It had been my hope, in the present work, to have avoided acute controversy, but the attitude adopted, unfortunately, by the late Professor's champions has rendered that course impossible. One can but rejoice that his accuracy should find strenuous defenders, as it removes the reluctance one would otherwise feel in continuing to criticize it now. A case is doubly proved when proved in the teeth of opposition. But one expects that opposition to be fair, and the line my opponents have taken throughout cannot, by any stretch of courtesy, be so described. My difficulty, indeed, in dealing with their arguments on the Battle of Hastings, is that they do not affect or even touch my case. In spite of their persistent efforts to obscure a plain issue, there is not, and there cannot be, any 'controversy' as to Mr Freeman and the 'palisade'. For, while fully recognizing that the _onus probandi_ lay on those who assert its existence, he failed, on his own showing, to produce any proof of it whatever.[9] Mr Archer has ended,[10] as he began,[11] by deliberately ignoring Mr Freeman's words,[12] on which my case avowedly rests, and without suppressing which he could not even enter the field. This, indeed, I have explained so often, that I need not again have disposed of his arguments had not Mr Gardiner, in the exercise of his editorial discretion, allowed him to make certain statements,[13] and refused me the right of exposing them. A typical example will be found on p. 273.[14] It is not only demonstrable error that justifies critical treatment; no less dangerous, if not more so, is that subtle commixture of guess-work and fact, which leaves us in doubt as to what is proved and what is merely hypothesis. In his lecture on 'The Nature of Historical Evidence', the late Professor himself well brought out the point: Many people seem to think that a position is proved if it can not be disproved.... Very few see with Sir George Lewis--though Sir George Lewis perhaps carried his own doctrine a little too far--that in a great many cases we ought to be satisfied with a negative result, that we must often put up with knowing that a thing did not happen in a particular way, or did not happen at all, without being furnished with any counter-statement to put in the place of that which we reject.[15] The question is whether a statement can be proved, not whether it can be disproved. Cases in point will be found on pp. 291, 298, 331-3. It may, in view of certain comments, be desirable, perhaps, to explain that the study on the origin of knight-service appeared in Mr Freeman's lifetime,[16] and that my open criticism of his work began so far back as 1882. It will be seen, therefore, that I challenged its accuracy when he was himself able to reply. To those who may hold that in these studies excessive attention is bestowed on Anglo-Norman genealogy, I commend the words, not of a genealogist, but of the historian Kemble: