What_Problems_Does_the_Historian_Face_in_Utilising_Contemporary_Accounts_of_the_English_Civil_War_

As historians we are always looking at documents written by other people sometimes an extremely long time ago. The first obstacle with using these documents is we need to understand why these people wrote what they did and what the documents mean we can’t just study the document by itself. We have to have knowledge of what was going on at the time the document was made and other documentation to back up our findings before we can come to a genuine conclusion. When relying on accounts of others we have to be careful. People often embellish their own roles in events sometimes through no fault of their own. If they are in the middle of a huge event for example a battle and there is a lot of action it is probably easy to get caught up in the melee and believe you have done a lot more that you actually have. Time can also affect the mind and sometimes you will miss out crucial information because you have simply forgotten it during the time the event occurred and the time you wrote it down. Prejudices can obviously affect someone’s opinion and they can make their enemies out to be monsters while their friends are portrayed as heroes even if this may not be the total case. It’s important not to take the opinions in the documents we study for facts they can help us understand others feelings toward the people they were talking about but we will need a lot more supporting information to build a clear case for their opinion being factual. Looking to the civil war in particular this is a time of great turmoil. A great war was being fought between the royalists and the parliamentarians no-one could know at the time what the outcome would be with entire families were torn apart by choosing the different sides. This would mean different people believing different things due to the area that they were in or perhaps the side that they were on or even perhaps the propaganda that they had access to in their area. With such a mix of opinion and strife it is difficult to find the genuine facts of the argument, the historian must remember that the people are living in the moment and they are not sure what tomorrow will bring with the war. If the historian is looking at a public document we must ask, who are they trying to convince and why the document was created. If it is a private document then the question is why they would write down their private thoughts and whether they are genuinely private thoughts or if the people knew they would eventually be read by other people which would affect their writing. First looking at a public document like Anthology document 3.11 these are newsbooks written by people on different sides of the war about the same battle. If we as historians were to look at newsbook (a) and take it as fact then we would learn that the Earl of Derby defeated Sir William Breton at Warrington twice in one day. However if we take newsbook (b) as fact we learn that the Earl of Derby was ‘soundly defeated.’ These are two contemporary documents written almost during the same week but they tell a completely different story. Thinking of our daily lives and the times now our opinions can be swayed by media coverage of an event we can be sure the people of the 1600’s were which is why these newsbooks with their obvious bias were created. This is a great difficulty for a historian when looking at it because we do not know who to believe. With both sides claiming victory we will need to have other accounts of the battle and perhaps an impartial bystanders view of the battle (which is highly unlikely) in order to make sure we know who won the battle. With C it is also hard to use because of its obvious bias but also because in the first sentence it read that they have ‘more letters from Lancashire confirms’ If this is what they are basing their information on letter from other people then they can easily be misinformed by people themselves because they have not actually seen the battle they are only pronouncing what other people have told them through correspondence. This is again why we would struggle to use this document for facts it is pronouncing gossip to the masses without actually corroborating its ‘news.’ Looking at a private document like Anthology document 3.16 it is apparent that these are diaries written during the civil war. Looking at (a) there is a problem the historian comes across straight away, because this is not written in the English known today it is hard to understand what Isabella is saying, the historian must make sure to translate what Isabella is saying correctly perhaps by using other documents as a template if you translate one you could possibly translate them all, however , there does not seem to be a rule with how to write as Roger writes in a completely different style even if one is a diary and one is a journal. Secondly if it was not for the footnotes in the anthology telling us who Isabella is talking about we would not know who these people are they would just be a list of names. How we have the footnotes in the Anthology is because historians have found out who Isabella was talking about by using other documents that will together make up a picture of Isabella’s life and who she was in contact with. Isabella says that on the 14th of June ‘Fairfax had a great victory at Nasby’ again we can’t take that as fact as Isabella could be getting her information via one of the propaganda newsbooks. She may not be trying to mislead she would just be repeating something she had perhaps heard as fact in her diary we do not know for sure unless we have other information to find out if this event occurred on this date. With a diary the historian must be careful because it is easy for someone to get their dates mixed up and perhaps think an event happened on one day but be completely wrong because they were misinformed themselves. So the main problems for this historian looking at documents during the civil war is that during a time of national turmoil it is hard to know if someone is being completely biased towards their side. We also need to know exactly what the people are saying and almost ‘translate’ their words into the English spoken today. For the civil war it is probable that a certain argument can be put forward by a historian using lots of different documents but because there was so much difference of opinion at the time it is easy to think another historian can completely refute their argument with other documents from around the time. During this time of crisis it is hard to build up a concrete argument because of the wide ranging selection of opinions on the matter during the Civil War. Bibliography Gibbons, Rachael C. (ed) 2006 Exploring History 1400-1900. An Anthology of Primary Sources, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Laurence, A. (2007) Unit 10: ‘The origins of the wars of the three kingdoms’ in AA200 Block 3, ‘The wars of the three kingdoms’, Milton Keynes, The Open University Laurence, A. (2007) Unit 11: ‘The course of the wars and the constitutional experiments 1642-1660’ in AA200 Block 3, ‘The wars of the three kingdoms’, Milton Keynes, The Open University