Helen Castor: preference

Transcript context

…This era — if I’m trying to think about the flow of evidence, is it that we learn new things each year because records get digitized or we discover new diaries? Or is it just what we have is what we have? The new evidence coming — is it archeological? How do we learn things over time other than just historians arguing with each other? Both/and, I would say. I wish we had diaries for this period. I would dearly love to have the diary of Richard II at any point in his life, or of Henry for that matter, or anyone around them. We do have some letters, very few of them in any sense, what we would call private letters. In one sense we have, compared to what modern historians are working with, very little. I tend to think of it as joining scattered dots, trying to paint a picture when you’re having to join dots, that can be very far apart. But because England was such a centralized state, we have vast quantities of documents that are produced by central government or by the law courts centrally, all in their delegated forms right down to manorial level. In that sense, new evidence is being discovered by the process of historians digging deeper and deeper. When I was doing my PhD many decades ago, I was working on the legal records of 15th-century England, and I was having to sample them because there were so many. There were four legal terms a year, two or three different courts that I was trying to work with. Just physically, I would order up a term’s worth of documents, and it would be more than I could almost manhandle onto the stand I had to use. It’s less a question of things being digitized and more a question of the historical process of sifting and finding, and what questions are being asked, and returning to the material and seeing what those documents can be made to give up. Occasionally of course, there is either a document that hasn’t been looked at or hasn’t been looked at in the very particular way that a historian is now choosing to do it. Just your personal sense of what Richard II was like, what Henry IV was like — where does that mainly come from? What document or evidence or thing gives you that feeling?…

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