Note 1 — PART I TERRITORIAL STUDIES (continued 3)

In discussing Mr Freeman's treatment of the great battle, we saw that the only passage he vouched for the existence of a palisade1 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.