Note 91 — PART II HISTORICAL STUDIES

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.