The result of this fact was that from the very beginning of the battle the English were crowded and crushed together and wholly unable to manœuvre (p. 575). In his first work (1885) Mr. Oman had adopted “100,000 men” as the number of Edward’s host; in 1895 it had become “an army that is rated at nearly 100,000 men by the chronicler.”[589] In 1898 we learn that “the estimate of a hundred thousand men, which the Scottish chroniclers give, is no doubt exaggerated, but that the force was very large is shown by the genuine details which have come down to us” (p. 573). These “genuine details” prove to be the figures in the ‘Foedera,’ on which Mr. Bain relied. Mr. Oman arrives at his figures thus: Edward II. had brought a vast host with him.... There have been preserved of the orders which Edward sent out for the raising of this army only those addressed to the sheriffs of twelve English counties, seven Marcher barons, and the Justices of North and South Wales. Yet these account for twenty-one thousand five hundred men, though they do not include the figures of any of the more populous shires, such as Norfolk, Suffolk, Kent, or Middlesex. The whole must have amounted to more than 50,000 men (p. 573). To the numbers of Edward’s host he attaches so great an importance that he gives the details, from Rymer, in a note. I make the total, myself, to be 21,540.[590] It is Mr. Oman’s extraordinary delusion that the other English counties were similarly called on for troops, but that the orders have not been “preserved.” On the strength of this illusion alone he adds some 30,000 men to the English host! A glance at Rymer’s list, as given in his own pages, is sufficient to dispel that illusion. As Mr. Bain correctly implies, the counties called on for troops form a compact group, of which Warwick was the southernmost. Moreover, even within that group, the southern counties were evidently called on for much less than the northernmost, Warwick and Leicester only sending 500 men, while Northumberland and Durham were called on to supply 4,000, as was also Yorkshire. We have only to turn to the ‘Rotuli Scotiæ’[591] for 1314 to learn that the writs originally issued (_i.e._ in March) for the Bannockburn campaign summoned no more than 6,500 men, and these from the counties “beyond Trent” alone.[592] As the peril increased subsequent writs called for a further 6,000 men from these counties, and extended the net so as to obtain 3,000 from Lincolnshire, 500 from Warwickshire and Leicestershire, and 500 from Lancashire (previously omitted); this, with 4,940 men from Wales and its marches, made up the total.