was his; but it was not his to stake on the issue of a single combat.  If Harold were killed, the nation might give the crown to whom they thought good; Harold’s death could not make William’s claim one jot better.  The cause was not personal, but national.  The Norman duke had, by a wanton invasion, wronged, not the King only, but every man in England, and every man might claim to help in driving him out.  Again, in an ordinary wager of battle, the judgement can be enforced; here, whether William slew Harold or Harold slew William, there was no means of enforcing the judgement except by the strength of the two armies.  If Harold fell, the English army were not likely to receive William as king; if William fell, the Norman army was still less likely to go quietly out of England.  The challenge was meant as a mere blind; it would raise the spirit of William’s followers; it would be something for his poets and chroniclers to record in his honour; that was all.

The actual battle, fought on Senlac, on Saint Calixtus’ day, was more than a trial of skill and courage between two captains and two armies.  It was, like the old battles of Macedonian and Roman, a trial between two modes of warfare.  The English clave to the old Teutonic tactics.  They fought on foot in the close array of the shield-wall.  Those who rode to the field dismounted when the fight began.  They first hurled their javelins, and then took to the weapons of close combat.  Among these the Danish axe, brought in by Cnut, had nearly displaced the older English broadsword.  Such was the array of the housecarls and of the thegns who had followed Harold from York or joined him on his march.  But the treason of Edwin and Morkere had made it needful to supply the place of the picked men of Northumberland with irregular levies, armed almost anyhow.  Of their weapons of various kinds the bow was the rarest.  The strength of the Normans lay in the arms in which the English were lacking, in horsemen and archers.  These last seem to have been a force of William’s training; we first hear of the Norman bowmen at Varaville.  These two ways of fighting were brought each one to perfection by the leaders on each side.  They had not yet been tried against one another.  At Stamfordbridge Harold had defeated an enemy whose tactics were the same as his own.  William had not fought a pitched battle since Val-es-dunes in his youth.  Indeed pitched battles, such as English and Scandinavian warriors were used to in the wars of Edmund and Cnut, were rare in continental warfare.  That warfare mainly consisted in the attack and defence of strong places, and in skirmishes fought under their walls.  But William knew how to make use of troops of different kinds and to adapt them to any emergency.  Harold too was a man of resources; he had gained his Welsh successes by adapting his men to the enemy’s way of fighting.  To withstand the charge of the Norman horsemen, Harold clave to the national tactics,