Freeman’s huge volumes upon the Norman Conquest were long treated as a serious classic. He pretended to have read what he had not read. He pretended to have studied ground he had not studied. He wrote what he knew would sell because it was consonant with what was popular at the time. He attacked blindly the universal Catholic religion of the epoch he dealt with because he hated that religion. But scholarly he was not and did not attempt to be; yet scholarly he pretended to be, and upon supposed scholarship he based his false representation. I will give three examples. He calls the Battle of Hastings “Senlac.” He found the term not where he pretends, in Ordericus Vitalis, but in Lingard, who was the first man to commit the error. Lingard was the great quarry from which Freeman’s generation of Dons dug out its history without ever acknowledging the source. “_Senlac_” could not possibly be a Saxon place-name, but Freeman understood so little about the time and was so ignorant of the genius of the language, that he took it for Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps he thought in some vague way he was restoring a “Teutonic” name; more “Teutonic” than Hastings itself! To this religious motive of his there was undoubtedly added the motive of novelty and of showing off. What the ridge of Battle was originally called by the people of the place, before the Norman invasion, we cannot tell. It may have been “Sandleg” (which would be Sussex enough), or it may have been “Senhanger,” also sound Sussex, or it may have been something ending in the Celtic and Latin “lake.” But “Senlac” it most certainly could not have been; and that Freeman should have pretended to scholarship in a matter of that kind damns him. The second point is far more striking and can be tested by anyone who visits the localities mentioned in the five principal contemporary authorities. He desires to reduce the numbers involved in the battle; partly from a silly prejudice against anything written by a monk, partly from a desire to belittle the actions of the early Middle Ages and the whole of its civilization, partly (mainly, perhaps) from a desire to be novel. He makes up the estimates out of his head, grossly reducing the forces actually engaged.