The Matter of England Part I

The trouble with history is dates. Not so much remembering them, as ascertaining them in the first place. Just in Europe even when documented there can be confusion over which year something took place, depending on what date the new year is counted from. Going back to the Roman period and Late Antiquity, there is the complicating factor of how dates were reckoned. It was theoretically possible to count from the founding of Rome, though mostly people didn’t; the commonest, official method was by who were the consuls for a given year. That meant, of course, that you need a full list of consuls even to know which year came before another. Occasionally the Church reckoned by years since the Crucifixion – not, in the first half of the first millennium, the Incarnation, which can cause problems for the unwary.

And this is just when dates are specified at the time. When they are inserted later – sometimes centuries later – things get even worse. Chronicles written at the time are usually OK for dates, but retrospective ones are often slotted into Easter Tables so there tends to be a suspicious preponderance of 4 and 8 year time gaps.

However, what one should not do is draw too sharp a line between events that can be dated and those that can't. Writers have their own agendas; most of what we know about Carausius, for example, comes from panegyrics (Roman for Praise-songs), and the only documentary evidence we had (until Yigael Yadin's finds) about Bar Kochba is from Josephus, who by then had solidly aligned himself with the Romans in general and the family that destroyed the Temple in particular.

But if events with dates and events without dates can both be unreliable, that doesn't mean we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Within limits, timespans based on recollection can still be useful.

Here's an example, looking at recent history without benefit of documents. I know when WWII ended because it was the year before I was born, which is a firm date because I know how old I am. I have a fairly close estimate for WWI, because my mother was born about a year before it started and a small child, though old enough to know what was going on, when it ended. I also know when the Spanish Flu was at its height because that is what her father died from not long after the war ended but before he was demobilised from Belgium; these dates are accurate within a year or two. There's more elasticity in the final event: my mother told me that her mother had said that she, like her mother before her, had been frightened into good behaviour by being told that if she was bad Boney would get her. I know roughly how old my grandmother was when she died, when I was small, and I know that she was the youngest of thirteen children who had somewhat more than a year between them. That would put my great-grandmother's birth at least 150 years ago, and with it a time when Napoleon was already a bogeymann The margin of error here is decades rather than years, but is in the right sort of area. If all it gives is that the Napoleonic Wars were over a hundred years before WWII, that is still usable historical data.

Another thing about dates, or rather timespans, is that they are not usually completely inaccurate; if two events are said to have taken place five years apart, five years may well not be accurate, but the gap is unlikely to be as little as two years or as long as ten years, and almost certainly will not be as long as twenty. And, within the same or neighbouring areas, the sequence is likely to be accurate.

Now for the question of agenda. As a general rule, when people twist the facts or make things up, it's to make them look better, not worse: if someone says their side won, this may be true or it may not, but if they say they lost, there's a very good chance that they are telling the truth.

There's another way in which apparently unreliable evidence can be useful; a deconstructuralist type approach. Here what is looked at is effectively what is written between the lines. When I was studying Human Skeletal Remains in Archaeology and looking at lifestyles, this was sometimes very useful, and extremely old traditions were often surprisingly accurate. Thus the story of Dionysus accurately depicts the spread of viticulture, and the story of Triptolemus is extremely close to the spread of cereal growing; this is, if anything, the more interesting as it containns accurate traditions about the spread of agriculture, from the beginning of the Neolithic - which in that part of the world was something like 7,000 years before the story was written down. Welsh legend accurately states that domestic pigs in Britain were not domesticated local wild boars but brought into the country from outside; again going back to the Neolithic, though that was significantly later than in the Near East, but on the other hand the first written version was best part of 2,000 years later than the Triptolemus story.