As a tour guide it’s important for me to know as much as I can about the places I will take you on my tours. I will aim to make sure what I know is accurate and also to know more than I will usually have time on the tour to tell you or without losing your interest. If you do ask questions or want me to expand it n something I then have more ability to give you extra information.
So, this should be easy. I just look up the facts, memorise them and then tell them to you. I thought today I would lift the curtain a bit so you could peek behind it and see what this actually involves and why it is nowhere near as l straightforward as it might first appear. This is because we are dealing with history. So, what is history? It’s surely just a collection of facts about people, what they did and when they did them as well as records of natural events. Well, not really. So, let’s look at what history consists of.
Firstly, there are what I call primary sources. These can be written or spoken recode made by someone who was actually there and recorded the event for posterity. These can be records of agreements, legal proceedings, court cases, deeds, wills, contracts, invoices, receipts, census returns, tax payments, inscriptions, graffiti, pictures and more recently photos, recordings, videos, and electronic data.
This list is by no means exhaustive, but the one important one I’ll add is eyewitness testimony which is a firsthand account by someone who saw and/or took part in whatever it was that happened. These could be a written record or an oral account. If it is the latter, it then relies on someone recording it in some way, so it is not lost when the person is no longer around to tell the story. Unless you hear it directly from the person themselves or read their firsthand account, you can’t consider it a primary source. Why not? Well because you can’t be sure whoever recorded it hasn’t accidentally or deliberately altered the account.
The other primary source is physical evidence. This can be in the form of physical changes to the landscape made by nature or humans, and objects left behind by humans or animals including buildings and other artificial structures. These are studied by archaeologists who have now come a long way from their origins as tomb raiders and treasure hunters. At least most of them have anyway. They now don’t just dig holes in the ground looking for things. In fact, they try to be as non-destructive and non-invasive as possible in their investigations. They also consider the whole landscape and how it has changed over time.
So, what are the problems with all of this? Let’s first look at eyewitness testimony. Psychologists tell that this is notoriously unreliable. Show two people the same event and you can get accounts that are so wildly down different that you can question whether they actually saw the same event. This is because we are very task oriented. We tend to focus on the parts of the event we are most interested in, involved in or have been told to concentrate on. We turn miss things happening in the event that are obvious to someone with a different focus.
There are lots of examples of this. My favourite is an experiment set up by psychologists to test this. They got two people to carry a long plank and approach random members of the people bloc who are unaware it’s a set up for an experiment. The person carrying the front end of the plank are preachers the unsuspecting bystander, produces a map and asks for directions. Whilst this is happening the person at the back end of the plank swaps with someone who is obviously different. A short man swaps with a tall one, a bald man with a hairy one, a man swaps with a woman and so on. The person at the front then thanks the bystander and walks off making sure the new person at the rear parades in front of them. When questioned afterwards the bystander often couldn’t recall that the rear person looked like before or after the swap. They may have noticed one or the other of two people who had been at the rear, but not noticed or even realised they had been swapped.
Magicians use this all the time when doing their tricks. They get you to focus on something whilst they are doing something else, often in plain sight. You don’t notice it and the result is that something appears to have happened in a way that defies explanation. As a result of all this eyewitness accounts can be notoriously unreliable. When you get conflicting accounts, who do you believe?
It is often said that history is written by the winning side. This is often true. Whoever is most dominant at a particular time is able to shout their version loudest and it may be the only version that survives. Even if there are alternative views, these often get suppressed and may not emerge until there is a culture change that is more accepting of them. When recording events people will inevitably have their own biases, prejudices and agendas which will subconsciously or deliberately influence what they say about it.
They may play down or omit some aspects or exaggerate or even make up others. Tales can also grow in the telling so each time they recount it, things can be exaggerated. There can also of course be deliberate fabrication of events which may not have occurred at all. Sometimes there is correspondence between people in the form of letters, memos etc. Once again these can be subject to all of the above. We may also not have the whole of the correspondence chain so information can be missing. I will call all this bias from now on.
What we do have in terms of records may be difficult to read especially if they are handwritten, may be archaic language using obsolete words or ones that have changed their meaning or spelling over time. They may even be in Latin which has been very variable over time and also often uses abbreviations which can be subject to debate as to their meaning. Records may contain accidental or deliberate omission, errors, or additions.
Later generations trying to make sense of past events will gather all the information they can find and try to assemble it into a coherent account. In doing this they will bring their own bias and each time the tale is reworked more bias will appear. New information may come to light which alters the story, but the existing version may have become so entrenched that it will still circulate and compete with any new versions especially if not everyone accepts the new version. Once a version gets out it can be copied widely with each copy adding more bias. Even completely false accounts if circulated enough can become accepted as true.
Names of people and places can also cause problems. It is not uncommon for successive generations of the same family to have the same first and last names. Different branches can have the same names and occasionally even siblings can share a first name especially if the first one died young and another one born after that is given the same name. Spelling wasn’t really standardised in English until the 17th century which can lead to problems deciding if two different records are actually about the same person if the spelling is slightly different. As above errors on certificates and registers can occur either deliberately or accidentally. For example, someone supplies their name, but can’t tell if the clerk has written it down correctly as the person supplying it is illiterate.
Placenames also cause problems. Many were hundreds of years old before they were first written down in records like the Domesday Book. Here the spelling they got was a Norman-French clerk’s best guess of an Anglo-Saxon name where he was not familiar with the spelling or pronunciation of it and the source was illiterate.
Even on the physical evidence side, the context in which it is found may not be known and even if it is, can be misinterpreted or disputed. It can also be subject to the same biases and issues as written records. Certain experts can and have become so dominant in the field that others have had to wait for them to pass on before they can challenge their ideas.
All of this means that history is not a fixed set of straightforward facts but is open to interpretation and reinterpretation. All you can do is look at all the evidence you can find and come to your own conclusions. You should of course point out where there are conflicts in the accounts and accept, they can’t also be resolved. Also, if someone else has a different view or evidence appears that changes your own, it should not be dismissed out of hand, but examined and accepted if it seems credible.
To give an example, think about that most famous of dates in English history, the Battle of Hastings. There is universal agreement and always has been that it happened, who won and lost and the date of it. All the sources from then to now agree on this and none contradict. However, when we start to go into detail, issues arise. The exact location of the battlefield has been debated as the sources can be interpreted different ways. Exactly how King Harold died has also been debated along with many other details of the whole event.
This of course is my own take on all of this. Others may well disagree, but that probably makes my point for me better than all of the above. As a guide I obviously have my own thoughts on events, but when presenting I try to remain neutral. I present what is definitely known, what is probable, what is disputed and why, and what is made up. If there is more than one view, I will put the different sides. It’s then up to the audience to make up its mind. Other guides may prefer to tell their favourite version of the story. Both are okay, but it hopefully shows you how different guides can give you a quite different tour of the same locations.
Next time I will show you how I investigated a particular building which has been vexing some of us guides and show you what I did and examples of the issues that can occur.
