e King of Stones. In the same category we
must put the spectral host in the Donnersberg, and Herla's company,
which haunted the Welsh marches, and is described by Walter Map as a
great band of men and women on foot and in chariots, with pack-saddles
and panniers, birds and dogs, advancing with trumpets and shouts, and
all sorts of weapons ready for emergencies. Night was the usual time of
Herla's wanderings, but the last time he and his train were seen was at
noon. Those who then saw them, being unable to obtain an answer to their
challenge by words, prepared to exact one by arms; but the moment they
did so the troop rose into the air and disappeared, nor was it ever seen
again.[170]

This is a different account of Herla from that previously quoted from an
earlier part of Map's work; but perhaps, if it were worth while to spend
the time, not altogether irreconcilable with it. The tradition, it
should be observed, appears to have been an English, and not a Welsh,
tradition, since the host received the English name of Herlething.
Gervase of Tilbury, writing about the same time, reports that Arthur was
said by the foresters, or woodwards, both in Britain and in Brittany, to
be very often seen at midday, or in the evening moonlight at full of the
moon, accompanied by a troop of soldiers, hunters, dogs, and the sound
of horns. This is manifestly a Celtic tradition. But these occasions are
not the last on which such appearances have been seen and heard in this
country. If we may believe a tract published in 1643, spectral fights
had taken place at Keniton, in Northamptonshire, during four successive
Saturday and Sunday nights of the preceding Christmastide. By those who
are reported to have witnessed the phenomenon--and among them were
several gentlemen of credit mentioned by name as despatched by the king
himself from Oxford--it was taken to be a ghostly repetition of the
battle of Edgehill, which had been fought only two months before on the
adjacent fields. The excitement of men's minds during periods of
commotion has doubtless much to do with the currency of beliefs like
this. Saint Augustine alludes to a story of a battle between evil
spirits beheld upon a plain in Campania during the civil wars of Rome.
As in the case of Edgehill, the vision was accompanied by all the noises
of a conflict; and indeed the saint goes the length of declaring that
after it was over the ground was covered with the footprints of men and
horse