On the wondrous estimate of 60,000 I have more to say. Started by Ordericus,[187] this venerable fable has been handed down by Higden and others, till in the _Short History of the English People_ it has attained a world-wide circulation.[188] Dr Stubbs has rightly dismissed the statement 'as one of the many numerical exaggerations of the early historians';[189] but neither he nor any other writer has detected, so far as I know, the peculiar interest of the sum. What that interest is will be seen at once when I say that Ordericus, who asserts that the Conqueror had so apportioned the knight-service 'ut Angliæ regnum lx. millia militum indesinenter haberet' (iv. 7), also alleges that the number present at the famous Salisbury assembly (1086) was 60,000. It is very instructive to compare this 'body whose numbers were handed down by tradition as no less than sixty thousand',[190] with the 'sixty thousand horsemen'[191]--'ut ferunt sexaginta millia equitum'--of thirteen years earlier, and with the number of the Norman invaders, 'commonly given at sixty thousand',[192] of seven years earlier still. It is Ordericus, too, who states that the treasure in Normandy at the death of Henry I was £60,000. His father seems to have left behind him the same sum at Winchester, for, though the chronicle left the amount in doubt, 'Henry of Huntingdon,' Mr Freeman observed, with a touch of just sarcasm, 'knew the exact amount of the silver, sixty thousand pounds, one doubtless for each knight's fee'.[193] He also reminds us, as to the crusade of William of Aquitaine, that 'Orderic allows only thirty thousand. In William of Malmesbury they have grown into sixty thousand. Figures of this kind, whether greater or smaller, are always multiples of one another'.[194] Pursuing the subject, we learn from Giraldus that the Conqueror's annual income was 60,000 marcs.[195] Fantosme speaks of marshalled knights as _Meins de_ seisante mile, _e plus de seisante treis,_ and the author of the Anglo-Norman poem on the conquest of Ireland gives the strength of the Irish host, in 1171, as 60,000 men. Even 'Sir Bevis', if I remember right, slew in the streets of London 60,000 men; and Fitz Stephen asserts that, in Stephen's reign, London was able to turn out 60,000 foot.[196] It may, also, not be without significance that 60,000 Moors are said to have been slain at Navas de Tolosa, and that William of Sicily was said to have bequeathed to Henry II three distinct sums of 60,000 each.[197] The fact is that 'sixty thousand' was a favourite phrase for a great number, and that 'sixty' was used in this sense just as the Romans[198] had used it in classical times and just as Russian peasants (I think I have read) use it to this day. The 'twice six hundred thousand men', who were burning to fight for England,[199] and the £180,000 (60,000 × 3) of Gervase (1159), are traceable, doubtless, to the same source.