In the Contemporary Review of March 1893, Mr T. A. Archer produced a reply to my original article (Quarterly Review, July 1892), or rather, to that part of it which dealt with the Battle of Hastings. Declaring my attack on the palisade to be my 'only definite and palpable charge against Mr Freeman's account' (p. 273) which, it will be found, is not the case—he undertook to 'show Mr Freeman to have been entirely right in the view he took of the whole question' (p. 267). To do this, he deliberately suppressed the fatal passage (iii. 763-4) I have printed above—to which, in my article, I had prominently appealed—in order to represent me as alone in seeing a description of the shield-wall in Wace's lines (p. 267). He then insisted that 'there are six distinct objections to translating this passage as if it referred to a shield-wall' (p. 270).
Instantly reminded by me (Athenæum, March 18, April 8, 1893), that Mr Freeman himself had taken it as a description of the shield-wall, and challenged to account for the fact, again charged (Quarterly Review, July 1893, p. 88), with 'ignoring a fact in the presence of which his elaborate argument collapses like a house of cards', further challenged (Academy, September 16, 1893) to reconcile Mr Freeman's words (iii. 763-4), with his representation of the historian's position, Mr Archer continued to shirk the point, till in the English Historical Review of January 1894, he grudgingly confessed that 'the discovery that a shield-wall (of some sort or other) was implied in this so-called "crucial passage", is due to Mr Freeman' (p. 3), but he and Miss Norgate endeavoured to urge that it could not be as I imagined, the shield-wall that he had always spoken of (pp. 3, 16, 62). Even this feeble evasion, now seems to be dropped since I disposed of it (Ibid., 225-7).
[25] Quarterly Review, July 1892, p. 15.
[26] See below, p. 284.
[27] Quarterly Review, July 1893, p. 84.
[28] Athenæum, March 18, 1893.
[29] English Historical Review, ix. 40.
[30] Ibid., p. 58.
[31] Cont. Rev., 351.
[32] Quarterly Review, July 1893, pp. 93-4.