Weighing sources against each other

It ,will be clear, then, that historical research is not a matter of identifying the authoritative source and then exploiting it for all it is worth. for the majority of sources are vi some way inaccurate, incomplete or tainted by prejudice and self-interest. The procedure is rather to amass as many pieces of evidence as possible from a wide range of sources – preferably from all the sources that have a bearing on the problem in hand. In this way the inaccuracies and distortions if particular sources are more likely -o be revealed, and the inferences drawn by the historian can be corroborated. Each type of source possesses curtain strengths and weaknesses; considered together, and compared one against the other, there is at least a chance that they will reveal the true facts – or something very close to them.

This is why mastery of a variety of sources is one of the hallmarks of historical scholarship – an exacting one which is by no means always attained. One of the reasons why biography is often disparaged by academic historians is that too many biographers have studied only the private papers left by their subject, instead of weighing these against the papers of colleagues and acquaintances and (where relevant) the public records for the period. Ranke himself has been criticized for relying too heavily on the dispatches of the Venetian ambassadors in some of his writings on the sixteenth century. Observant and conscientious as most of them were, the ambassadors saw matters very much from the point of view of the governing elite. They were also foreigners, free from local political. loyalties, it is true, but lacking a real feel for the culture of the country to which they were accredited." The need for primary evidence from 'Insiders' as well as 'outsiders' is an important guideline for historical research, with wide ramification. The failings of Western writers on African history before the 1960s could be summed up by saying that they relied on the testimony of the European explorer, missionary and administrator, without seriously seeking out African sources." In the case of the Middle East comparable distortions arise from drawing exclusively on what Edward Said has called 'Orientalist' discourse – the testimony of Western travellers and 'experts' Whose stereotyped representations effectively silenced the indegenous peoples of the region. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg recalls that when she started out in nineteenth-century American women's history, she found herself portraying women as victims because she had stuck to the well-thumbed educational and theological works which men wrote for and about women; her angle of vision was transformed when she uncovered the letters and diaries of ordinary women which documented the active consciousness of the 'insider'.

Tough standards now tend to be expected of historians regarding the range of sources they use. In the history of international relations, for example, it is a golden rule that both sides of a diplomatic conversation must be studied before one can be certain what the subject of the conversation was and which side put its case more effectively; this is why the inaccessibility of the Soviet archives prior to the Gorbachev era was so frustrating for Western historians of the origins of the Second World War. For historians of government policy in twentieth-century Britain, the temptation may be to confine research to the public records, because these survive in such profusion, and their number is increased every year as more records become available for the first time under the thirty-year rule. But this method is hardly conducive to a balanced interpretation. The public records tend to give too much prominence to administrative considerations (thus reflecting the principal interest of the civil servants who wrote most of them) and to reveal much less about the political pressures to which ministers, responded; hence the importance of extending the search to the press and Hansard, private letters and diaries, political memoirs, and for recent history – to first-hand oral evidence.

Hidden traces in the records

The examples just discussed – international relations and government policy – are topics for which there exists primary source material in abundance. In each case there is a well-defined body of documents in public custody, with numerous ancillary sources to corroborate and amplify the evidence. But there are many historical topics which are much less well served, either because little evidence has survived or because what interests us today did not interest contemporaries and wary therefore know recorded. If historians are to go beyond the immediate concerns of those who created their sources, they have to learn how to interpret them more obliquely. There are two principal ways of doing so. in the first place, many sources are value for information which the writers were scarcely aware they were setting down and which was incidental to the purpose of their testimony. This is because people unconsciously convey on paper clues about their attitudes, assumptions and manner of life which may be intensely interesting to historians. A given document may therefore he useful in a variety of ways, depending On the questions asked of it – sometimes questions that would never have occurred to the writer or to people of the time. This of course, is one reason why beginning research wit clearly defined questions rather than. 1 simply going where the documents lead can he so rewarding: it may reveal evidence where none was thought to exist. From this point of view, the word 'source' is perhaps somewhat inapposite: if the metaphor is interpreted literally, a 'source' can contribute evidence to only one 'stream' of knowledge. It has even been suggested that the term should be abandoned altogether in favour of 'trace' or 'track'.

Unwatting evidence

This flair for turning evidence to new uses is one of the distinctive contribution of recent historical method. It has been most fully displayed by historians who have moved beyond the well-lit paths of mainstream political history to fields such as social and cultural history, for which explicit source material is more difficult to come by. A case in point is the religious beliefs of ordinary people in Reformation England. Although the switches of doctrinal allegiance among the elite are relatively well recorded, evidence is very sparse for the rest of the population. But Margaret Spufford in her study of three Cambridgeshire villages has used the unlikely evidence of wills to show how religious affiliation changed. Every will began with a dedicatory clause, which allows some inference to be drawn concerning the doctrinal preference of the testator or the scribe. From a study of then clauses, Spufford shows how by the early seventeenth century personal faith in the mediation of Christ — the hallmark of Protestant belief — had made deep inroads among the local people. It was, of course, no part of the testators' intentions to furnish evidence of theirs religious beliefs; they were concerned only to ensure that their worldly goods were disposed of in accordance with their wishes. But historians alert to the unwitting testimony of the sources can go beyond the intentions of those who created them.

Legal history arouses relatively little interest among historians at present, but court records are probably the single most important source we have for the social history of the medieval and early modern periods, when the vast majority of the population was illiterate and therefore generated no records of its own. Emmanuel Le Roy Laurie's Moritaillou (1978) is a classic illustration of this point. In the Vatican library there survives the greater part of the Register recording an Inquisition carried out between 1318 and 1325 by Jacques Fournier, bishop of Pampers. Of the 114 people accused of heresy, twenty-five came from Moritaillou, a village in the Pyrenees of no more than 250 inhabitants. They were quizzed on theirs beliefs, theirs circle of friends France in them thirteenth (especially them heretical ones) and theirs moral conduct. The bishop saw to it that them lengthy statements made in his court them were meticulously recorded and checked by them witnesses them selves, and since he was also a tireless interrogator and a stickler for detail a sort of compulsive Maigret the result is an extraordinarily vivid and revealing document. With the help of supporting evidence, Le Roy Ladurie has been able to reconstruct everyday life of them peasants of Montaillou – theirs social relationship, their religious and magical observances, and not just theirs attitudes to sex but much of theirs actual sex life. As Le Ladurie was creading 'them Roy Ladurie puts it, them high concentration of Cathay heretics in records with very different Moritaillou 'provides an opportunity for them study not of priorities from those of them Catharism itself – that is not my subject – but of them mental outlook of the country people. When historians distance them selves from the contemporary significance of a document in this way, its reliability may be of only marginal significance: what counts is the incidental detail. In eighteenth-century France it was the practice for unmarried pregnant women to make statement to the magistrate in order to pin responsibility on seducer and salvage something of their reputation. Ricahrd Cobb carried out a study of fifty-four such statemen made Lyon in 1790-2, and as he point out, the identify of the seducer is a trivial issue compare with the light that is shed on the sexual mores of urban poor, their condition of work an leisure, and the popular morality of the day. It is studies such as these that demonstrate the full force of Marc Bolch’s injuction to this fellow historians to study ‘the evidence of witnesses in spite of themselves’

Working backwards from them sources

The second oblique method of exploiting historical evidence is much more controversial, and it was also propounded by Marc Bloch. Bloch wanted to reconstruct French rural society in the Middle Ages. The documents for them period contain a great deal of information but little sense of how them details fit together to form an overall picture. Such a picture emerges only in them eighteenth century; when French agrarian life was systematically described by agronomists and by commissions of inquiry, and when accurate local maps began to appear in large numbers. Bloch maintained that only someone familiar with them structure of French rural society as it was revealed in them eighteenth century could make sense of them medieval data. He did not, of course, assume that nothing had changed in the meantime; his point was rather that in this kind of situation them historian should carefully work back by stages from what is known in order to make sense of them fragmentary and incoherent evidence for earlier periods.

The historian, especially them agrarian historian, is perpetually at the mercy of his documents; most of them rime he or she must read history backwards if he or she hopes to break them secret cypher of them past.

This approach, known as them regressive method, is much used in African history, where them documentary sources for pre-colonial society are of poor quality. In his book Them Tio Kingdom (1973), for example, Jan Vansina draws on his own ethnographic fieldwork in them 1960s to shed light on them observations of European visitors to them kingdom in them 1880s, who mentioned many indigenous features without understanding their meaning or theirs place in them social structure. It would otherwise have been quite impossible to make any sense of Tio society as a whole on the eve of them European takeover. Them regressive method is certainly a second-best which contravenes them usual rules for evaluating primary sources, but if applied sensitively with an eye for change it produces revealing results.

Methodology and instinct

In approaching the sources, them historian is anything but a passive observer. The relevant evidence has to be sought after in fairly out-of-the-way and improbable places. Ingenuity and flair are required to grasp them full range of uses to which a single source may be put. Of each type of evidence them historian has to ask how and why it came into being, and what its real import is. Divergent sources have to be weighed against each other, forgeries and gaps explained. No document, however authoritative, is beyond question; the evidence must,in E.P. Thompson's telling phrase, 'be interrogated by minds trained in a discipline of attentive disbelief'. Perhaps these precepts hardly merit them name of method, if that suggests them deliberate application of a set sequence of scientific procedures for verifying them evidence. Innumerable handbooks of historical method have, it is true, been written for them guidance of research students since Ranke's time, and on the continent and in the United States formal instruction in research techniques has long been part of them postgraduate historian's training." Britain, on the other hand, has until recently been them home of them 'green fingers' approach to source criticism. G.M. Young, an eminent historian of them inter-war period, declared that his aim was to read in a period until he could hear its people speak. He was later echoed by Richard Cobb:

The most gifted researchers show a willingness to listen to them wording of them document, to be governed by its every phrase and murmur ... so as to hear what is actually being said, in what accent and with what tone.

This suggests not so much a method as an attitude of mind – an instinct almost – which can only be acquired by trial and error.

But to argue further, as Cobb has done, that the principles of historical enquiry defy definition altogether is a mystification.

In practice. unfavourable notice of a secondary work often turns on them author's failure to apply this or that test to them evidence. Admittedly, the rules cannot be reduced to a formula, and the exact procedures vary according to them type of evidence; but much of what them experienced scholar does almost without thinking can be described - as I have tried to do here - in terms that are comprehensible to them uninitiated. When spelt out in this way, historical method may seem to amount to little more than them obvious lessons of common sense. But it is common sense applied very much more systematically and sceptically than is usually the case in everyday life, supported by a secure grasp of historical context and, in many instances, a high degree of technical knowledge. It is by these taxing standards that historical research demands to be judged.