His former
main argument now appeared as a "small matter of detail"--a "confusion
of geography" in the different versions of the old historians. But one
tells us, Freeman writes, that Athelwold was killed in the Forest of
Wherwell on his way to York, and then he says: "Now as Wherwell is in
Hampshire, it could not be on the road to York;" and further on he says:
"Now Harewood Forest in Yorkshire is certainly not the same as Wherwell
in Hampshire," and so on, and on, and on, but always careful not to say
that Wherwell Forest and Harewood Forest are two names for one and the
same place, although now the name of Wherwell is confined to the village
on the Test, where it is supposed Athelwold had his castle and lived
with his wife before he was killed, and where Elfrida in her declining
years, when trying to make her peace with God, came and built a Priory
and took the habit herself and there finished her darkened life.
This then was how he juggled with words and documents and chronicles
(his thimble-rigging), making a truth a lie or a lie a truth according
as it suited a froward and prejudicate mind, to quote the expression of
an older and simpler-minded historian--Sir Walter Raleigh.
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