Note 187 — PART I TERRITORIAL STUDIES (continued 3)

On the wondrous estimate of 60,000 I have more to say. Started by Ordericus,187 this venerable fable has been handed down by Higden and others, till in the Short History of the English People it has attained a world-wide circulation.188 Dr Stubbs has rightly dismissed the statement 'as one of the many numerical exaggerations of the early historians';189 but neither he nor any other writer has detected, so far as I know, the peculiar interest of the sum. What that interest is will be seen at once when I say that Ordericus, who asserts that the Conqueror had so apportioned the knight-service 'ut Angliæ regnum lx. millia militum indesinenter haberet' (iv. 7), also alleges that the number present at the famous Salisbury assembly (1086) was 60,000. It is very instructive to compare this 'body whose numbers were handed down by tradition as no less than sixty thousand',190 with the 'sixty thousand horsemen'191—'ut ferunt sexaginta millia equitum'—of thirteen years earlier, and with the number of the Norman invaders, 'commonly given at sixty thousand',192 of seven years earlier still. It is Ordericus, too, who states that the treasure in Normandy at the death of Henry I was £60,000. His father seems to have left behind him the same sum at Winchester, for, though the chronicle left the amount in doubt, 'Henry of Huntingdon,' Mr Freeman observed, with a touch of just sarcasm, 'knew the exact amount of the silver, sixty thousand pounds, one doubtless for each knight's fee'.193 He also reminds us, as to the crusade of William of Aquitaine, that 'Orderic allows only thirty thousand. In William of Malmesbury they have grown into sixty thousand. Figures of this kind, whether greater or smaller, are always multiples of one another'.194