Florence adopts the same word in describing the formation of the rival hosts on that occasion:
Pagani in duas se turmas dividentes, æquali testudine bellum parant (i. 83).
Ælfred ... Christianas copias contra hostiles exercitus ... dirigens ... testudine ordinabiliter condensata (i. 84).
So, too, at the battle of Ethandun:
Ubi contra Paganorum exercitum universum cum densa testudine atrociter belligerans (i. 96).
Again, in 1052:
Pedestris exercitus ... spissam terribilemque fecit testudinem.
This is an exact description of the host that faced the Normans, fourteen years later, on the hill of Battle. As William of Malmesbury describes it:
Pedites omnes cum bipennibus, conserta ante se scutorum testudine, impenetrabilem cuneum faciunt.[70]
“It is a pleasure,” as I wrote, “to find myself here in complete agreement with Mr. Freeman.”[71] Mr. Freeman saw in this passage “the array of the shield wall,”[72] and aptly compared Abbot Æthelred’s description of the English array at the Battle of the Standard: “Scutis scuta junguntur, lateribus latera conseruntur.”[73] With Mr. Oman also I was no less pleased to find myself in perfect agreement. I myself should speak, as he does, of the “tactics of the phalanx of axemen.”[74] It is particularly interesting to read in his latest work (p. 57), that at Zülpich (A.D. 612), according to Fredegarius: