Early Modern Notes

Erin O’Connor at Critical Mass has been doing family history, clearly a moving experience. On ‘rediscovering’ an ancestor, David Sells, killed in the Civil War, lost in an unmarked grave and misremembered by subsequent family:

How do you find someone who has been twice lost–once by his country, and a second time by his own family? What do you really know about him from a letter and a photo and a small, sadly generic collection of facts? What can you know? It’s the grand conundrum of historiography writ small, as genealogy.

I often have doubts about family history when it seems to be simply genealogy, the collecting of names for a family tree, with no apparent desire to know more than those basic dates - birth, marriage, death - or to learn about the lives, the experiences, the societies in which those lives were led. Yet that may, I realise, be unfair; behind those lists of bald names and dates could lie all kinds of frustrated efforts to fill in the gaps. I should know all too well from working with poorly indexed archives that - certainly before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - that searching for those lives beyond the parish registers and census listings must be an immensely difficult task.

When so much early modern government and administration was done in courtrooms, there’s a good chance that somewhere in there you’ll find something rewarding. We’re not just talking ‘criminals’ here (to take just one example: if your ancestor ran an inn or alehouse, and there were a lot of them about, they were supposed to be licensed by magistrates, and documents relating to this frequently turn up in Quarter Sessions records - as do prosecutions of those who didn’t get licences…). But could even the most devoted family historian afford the time it would take to comb through the vast swathes of the early modern legal records, the maze of local and central criminal and civil courts, church courts, manorial courts, borough courts, special jurisdictions, in the hope of finding just a handful of people?

This is not just a problem when hunting for individual people. One of the reasons new online resources like the Old Bailey Proceedings are so important is the way in which they make it possible to search for needle-in-haystack topics. This has the danger that it can lead to decontextualised cherry-picking (there was at times a little of that at the Tales of the Old Bailey conference I went to last month and never got round to posting about), but the benefits - especially if we can get to the point where we have a wide range of such resources to search through and combine - to my mind outweigh that risk. (If nothing else, it should make for some interesting undergrad dissertations for us to read…)

Online resources are - is this an exaggeration? I don’t think so - revolutionising family history. Hopefully they will gradually come to have a much greater impact on ‘academic’ history too. But of course, they’ll never free us from that ‘grand conundrum of historiography’ (a quote to savour, don’t you think?). And who would, in truth, wish it otherwise? Where would we be without the uncertainties, the gaps, the controversies, which force us as historians to interpret and keep on interpreting, thinking and re-thinking?

So, let me finish with this (which concludes with perhaps my single favourite ‘history quote’), from the introduction to the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl’s book on the history of the history of Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon: for and against [1949], written during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands).

To expect from history those final conclusions which may perhaps be obtained in other disciplines is in my opinion to misunderstand its nature… The scientific method serves above all to establish facts; there is a great deal about which we can reach agreement by its use. But as soon as there is a question of explanation, of interpretation, of appreciation, though the special method of the historian reamins valuable, the personal element can no longer be ruled out, that point of view which is determined by the circumstances of his time and by his own preconceptions…. we cannot see the past in a single communicable picture except from a point of view, which implies a choice, a personal perspective. It is impossible that two historians, especially two historians living in different periods, should see any historical personality in the same light… A man’s judgement - for however solemnly some people may talk about the lessons of History, the historian is after all only a man sitting at his desk - a historian’s judgement, then, may seem to him the only possible conclusion to draw from the facts, he may feel himself sustained and comforted by his sense of kinship with the past, and yet that judgement will have no finality. Its truth will be relative, it will be partial…The study even of contradictory conceptions can be frutiful. Any one thesis or presentation may in itself be unacceptable, and yet, when it has been jettisoned, there remains something of value. Its very critics are that much richer. History is indeed an argument without end.