It might well be thought the height of rashness to attempt criticism, even in detail, of Mr Freeman's narrative of the Battle of Hastings. For its story, as his champion has well observed, is 'the centre and the very heart of Mr Freeman's work; if he could blunder here in the most carefully elaborated passage of his whole history he could blunder anywhere; his reputation for accuracy would be gone almost beyond hope of retrieving it'.[1] And indeed, it may fairly be described as Mr Freeman's greatest achievement, the point where he is strongest of all. He himself described the scene as the 'battle which is the centre of my whole history', and reminded us that on its historic importance I need not dwell; it is the very subject of my history.... Looking also at the fight simply as a battle, it is one of the most memorable in all military history. That is the first point. The second is that in his battle pieces our author was always at his best. Essentially a concrete historian, objective as Macaulay in his treatment, he loved incident and action; loved them, indeed, so well, that he could scarcely bring himself to omit the smallest details of a skirmish: E ripenso le mobili Tende, e i percossi valli, E 'l campo dei manipoli, E l'onda dei cavalli. Precentor Venables has well described that wonderful discourse, one of his greatest triumphs--in which, with flashing eye and thrilling voice, he made the great fight of Senlac--as he loved to call it, discarding the later name--which changed the fortunes of England and made her what she is, live and move before his hearers. My third point is that his knowledge of the subject was unrivalled. He had visited the battlefield, he tells us, no less than five times, accompanied by the best experts, civil and military, he could find; he had studied every authority, and read all that had been written, till he was absolutely master of every source of information. He had further executed for him, by officers of the Royal Engineers, an elaborate plan of the battle based on his unwearied studies. Never was historian more splendidly equipped. Thus was prepared that 'very lucid and quite original account of the battle', as Mr G. T. Clark describes it, which we are about to examine; that 'detailed account of the battle' that Mr Hunt, in his _Norman Britain_, describes as written 'with a rare combination of critical exactness and epic grandeur'. THE NAME OF 'SENLAC' Before we approach the great battle, it is necessary to speak plainly of the name which Mr Freeman gave it, the excruciating name of 'Senlac'. It is necessary, because we have here a perfect type of those changes in nomenclature on which Mr Freeman insisted, and which always remind one of Macaulay's words: