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.[1]
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 incorporated 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 borrowed 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.[2] 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
