Between the years 1046 and 1065 , what was the number of times that the whole national " fyrd " was called out ?
The historian David Sturdy has cautioned about regarding the " fyrd " as a precursor to a modern national army composed of all ranks of society , describing it as a " ridiculous fantasy " :The persistent old belief that peasants and small farmers gathered to form a national army or " fyrd " is a strange delusion dreamt up by antiquarians in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries to justify universal military conscription .