Dash'd on every rocky square,
Their surging charges foam'd themselves away.
As Mr Oman has so well observed, the Norman horse might have surged for ever 'around the impenetrable shield-wall'.[139] It was only, as he and Mr Hunt[140] have shown, by the skilful combination of horsemen and archers, by the maddening showers of arrows between the charges of the horse, that the English, especially the lighter armed, were stung into breaking their formation and abandoning that passive defence to which they were unfortunately restricted. 'While no mode of array could be stronger so long as the line remained unbroken, it made it hard to form the line again.'[141] Dazzled by the rapid movements of their foes, now advancing, now retreating, either in feint or in earnest, the English, in places, broke their line, and then the Duke, as Mr Oman writes, 'thrust his horsemen into the gaps'.[142] All this is quite certain, and is what the authorities plainly describe. Let us, then, keep to what we know. Is it not enough for us to picture the English line stubbornly striving to the last to close its broken ranks, the awful scene of slaughter and confusion, as the Old Guard of Harold, tortured by Norman arrows, found the horsemen among them at last, slashing and piercing right and left. Still the battle-axe blindly smote; doggedly, grimly still they fought, till the axes dropped from their lifeless grasp. And so they fell.
Mr Archer, when he first came forward to defend 'Mr Freeman's account of the great battle',[143] observed that I claimed 'here to prove the entire inadequacy of Mr Freeman's work', that I held him 'wrong, completely wrong in his whole conception of the battle'.[144] And he admitted that
'such a contention, it will at once be perceived, is very different from any mere criticism of detail; it affects the centre and the very heart of Mr Freeman's work. If he could blunder here in the most carefully elaborated passage of his whole history, he could blunder anywhere; his reputation for accuracy would be gone almost beyond hope of retrieving it' (p. 336).
'Blunder', surely, is a harsh word. I would rather say that the historian is seen here at his strongest and at his weakest: at his weakest in his tendency to follow blindly individual authorities in turn, instead of grasping them as a whole, and, worse still, in adapting them, at need, to his own preconceived notions; at his strongest, in his Homeric power of making the actors in his drama live and move before us. Not in vain has 'the wand of the enchanter', as an ardent admirer once termed it, been waved around Harold and his host. We are learning from recent German researches how the narratives of early Irish warfare are 'perfectly surrounded with magic'; how, for instance, at the battle of Culdreimne 'a Druid wove a magic hedge, which he placed before the army as a hindrance to the enemy'. But spells are now no longer wrought
With woven paces and with waving hands;
and the Druid's hedge must go the way of our own magician's 'palisade'.
But, as I foresaw, in his eagerness to prove, at least, the existence of a palisade, my critic was soon reduced to impugning Mr Freeman's own supreme authority, and at last to throwing over Mr Freeman himself. 'Incidit in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim.' Sneering[145] at what the historian termed his 'highest', his 'primary' authority, that 'precious monument', the Bayeux Tapestry—merely because it will not square with his views—he rejects utterly Mr Freeman's theory as to its date and origin,[146] and substitutes one which the Professor described as 'utterly inconceivable'.[147] He has further informed us that 'common sense' tells him that the English axemen cannot possibly have fought 'in the close array of the shield-wall', as Mr Freeman says they did.[148] And then he finally demolishes Mr Freeman's 'conception of the battle' by dismissing 'an imaginary shield-wall',[149] and assuring us that the absurd vision of 'an extended shield-wall vanishes like smoke'.[150]