It is the method of Domesday Book, after reciting the particulars relating to each Manor, to set down the valuation thereof, at three several periods, to wit, the time of King Edward the Confessor, afterwards _when the new tenant entered upon it_, and again at the time when the survey was made. Now it is to be observed in perusing the account of the Rape of Hastings in that book, that in several of the Manors therein _at the second of these periods_, it is recorded of them that they were waste, and from this circumstance it may upon good ground be concluded what parts of that Rape were marched over by, and suffered from the ravages of the two armies of the Conqueror and King Harold; and indeed, the situations of those Manors is such as evidently shows their _then_ devastated state to be owing to that cause.[4] Mr Freeman's treatment of this theory was highly characteristic. In the Appendix he devoted to the subject[5] he first contemptuously observed of the allusion to Harold's army: This notion would hardly have needed any answer except from the sort of sanction given to it by the two writers who quote Mr Hayley. I do not believe that any army of any age ever passed through a district without doing some damage, but to suppose that Harold systematically harried his own kingdom does seem to me the height of absurdity. 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]