I’ll Just Go Back One More Chapter: the pitfalls of historical research

At university I wrote an essay about the Silver Bullion crisis in 17th Century Spain. As I did my research I kept on finding yet another fact or event that intrigued me. So I started going back through my “set” books to yet another earlier chapter. Eventually I found myself reading about Ferdinand and Isabella – who had lived and ruled 250 years before. This did not helped me write my essay.

Recently I read the Prologue to a book – “The Burgundians: A vanished empire” by Bart Van Loo. He had done the same thing. Each time he read up on the end of the Burgundian Empire, he went back another few years until eventually he had gone back a millennium! He subtitled his book – “A history of 1,111 years, and one day”. Quite a tag line! But I instantly recognised his problem.

And today, more than 40 years after trying to write my essay in the Spanish Silver Bullion crisis, I met the same problem. This time I dropped back 5 years, from 1469 to 1464. I was researching the Earl of Warwick’s rebellion against Edward IV and every fact I uncovered felt isolated from its causation. What had caused Edward and Warwick to fall out? So I went back to 1458, then 1457 etc. until eventually I found the Royal Council of Reading in October 1454, where I think Warwick’s schemes had all been shattered by Edward’s independence.

Sometimes we don’t know where the beginning is. We need to know our history sufficiently well to know where the best place to start from is.