This is an exact description of the host that faced the Normans, fourteen years later, on the hill of Battle. As William of Malmesbury describes it: Pedites omnes cum bipennibus, conserta ante se _scutorum testudine_, impenetrabilem cuneum faciunt.[70] “It is a pleasure,” as I wrote, “to find myself here in complete agreement with Mr. Freeman.”[71] Mr. Freeman saw in this passage “the array of the shield wall,”[72] and aptly compared Abbot Æthelred’s description of the English array at the Battle of the Standard: “Scutis scuta junguntur, lateribus latera conseruntur.”[73] With Mr. Oman also I was no less pleased to find myself in perfect agreement. I myself should speak, as he does, of the “tactics of the phalanx of axemen.”[74] It is particularly interesting to read in his latest work (p. 57), that at Zülpich (A.D. 612), according to Fredegarius: So great was the press when the hostile masses [_phalanges_] met and strove against each other, that the bodies of the slain could not fall to the ground, but the dead stood upright wedged among the living. For precisely the same phenomenon is described at the Battle of Hastings. William of Poitiers says of the English: Ob nimiam densitatem eorum labi vix potuerunt interfecti. And Bishop Guy: Spiritibus nequeunt frustrata cadavera sterni, Nec cedunt vivis corpora militibus. Omne cadaver enim, vita licet evacuatum, Stat velut illæsum, possidet atque locum.[75] There is nothing strange in this parallel between Zülpich and Hastings, for Mr. Oman observes that: In their weapons and their manner of fighting, the bands of Angles, Jutes, and Saxons who overran Britain were more nearly similar to the Franks than to the German tribes who wandered south.[76] At Poictiers “the Franks fought, as they had done two hundred years before at Casilinum, in one solid mass,”[77] for their tactics were “to advance in a deep column or wedge.”[78] We have seen that the “column” of English axemen similarly fought, according to Mr. Oman, “arranged in a compact mass.” Where the agreement is so complete, I need not labour the point further. In my ‘Feudal England’ (pp. 354–8), I showed that Mr. Archer’s views on the subject could not stand for a moment against those of Mr. Freeman and Mr. Oman, to which they were directly opposed. In ‘Social England’--just as Mr. Freeman had written that both the English and the Danes stood as a “wedge of infantry forming a wall with their shields”[79]--Mr. Oman writes of their “wedge or column.” It is only in his later work that he suddenly shifts his ground, and flatly contradicts his own words: 1894. 1898.