As Sir Henry Howorth has so truly observed, in a presidential address to the members of the Archæological Institute, the transition from the chronicle to the record as a source of mediæval history is one of the most striking and hopeful features in recent historical research. And in no respect, perhaps, has the study of original records modified more profoundly the statements of mediæval chroniclers than in the matter of the figures they contain. Dealing with the introduction of knight-service into England, I was led to give some instances in point,[581] and specially to urge that “sixty thousand” occurs repeatedly as a conventional number ludicrously remote from the truth. It is now, I believe, generally accepted that my estimate of about five thousand for the number of knights’ fees in England[582] is nearer the truth than the “sixty thousand” which, in his History, Mr. Green accepted. But we still read in ‘Social England’ (i. 373) that William I. “is believed to have landed ... with at least 60,000 men”; nor did Mr. Freeman himself reject the statement of Orderic that “sixty thousand” men were gathered on Salisbury Plain for the “Mickle Gemót” of August 1, 1086. We who saw, only last summer, the difficulty of there assembling a force scarcely so large, even with all the modern facilities of transport and organization, can realize, more forcibly than ever, the incredibility of the fact. “Stephen Segrave,” Dr. Stubbs reminds us, “the minister of Henry III., reckoned 32,000 as the number” of knights’ fees; and even so late as 1371, ministers allowed a parliamentary grant to be calculated on the belief that there were 40,000 parishes in England, when there were, as a fact, less than 9,000.[583] So too, as is well known, Fitz Ralph, archbishop of Armagh, declared at Avignon, that at Oxford, in his early days, there were 30,000 students, although it is probable that they cannot have exceeded 3,000 in number.[584] It is even said that Wycliffe doubled Fitz Ralph’s estimate. There is nothing, therefore, strange in the fact that two centuries and a half after the Norman Conquest, we still find absurd numbers assigned to armies in the field and accepted with thoughtless readiness, even by modern historians. This, we shall see, has been the case, among many other battles, with that of Bannockburn (1314). The ultimate “authority” for the numbers engaged at this ever memorable fight is Barbour’s Brus. Of Edward that romancer wrote: He had of fechtaris with hym tha Ane hundreth thousand men and ma And fourty thousand war of tha Armyt on hors, bath hede and hand And zeit of thai war thre thousand With helit hors in-till playn male Till mak the front of the battale And fifty thousand of archerys He had, forouten the hoblerys; With men on fut and small rangale. In accordance with this statement we read further of the king, that His folk he delt in battalis ten In ilkane war weill ten thousand.