Note 138 — PART II HISTORICAL STUDIES

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