If 3,000 “barded horses” implied 4,000 other horsemen in 1298, why should they imply 7,000 in 1314? More especially, why should they do so when, as we have seen, the king, in summoning his foot forces, himself described the scene of the campaign as “ubi equitibus difficilis patebit accessus,” so that he was most unlikely to take a large force of cavalry?[597] Estimating the horse on the Falkirk basis, the English host cannot have amounted to more than 30,000 men instead of the 60,000 or 70,000, horse and foot, at which Mr. Oman reckons it.[598] And what of the Scotch? Let us compare these passages: The front between the wood There was only something and the marsh was not much slightly more than a mile of more than a mile broad, a space slope between the wood and the not too great to be defended by marshes.... This was well the _forty_[599] thousand men enough for the main line of the whom Bruce had brought Scottish host, formed in three together p. 571). lines of perhaps _twenty-five_ [600] thousand men in all (p. 575). It is true that the Scottish king had a fourth battle in reserve, but, according to Mr. Oman’s plan, it was no larger than the others, if so large. It would only, therefore, add some 8,000 men to the above 25,000. Where then are the 40,000? From the numbers of the forces I now pass to their disposition on the field. With each of his successive narratives of the battle Mr. Oman has given us a special--and different--ground plan. In all three of these the English ‘battles’ are shown as composed of horse and foot,--the horse in the front of each, the foot behind. But in the earliest of these (1885) _three_ such ‘battles’ are shown, in the second (1895) _five_, and in the third (1898) _ten_.[601] Will the number increase indefinitely? Again, as to the famous “pottes,” dug as traps for the English horse. In the earliest narrative these are described as covering the Scottish flank “to the left,” and in the second, as dug by the Scots “on their flanks,” though in both the ground plans they are shown in a cluster on the left flank alone. When we turn, however, to the latest account (1898), we find them shown, no longer on the flanks, but as a single line along the Scottish front, and described as dug by Bruce “in front of his line,” so that they “practically covered the whole assailable front of the Scottish host” (p. 572).