We have now seen that the writer has actually given in succession four entirely different descriptions of the defences of the English front, while he has not the candour to confess that he has ever changed his mind.
At this I am not in the least surprised. As I have observed in ‘Feudal England,’ p. 342:
As for the defenders of the ‘palisade,’ they cannot even agree among themselves as to what it really was. Mr. Archer produces a new explanation only to throw it over almost as soon as it is produced. One seeks to know for certain what one is expected to deal with; but, so far as it is possible to learn, nobody can tell one. There is only a succession of dissolving views, and one is left to deal with a nebulous hypothesis.
Even since these words were published, Mr. Oman has produced his fourth explanation, and has produced it in conjunction with Mr. Archer, who had previously enriched this series of explanations by two further ones of his own. In one of them the “fenestres,” which Wace makes the principal ingredient of the palisade, are rendered by Mr. Archer “windows.”[92] In another he describes the English defence as “a structure of interwoven shields and stakes,” “shields set in the ground and supported by a palisade of stakes,” a defence into which “actual shields have been built.”[93] It is only necessary to add that Mr. Oman, who acknowledges here his “indebtedness to Mr. T. A. Archer,”[94] tacitly, but absolutely, rejects both these phantasies, together with Mr. Archer’s great theory that the English axemen were “shieldless” at the battle,[95] and “could not or did not form the shield wall.”[96] All this Mr. Oman rejects, though, of course, he is careful not to say so; just as Mr. Archer, before him, had rejected views of Mr. Freeman, while professing to defend his account of the battle against me.[97]
I have now shown that my opponents are still as unable as ever to agree among themselves on the subject of the alleged English defence, and that as to Mr. Oman, he contradicts himself, not only in successive works, but even in a single chapter. A little clique of Oxford historians, mortified at my crushing exposé of Mr. Freeman’s vaunted accuracy, have endeavoured, without scruple, and with almost unconcealed anger, to silence me at any cost. And they cannot even wait until they have agreed among themselves.
How entirely impotent they are to stay the progress of the truth is shown by the fact that a German writer, Dr. Spatz, who has independently examined the authorities and the ground, goes even farther than myself in rejecting Mr. Freeman’s narrative, and especially the palisade.[98] Sir James Ramsay also, on similarly independent investigation, has been driven to the same conclusion, which his recently published work embodies. Does Mr. Oman refer to Dr. Spatz, whose work is a well-known one? No, he coolly states that “the whole balance of learned opinion” is against me on this matter,[99] although, as we have seen, neither he nor Mr. Archer accepts Mr. Freeman’s narrative,[100] while their own recorded views hopelessly differ (see pp. 43, 49).
Again, Mr. Oman writes:
I do not see what should have induced him [Wace] to bring the wattled barrier into his narrative, unless it existed in the tale of the fight as it had been told him, etc. (p. 153).
And yet he made use of my ‘Feudal England,’ in which I set forth prominently (pp. 409–416), as I had previously done in the ‘English Historical Review’ (viii. 677 et seq.; ix. 237), my theory that the passage in Wace “is nothing but a metrical, elaborate, and somewhat confused paraphrase of the words of William of Malmesbury,” and that he was clearly misled by the words “conserta ... testudine,” which he did not understand. Mr. Archer discussed this theory, but did not venture to reject it (Ibid.). Mr. Oman finds it safer to ignore it, and to profess that he cannot imagine where Wace got the idea from, except from oral tradition.