Here, again, Mr Freeman's error can be traced beyond the possibility of question, to a misreading of Domesday: the entry runs, 'modo sunt ibi quater xx. et viii. [88] domus, et c. [sunt] penitus destructæ'. Mr Freeman must have hurriedly ignored the 'quater', and then added the 'twenty-eight' thus evolved to the hundred houses that were destroyed. All this Mr Freeman did, and we have in 'that great record, from which there is no appeal', the proof of the fact. Clearly, in the notable words of M. Bémont (Revue Historique), 'il est prudent de revoir après lui les textes qu'il invoque'.[13]
The strange thing is that Sir Henry Ellis's work, though 'far from being up to the present standard of historical scholarship', could have saved him, here also, from error, as it gives the correct figures from Domesday.
But passing from 'facts' to theories, we find Mr Freeman holding that 'no doubt', 'doubtless', 'probably', the destruction recorded in Domesday was wrought by the Conqueror himself in 1068. Why should this guesswork be substituted for history, when we have 'always the means', as our author himself wrote, 'of at once turning to the law and testimony to see whether these things are so'? A glance at Domesday effectually disposes of Mr Freeman's theory; for the Survey is here peculiarly explicit: with anxious care, with painful iteration, it assures us that, in the case of Wareham, the devastation was wrought 'a tempore Hugonis vicecomitis', and that, in the case of Shaftesbury and in the case of Dorchester, it was wrought 'a tempore Hugonis vicecomitis usque nunc'. These categorical statements are conclusive: they place the whole of the devastation subsequent to the accession of the Norman sheriff, Hugh FitzGrip. Mr Eyton, in his work on the Dorset Domesday, held that they fix it as having occurred between 1070 and 1084; the words, however, 'usque nunc' carry it on down to 1086, and, but that I must now come to Exeter, I could show the real bearing of these allusions to Sheriff Hugh.
The breakdown, when tested, of the alleged 'Civic League' strangely vindicates the sound insight of that sagacious historian who explicitly asserted that the English boroughs
never, as was the case in Scotland and in Germany, adopted a confederate bond of union, or organized themselves in leagues.[14]
Yet, in his English Towns and Districts, Mr Freeman was led by his own tale of the resistance of the western lands and their capital to argue from it as from a proved historic fact:
When Exeter stood forth for one moment ... the chief of a confederation of the lesser towns of the West ... we see that the path was opening by which Exeter might have come to be another Lübeck, the head of a Damnonian Hanse, another Bern, the mistress of the subject-lands of the western peninsula. Such a dream sounds wild in our ears.[15]
It does indeed. But it does so for the reason that it is founded on a fact which has no historic existence. Yet, for Mr Freeman, with his fertile imagination afire with the glories of ancient Greece and of countless mediaeval Commonwealths, this same 'wild dream' possessed an irresistible fascination. 'It is none the less true', he hastened to add, that