Note 7 — PART II HISTORICAL STUDIES

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