And he, further, indignantly denied that such a King as Harold was 'likely to mark his course by systematic harrying'. Now, Mr Hayley had never charged him with 'systematic harrying'; he had merely traced with much ingenuity, the approach of his army to Senlac by the damage, Mr Freeman admits, its passage, when assembled, must have caused.
The fact is that Mr Hayley had, and Mr Freeman had not, read his Domesday 'with common care'.[6] The latter started from the hasty assertion that:
the lasting nature of the destruction wrought at this time is shown by the large number of places round about Hastings which are returned in Domesday as 'waste'.
Hence he argued, Harold, even had he been 'Swegen himself'—
could not have done the sort of lasting damage which is implied in the lands being returned as 'waste' twenty years after. The ravaging must have been something thorough and systematic, like the ravaging of Northumberland a few years later.
The whole argument rests on a careless reading of Domesday. It was on passages such as these that Mr Hayley had relied:
Totum manerium T.R.E. valebat xx. lib. Et post vasta fuit. Modo xviii. lib. et x. sol.
Totum manerium T.R.E. valebat xiiii. lib. Postea vastatum fuit. Modo xxii. lib.
Totum manerium T.R.E. valebat cxiiii. sol. Modo vii. lib. Vastatum fuit.[7]
Thus, so far from being returned in 1086 as 'waste', these Manors, we see, had already recovered from their devastation at the Conquest, and had even, in some cases, increased their value. And so Mr Freeman's argument falls to the ground.
But as he was eager to vindicate Harold from a quite imaginary charge, I will try to clear William from Mr Freeman's very real one. Having wrongly concluded that the ravages were 'lasting', and must therefore have been 'systematic', Mr Freeman wrote: