What we call the growth of a story is really the result of the action of a number of human wills. The convenient metaphor must not delude us into thinking that a story really grows of itself as a tree grows. In a crowd of cases ... the story comes of a state of mind which does not willingly sin against historical truth, but which has not yet learned that there is such a thing as historical truth.
Had Mr Freeman done so himself? Did he ever really learn to distinguish conjecture from fact? One asks this because within the covers of a single work, his English Towns and Districts, that Civic League which in the Norman Conquest is said to have existed 'no doubt', is in one place said to have existed 'perhaps', and in another is set forth as an undoubted historic fact:
Exeter stood forth for one moment ... the chief of a confederation of the lesser towns of the West.... A confederation of the western towns, with the great city of the district at their head, suddenly started into life to check the progress of the Conqueror.
Finally, in his 'Exeter' (1887), the same story again appears, without a word of caution, as absolute historic fact. Exeter, we read, was
the head of a gathering of smaller commonwealths around her; ... the towns of Dorset were in league with Exeter.... We have no record of the march, but it is plain that the towns of Dorset were fearfully harried.
Through all Mr Freeman's work we trace this same tendency to confuse his own conjectures with proved historic fact.
For the details of this fearful harrying we are referred to the Domesday Survey. It was 'no doubt', we learn, when William marched on Exeter (1068), that
Dorchester, Bridport, Wareham, and Shaftesbury underwent that fearful harrying, the result of which is recorded in Domesday. Bridport was utterly ruined; not a house seems to have been able to pay taxes at the time of the Survey. At Dorchester, the old Roman settlement, the chief town of the shire, only a small remnant of the houses escaped destruction. These facts are signs, etc., etc.
'These facts', we find, will not bear investigation. To refute them in the case of Bridport, 'there is nothing to be done but to turn to the proper place in the great Survey'. Following this, his own, precept, we learn that there is nothing in Domesday of our author's 'utter ruin'; and that so far from 'not a house' being 'able to pay taxes', Domesday tells us that four-fifths of the houses then existing could and did pay them. Here, again, the errors arose from not reading Domesday 'with common care'. The entry runs: 'Modo sunt ibi c. domus, et xx. sunt ita destitutæ', etc. The meaning, of course, is that twenty houses were impoverished. Mr Freeman must have hurriedly misconstrued his Latin, and read it as a hundred and twenty. No error that he detected in Mr Froude could be worse than representing Bridport, on the authority of Domesday, as the greatest sufferer among the Dorset towns, when Domesday itself proves that it suffered least of all. And so, too, with Dorchester. On turning to Domesday, we learn with surprise that the 'small remnant' of houses remaining there was eighty-eight as against one hundred and seventy-two in the days of King Edward. From an appendix of our author's to which we are referred, we glean the fact that
at Dorchester, out of a hundred and seventy-two houses no less than a hundred and twenty-eight were 'penitus destructæ a tempore Hugonis vicecomitis usque nunc'.