82 
I should have liked to recapitulate more fully, and to recall 
to you some of the leading points which show that unless it 
was during the days of seven-leagued boots or the later 
ones of express trains, no army could have gone from Tada^ 
be it where it may, to Stamford Bridge^ near York, to fight 
"early in the morning,'* or sent messengers from thence 
to call up reinforcements from ships at the camp below 
Eicall ! The distance, in both instances, is at once fatal 
to the theory. But there is one point which, indirectly, 
bears strongly in my favour — it is that the latest and most 
prolix of the historians of England has just published a 
volume of English history bearing upon this era and this 
battle ; that in that volume of 768 pages, a large portion of 
it being a closely- written appendix in connection with the 
subject of this battle, after more than one view of the battle- 
ground, the author can make nothing satisfactory of it, and 
is driven to the strangest inconsistencies and evasions, in order 
to account for what must be unaccountable, and is led to a 
harsh conclusion, foreign to the gentle nature of one who 
would not tread upon a worm or hurt the feelings of a fox, 
viz., that all authorities^ ancient and modern, are wrong, 
and that he alone is right ! " The accounts in Lappenburgh, 
Thierry, and St. John, seem to have been written without 
any knowledge of the ground;" and, as to the Saga of 
Harold Hardrada, " I gradually came to the conclusion that 
that part of the Saga was mythical. . . . The Saga 
maker had to draw largely on his imagination"! and yet 
there were ballads extant which Snorro quotes with Harold's 
very words on this very battlefield, and Strykar at least 
escaped to tell his tale. In short, the whole of that laboured 
appendix on the details of the battle of Stamford Bridge is 
written to show that every one else but the writer of the 
history of the Norman Conquest (Freeman, vol. iii., pp. 352, 
354, 357, 721) does not understand or comprehend the 
subject he is treating ! 
