[77] Ibid. p. 58.
[78] Ibid. p. 36.
[79] See above, p. 40.
[80] The italics are mine.
[81] The spissa testudo of Florence is “of course” conveniently ignored.
[82] “When the compact shield wall was broken, William thrust his horsemen into the gaps” (p. 300). Just so.
[83] ‘Athenæum,’ 6th Aug., 1898. Mr. Oman had previously tried to escape from his own words by pleading that “silence does not mean a change of opinion” (‘Academy,’ 9th June, 1894). But I had been careful to explain that I did not rely on his ‘silence,’ but on his actually substituting ‘shield wall’ for ‘palisades’ in the above reproduced sentence (‘Academy,’ 19th May, 1894). Similarly, Mr. Oman, as Col. Lloyd has observed (‘English Historical Review,’ x. 538), “takes a different view” of the English formation at Crecy in the latter of these two works from that which he had taken in the earlier, substituting a wholly different arrangement of the archers.
[84] Mr. Freeman wrote of a “fortress of timber” with “wooden walls,” composed of “firm barricades of ash and other timber” (see ‘Feudal England,’ p. 340). Mr. George emphatically rejected this conception (‘Battles of English History’).
[85] ‘Norman Conquest,’ iii. (2nd ed.), 476, faithfully reproducing Henry of Huntingdon’s “dudum antequam coirent bellatores.”
[86] Guy of Amiens describes him as “Agmina præcedens innumerosa ducis.”