When Edward III. arrayed his host, twenty-five years later, for the French war, he only asked for 500 foot from Northumberland (as against 2,500), and 1,000 from Yorkshire, but from Warwickshire with Leicestershire he exacted 480. These figures speak for themselves. Any one of ordinary intelligence can see that the forces on these two occasions were raised on entirely different principles, Northumberland being called on for five times as many men in 1314 as in 1339, while Warwickshire and Leicester supplied almost as many in the latter as in the former year. And yet Mr. Oman actually makes the comparison himself (p. 593), and prints the numbers in detail for both occasions without any comprehension that this was so. Indeed, he bases on his misapprehension a theory that as, at the later date (1339), the quotas were never more than a third of those demanded for Bannockburn (1314), a comparatively picked force was secured. We note that the Commissions of Array in the latter year were directed to levy only from about one-third to one-fifth of the numbers which the sheriffs had been told to provide in the former year. They were, of course, individually better in proportion to the greater care which could be taken in selecting them.[593] We have seen that, on the contrary, in Warwickshire and Leicestershire, the number summoned was almost the same, and that the above theory is, therefore, another delusion. In 1339 the proportion varied from 20 per cent. to 96 per cent. of the numbers summoned in 1314, and did so, as we have seen, on a geographical system. Mr. Oman bases his above assertion on a note in which four lines contain four direct mistakes. It asserts that Yorkshire sent “six thousand,” Lincolnshire “four thousand,” Warwick “five hundred,” and Leicester “five hundred,” in 1314, when the right numbers, as given by himself on page 573 of the same volume, were: Yorkshire _four_ thousand, Lincolnshire _three_ thousand, and Warwick and Leicester _together_ five hundred. The result of this astounding inaccuracy is that he fails to understand the system of these levies in the least.