Tende, e i percossi valli,
E 'l campo dei manipoli,
E l'onda dei cavalli.
Precentor Venables has well described
that wonderful discourse, one of his greatest triumphs—in which, with flashing eye and thrilling voice, he made the great fight of Senlac—as he loved to call it, discarding the later name—which changed the fortunes of England and made her what she is, live and move before his hearers.
My third point is that his knowledge of the subject was unrivalled. He had visited the battlefield, he tells us, no less than five times, accompanied by the best experts, civil and military, he could find; he had studied every authority, and read all that had been written, till he was absolutely master of every source of information. He had further executed for him, by officers of the Royal Engineers, an elaborate plan of the battle based on his unwearied studies. Never was historian more splendidly equipped.
Thus was prepared that 'very lucid and quite original account of the battle', as Mr G. T. Clark describes it, which we are about to examine; that 'detailed account of the battle' that Mr Hunt, in his Norman Britain, describes as written 'with a rare combination of critical exactness and epic grandeur'.
THE NAME OF 'SENLAC'
Before we approach the great battle, it is necessary to speak plainly of the name which Mr Freeman gave it, the excruciating name of 'Senlac'. It is necessary, because we have here a perfect type of those changes in nomenclature on which Mr Freeman insisted, and which always remind one of Macaulay's words:
Mr Mitford piques himself on spelling better than any of his neighbours; and this not only in ancient names, which he mangles in defiance both of custom and of reason.... In such cases established usage is considered as law by all writers except Mr Mitford ... but he proceeds on no principle but that of being unlike the rest of the world. Every child has heard of Linnæus; therefore Mr Mitford calls him Linné. Rousseau is known all over Europe as Jean Jacques; therefore Mr Mitford bestows on him the strange appellation of John James.