282 HORSE-SHOES AND HORSE-SHOEING. 



few days before the appearance of the Normans and the 

 battle of Hastings, the Anglo-Saxons were so strong in 

 cavalry that the Danes, who were chiefly infantry, had to 

 dispose themselves in a particular order of battle in order 

 to repel the fierce attacks of these horsemen/ 



After the defeat of the Danes, Harold hurried back to 

 London to meet the Normans, but through disgust at his 

 behaviour, and perhaps owing to the long distance and 

 the fatigue they had already undergone, his northern army 

 appears to have been almost, if not entirely, dispersed. 

 But even at the battle of Hastings, though the footmen 

 formed the chief part of his army, there was a force of 

 cavalry ; this, however, was purposely dismounted and in- 

 corporated with the other portion, owing to the position 

 of the Anglo-Saxons on hilly ground. 



The weapons of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors were 

 purely Teutonic, and so far as the examples furnished by 

 their graves afford evidence, it would appear they bor- 

 rowed nothing from the Romans. In battle they fought 

 as Saxons ; and it was only when they came into contact, 

 socially, with the people who had preceded them, that they 

 felt the superiority of the Romans in the arts of peace.^ 

 They carried their manners and customs with them into 

 England, as well as their peculiar arms and equipment, 

 and with these also, perhaps, their own form of horse- 

 shoe. Certain it is, that from the time of their achieving 

 their supremacy in England, the characteristic bulging- 

 bordered shoe of the earlier ages appears rapidly to have 

 gone out of fashion. A specimen of the new kind of 



' See Siiorre's Sagas. 

 ' Wright. The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon, p. 415. 



