NOTE ON THE PSEUDO-INGULF

I owe to my friend Mr Hubert Hall the suggestion that the great battle described by the Pseudo-Ingulf as taking place between the English and the Danes in 870—and all accepted as sober fact by Turner in his History of the Anglo-Saxons—may be a concoction based on the facts of the battle of Hastings. This is also the theory Mr Freeman advanced as to Snorro's story of the battle of Stamford Bridge. The coincidence is very striking. In both narratives the defending force is formed with 'the dense shield-wall';[¹] in both it breaks at length that formation; in both it is, consequently, overwhelmed; and in both cases the attacking force consists of horsemen and archers. But the most curious coincidence is found in the principal weapon of the defending force. In Snorro's narrative, as Mr Freeman renders it, 'a dense wood of spears bristles in front of the circle to receive the charge of the English horsemen';[²] in the Pseudo-Ingulf the defending force 'contra violentiam equitum densissimam aciem lancearum prætendebant'.[³] Such a defence savours of the days when the knight, fighting on foot with his lance,[⁴] had replaced the housecarl with his battle-axe: it was not that of Harold's host, but one which we meet with in the twelfth century.

There are marks, however, in the Pseudo-Ingulf, of study, not merely of the Battle of Hastings, but of William of Malmesbury's account of it. From him, it would seem, are taken the words 'testudo' and 'tumulus'. The first parallel passages are these:

William	'Ingulf'
Conserta ante se scutorum testudine, impenetrabilem cuneum faciunt.	In unum cuneum conglobati, ... testudinem clypeorum prætendebant.

Again, after the disaster caused, in each case, by a feigned flight, we have the rally thus described:

William	'Ingulf'
nec tamen ultioni suæ defuere, quin crebro consistentes ... occupato tumulo, Normannos, calore succensos acriter ad superiora nitentes, in vallem dejiciunt.	in quodam campi tumulocetera planitie aliquantulum altiore in orbem conferti, barbaros arietantes diutissime sustinuerunt ... suum sanguinem vindicantes.

The Pseudo-Ingulf alludes but briefly to the Battle of Hastings itself. Yet here again we have traces of William of Malmesbury's words in 'nec de toto exercitu, præter paucissimos eum aliquis concomitatur' and 'more gregarii militis manu ad manum congrediens', which phrases are applied to Harold.

[¹] Norm. Conq., iii. 367.

[²] Ibid., p. 365.

[³] Ed. 1684, p. 21.

[⁴] Vide supra, p. 279. Cf. the fight at Jaffa, August 5, 1192.