The third of these made its appearance after his description in ‘Social England.’ “I still hold,” Mr. Oman wrote, “to the belief that there was an _abattis_ of some sort in front of Harold’s line.” But how can he “still” hold to a belief which he has never expressed before or since? For neither the first, second, or fourth of the defences he gives above can by any possibility describe an _abattis_. The New English Dictionary describes an _abattis_ as a defence constructed by placing felled trees lengthwise, one over the other, with their branches towards the enemy’s line. The ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ gives us a similar description, speaking of this defence as constructed of “felled trees lengthwise ... the stems inwards.”[91] One is driven to suppose that Mr. Oman is quite unable to understand what an _abattis_ really is. We have now seen that the writer has actually given in succession four entirely different descriptions of the defences of the English front, while he has not the candour to confess that he has ever changed his mind. At this I am not in the least surprised. As I have observed in ‘Feudal England,’ p. 342: As for the defenders of the ‘palisade,’ they cannot even agree among themselves as to what it really was. Mr. Archer produces a new explanation only to throw it over almost as soon as it is produced. One seeks to know for certain what one is expected to deal with; but, so far as it is possible to learn, nobody can tell one. There is only a succession of dissolving views, and one is left to deal with a nebulous hypothesis. Even since these words were published, Mr. Oman has produced his fourth explanation, and has produced it in conjunction with Mr. Archer, who had previously enriched this series of explanations by two further ones of his own. In one of them the “fenestres,” which Wace makes the principal ingredient of the palisade, are rendered by Mr. Archer “windows.”[92] In another he describes the English defence as “a structure of interwoven shields and stakes,” “shields set in the ground and supported by a palisade of stakes,” a defence into which “actual shields have been built.”[93] It is only necessary to add that Mr. Oman, who acknowledges here his “indebtedness to Mr. T. A. Archer,”[94] tacitly, but absolutely, rejects both these phantasies, together with Mr. Archer’s great theory that the English axemen were “shieldless” at the battle,[95] and “could not or did not form the shield wall.”[96] All this Mr. Oman rejects, though, of course, he is careful not to say so; just as Mr. Archer, before him, had rejected views of Mr. Freeman, while professing to defend his account of the battle against me.[97] * * * * *