an officer of the Abbey of Saint Bertin at Saint Omer, who had the charge of its possessions in the County of Guines, sent his sons, Arnold and Geoffrey, to the war ... and in the end they received a grant of lands both in Essex and in the border shires of Mercia and East-Anglia, under the superiority of their patron Count Eustace (iii. 314).

In an Appendix on 'Arnold of Ardres', which Mr Freeman devoted to this subject (iii. 725-6), he gave the 'Historia Comitum Ardensium' (of Lambert of Ardres) for his authority, and he verified, by Domesday, the Manors which Lambert assigns to 'these adventurers', holding that a Bedfordshire estate was omitted, while 'Stebintonia', which he identified with Stibbington, Hunts, was wrongly included, as it was 'held of Count Eustace by Lunen'.

The first point to be noticed here is that 'these adventurers' were the sons (as Lambert explains) not of any 'Geoffrey', a mere Abbey officer, but of a local magnate, Arnold, Lord of Ardres. The next is that Lambert was quite correct in his list of Manors.

In the fourth series of his historical essays Mr Freeman included a paper on 'The Lords of Ardres', for which he availed himself of Dr Heller's edition of Lambert in the _Monumenta_ (vol. xxiv). In this edition the passage runs:

Feodum Stevintoniam et pertinencias eius, Dokeswordiam, Tropintoniam, Leilefordiam, Toleshondiam, et Hoilandiam (cap. 113, p. 615).

Dr Heller, on this, notes:

Secundum 'Domesday Book' recepit Ernulfus de Arda Dochesworde, Trupintone (com. Cantabrig.) et Stiventone (comit. Bedford) a comite Eustacio ... e contra Toheshunt [_sic_] Hoiland, Leleford recepit ab eodem comite Adelolfus de Merc (prope Calais).

This note enabled Mr Freeman to identify 'Adelolfus' (which he had failed to do in the _Norman Conquest_), though he must have overlooked the identification of 'Stevintonia' (namely Stevington, Beds.), for we find him still writing:

But of the English possessions reckoned up by our author two only ... can be identified in Domesday as held by Arnold ... The local writer seems to have mixed up the possessions of Arnold with those of a less famous adventurer from the same reign, Adelolf--our Athelwulf--of Merck (pp. 184-5).

And he again insisted that 'Arnold had other lands in Bedfordshire'.

We will now turn to an entry in the _Testa de Nevill_ from the 'milites tenentes de honore Bononie':

Comes de Gines tenet xii. milites, scilicet--in Bedefordescire, in _Stiveton_ et Parva Wahull III milites, in Cantabr' in _Dukesword_, et _Trumpeton_ III milites ... in Essex, _Tholehunt_ et Galdhangr' III milites, in _Hoyland'_ et _Lalesford_ ibidem III milites.

Here we have all the Manors mentioned by Lambert (with their appurtenances) assigned to the Count of Guines, the heir of Arnold of Ardres; and we can thus believe the _Testa_ entry (p. 272) of Tolleshunt and Holland, 'quas idem comes et antecessores sui tenuerunt de conquestu Angliæ'. But the _Testa_ does more than this; it informs us that Holland and Lawford were held of the Count by 'Henry de Merk'. Now, 'Adelolf' de Merk is found in Domesday holding many Manors direct from Eustace of Boulogne, and these Manors are divided in the _Testa_ between his descendants Simon and Henry de Merk.[1] It is, therefore, possible that he held the three Essex Manors in 1086, not directly from Count Eustace, but, like his descendant, from their under-tenant (Arnold). This raises, of course, an important question as to Domesday.[2]

It is interesting to observe that the village of Marck in the Pas de Calais has, through Adelolf and his heirs, transferred its name to the Essex parish of Mark's Tey, though not to that of Marks Hall (so named in Domesday).

While on the subject of the Lords of Ardres, it may be convenient to give the reference to a letter of mine to the _Academy_ (May 28, 1892), explaining that Lambert's 'Albericus Aper', who puzzled Dr Heller and Mr Freeman, was our own Aubrey de Vere, first Earl of Oxford, and that Lambert's statement (accepted by Mr Freeman) as to the parentage of Emma, wife of Count Manasses, had been disproved by Stapleton.

[Footnote 1: An interesting charter belonging to the close of Stephen's reign shows us Queen Matilda compensating Henry 'de Merch' for his land at Donyland (one of these Manors)--which she was giving to St John's, Colchester--'de redditibus transmarinis ad suam voluntatem'. Another and earlier charter from her father and mother (printed by Mr E. J. L. Scott in the _Athenæum_ of December 2, 1893) has Fulco de merc and M. de merc among the witnesses.]

[Footnote 2: The non-appearance of Arnold's brother, 'Geoffrey', in Domesday which has been deemed a difficulty, is accounted for by Lambert's statement that he made over his English possessions to Arnold.]

EARLY IRISH TRADE WITH CHESTER AND ROUEN[1]

The eighth report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts speaks of the records of the city of Chester as 'beginning with Henry the Second's writ of licence to the citizens of Chester to trade in Durham [_sic_] as they were wont to do in the time of Henry the First' (p. xv). The records themselves are similarly described in the actual report on them (pp. 355-403) as 'beginning with a curious writ, addressed by Henry the Second to his bailiffs of the city of Durham' [_sic_]. This, which is among those items spoken of as 'especially interesting and important', figures thus as the head of the calendar:

(1) Henry II. Licence to the burgesses of Chester to buy and sell at Durham [_sic_] as they were wont to do in the time of Henry I--'Henricus Dei gratia Rex Anglie et Dux Normannie et Aquitanie et Comes Andegavie balluis [_sic_] de Dunelina [_sic_] salutem:--Precipio quod Burgenses Cestrie possint emere et vendere ad detaillum [_or_ doraillum] apud Dunelinam [_sic_] habendo et faciendo easdem consuetudines quas faciebant tempore Regis Henrici avi mei et easdem ibi habeant rectitudines et libertates et liberas consuetudines quas tempore illo habere solebant, teste, Willelmo filio Ald' dapifero Apud Wintoniam.

Durham is not only a most improbable place for such a writ to refer to, but is also an impossible rendering of the Latin name. The interest and importance of this 'curious writ' has, in short, been obscured and lost through the ignorance of Mr J. C. Jeaffreson, to whom the report was entrusted. The charters which follow the writ, and which are printed on the same page, refer to this writ as relating to Ireland; and the town, of course, to which it refers is not Durham but Dublin (_Duuelina_).

We have, therefore, in this writ an almost, if not quite, unique reference by Henry II to Dublin in the days of his grandfather, and a confirmation of the 'libertates', etc., which the men of Chester had then enjoyed there, just as if his grandfather had been in his own position. Secondly, we have here record evidence, not merely of a recognized connection, but of what might be termed treaty relations between the traders of Chester and the Ostmen of Dublin, long previous to the Conquest of Ireland, thus confirming Mr Green's observation, 'the port of Chester depended on the trade with Ireland, which had sprung up since the settlement of the Northmen along the Irish Coasts'.[2] And this has, of course, a bearing on the question of 'a Danish settlement' at Chester. Thirdly, we learn from this document that at the date of its issue Dublin was governed by bailiffs of the King (_ballivi sui_).

What, then, was its date? The clue, unfortunately, is slight; but it may not improbably belong to the close of 1175 or early part of 1176. This brings us to the interesting question, why was such a writ issued? Remembering that during his stay at Dublin (November 1171-January 1172) Henry II had granted that city to his men of Bristol, we may hold it in accordance with the spirit of the time, and, indeed, a matter of virtual certainty, that Bristol would have striven on the strength of this grant to exclude 'its rival port' (_Conquest of England_, p. 443) from the benefits of the Dublin trade. Chester would, therefore, appeal to the King on the strength of its antecedent rights, and would thus have obtained from him this writ, recognizing and confirming their validity.

The Domesday customs of the city (i. 262_b_) contain a curious allusion to its Irish trade:

Si habentibus martrinas pelles juberet prepositus regis ut nulli venderet donec sibi prius ostensas compararet, qui hoc non observabat xl. solidis emendabat ... Hæc civitas tunc reddebat de firma xlv. lib et iii. timbres pellium martrinium.

There is nothing to show where these marten skins came from, or why they are mentioned under Chester alone. But on turning to the customs of Rouen, as recorded in the charters of Duke Henry (1150-1) and King John (1199), we find they were imported from Ireland.

Quæcunque navis de Hibernia venerit, ex quo caput de Gernes [Guernsey] transierit, Rothomagum veniat, unde ego habeam de unaquâque nave unum tymbrium de martris aut decem libras Rothomagi, si ejusdem navis mercatores jurare poterint se ideo non mercatos fuisse illas martras ut auferrent consuetudinem ducis Normanniæ, et vicecomes Rothomagi de unaquaque habeat viginti solidos Rothomagi et Camerarius Tancarvillæ unam accipitrem aut sexdecim solidos Rothomagi.

Giraldus Cambrensis, it may be remembered, alludes to the abundance of martens in Ireland,[3] and describes how they were captured. We thus have evidence in Domesday of the Irish trade with Chester, even in the days of Edward the Confessor.

[Footnote 1: The error as to the Chester writ was explained by me in a letter to the _Academy_ (No. 734).]

[Footnote 2: _Conquest of England_, p. 440.]

[Footnote 3: 'Martrinarum copia abundant hic silvestria' (_Top. Hib._, i. 24).]

WALTER TIREL AND HIS WIFE

In his detailed examination of all the evidence bearing on the death of William Rufus, the late Mr Freeman carefully collected the few facts that are known relative to Walter Tirel. They are, however, so few that he could add nothing to what Lappenberg had set forth (ii. 207) in 1834. He was, however, less confident than his predecessor as to the identity of Walter Tirel with the Essex tenant of that name in Domesday. I hope now to establish the facts beyond dispute, to restore the identity of Walter Tirel, and also to show for the first time who his wife really was.

The three passages we have first to consider are these, taking them in the same order as Mr Freeman:

Adelidam filiam Ricardi de sublimi prosapia Gifardorum conjugem habuit, quæ Hugonem de Pice, strenuissimum militem, marito suo peperit (_Ord. Vit._).

Laingaham tenet Walterus Tirelde R. quod tenuit Phin dacus pro ii. hidis et dimidia et pro uno manerio (_Domesday_, ii. 41).

Adeliz uxor Walteri Tirelli reddit compotum de x. marcis argenti de eisdem placitis de La Wingeham (_Rot. Pip._, 31 Hen. I).

Dealing first with the Domesday entry, which comes, as Mr Freeman observed, 'among the estates of Richard of Clare', I would point out that though Ellis (who misled Mr Freeman) thought that 'Tirelde' was the name, the right reading is 'tenet Walterus Tirel de R[icardo]', two words (as is not unusual) being written as one. Turning next to the words of Orderic, we find that Lappenberg renders them 'Adelaide, Tochter des Richard Giffard', and Mr Freeman as 'a wife Adelaide by name, of the great line of Giffard'. But there is no trace of a Richard Giffard, nor can 'Adelida' herself be identified among the Giffards. The explanation of the mystery, I hold, is that she was the daughter, not of a Giffard, but of Richard _de Clare_, by his wife Rohese, daughter of Walter Giffard the elder. It is noteworthy that Orderic employs a precisely similar expression in the case of another Adeliza, the daughter of Robert de Grentmesnil. He terms her 'soror Hugonis de Grentemaisnil de clara stirpe Geroianorum', though she was only descended from the famous Geroy through her mother. Richard's daughter was sufficiently described as 'Adelida filia Ricardi', just as her brothers were known as 'Gilbertus filius Ricardi', 'Rogerus filius Ricardi', etc. The position of that mighty family was such that this description was enough, and they were even known collectively as the 'Ricardi', or 'Richardenses' (_Mon. Ang._, iv. 609). This is well illustrated by the passage in the Ely writer, describing Adeliza's brother Richard, Abbot of Ely, as

parentum undique grege vallatus, quorum familiam ex Ricardis et Gifardis constare tota Anglia et novit et sensit. Ricardi enim et Gifardi, duæ scilicet ex propinquo venientes familiæ, virtutis fama et generis copia illustres effecerat.

The above forms are curious, but not without parallel. Thus the descendants of Urse d'Abetot are spoken of as 'Ursini' in Heming's Cartulary. Æthelred of Rievaulx speaks of 'Poncii' and 'Morini' as present at the battle of the Standard; Gerald, in a well-known passage (v. 335), speaks of the 'Giraldidæ' and 'Stephanidæ', and Orderic, we have seen, of the 'Geroiani'.

The doubly influential character of this descent is well illustrated in this passage (_quantum valeat_) from the chronicle of St John's Abbey, Colchester.

Parcebatur tamen Eudoni, propter genus uxoris ipsius Rohaisæ: erat enim hæc de genere nobilissimo Normannorum, filia scilicet Ricardi, qui fuit filius Gilbert Comitis, duxitque Rohaisam uxorem, quæ erat soror Willelmi Giffardi, Episcopi Wintoniæ. Itaque, cum fratres et propinqui junioris Rohaisæ quoslibet motus machinaturi putarentur, si contra maritum ipsius aliquid durius decerneretur, sic factum est ut interventu predicti Episcopi, etc., etc.

This passage is, I believe, the sole evidence for the real parentage of Bishop William. It was clearly unknown to Canon Venables, who wrote the Bishop's life for the _Dictionary of National Biography_.

Like most of these 'foundation' histories, this document is in part untrustworthy. But it is Dugdale who has misread it, and not the document itself that is responsible for the grave error (_Baronage_,