Note 44 — PART II HISTORICAL STUDIES

On the other hand, there are, in spite of Mr Freeman, undoubted difficulties in rendering the passage as a description of the 'shield-wall', just as there are in taking escuz to mean 'barricades' (iii. 471). The result was that, perhaps unconsciously, Mr Freeman gave the passage, in succession, two contradictory renderings (iii. 471, 763). Now, starting from the fact that the disputed passage supported, and also opposed both renderings, I arrived at the conclusion that it must represent some confusion of Wace's own. He had, evidently, himself no clear idea of what he was describing. But the whole confusion is at once accounted for if we admit him to have here also followed William of Malmesbury. His escuz—otherwise impossible to explain—faithfully renders the scuta of William, while the latter's testudo, though strictly accurate, clearly led him astray. The fact is that William of Malmesbury must have been quite familiar with the 'shield-wall', if indeed he had seen the fyrd actually forming it.44 Wace, on the contrary, living later, and in Normandy instead of England, cannot have seen, or even understood, this famous formation, with which his cavalry fight of the twelfth century had nothing in common. It is natural therefore that his version should betray some confusion, though his Fait en orent deuant closture clearly renders William of Malmesbury's conserta ante se scutorum testudine. There is no question as to William's meaning, for a testudo of shields is excellent Latin for the shield-wall formed by the Romans against a flight of arrows. Moreover, the construction of William's Latin (conserta) accounts for that use by Wace of the pluperfect tense on which stress has been laid as proof that the passage must describe a 'barricade'.45 That Wace could, occasionally, be led astray by misunderstanding his authority, is shown by his taking Harold to Abbeville, after his capture on the French coast, a statement which arose, in Mr Freeman's opinion, 'from a misconception of the words of William of Jumièges (iii. 224)'. No one, I think, can read dispassionately the extracts I have printed side by side, without accepting the explanation I offer of this disputed passage in Wace, namely, that it is nothing but a metrical, elaborate, and somewhat confused paraphrase of the words of William of Malmesbury.