Codex Diplomatics

‘ Arid are we expected to enjoy our Codex Diplomatics as much as our Macaulay and our Froude? ’

‘We do not ask you to enjoy,’ said the Bede, in his dry way, ‘ we only ask you to know — or, to be quite accurate, to satisfy the examiners. The brilliant apologist of Henry vm. seems to give you delightful lectures; but I can assure you that the Schools know no other standard but that of accurate research, in the manner so solidly established by the late Regius Professor whom we have lost.’

‘ Do you think that a thoughtful essay on the typical movements in one’s period would not pay? ’ asked the Admirable one, in a rather anxious tone.

‘My young friend,’ said the Reverend Ethelbald, ‘you will find that dates, authorities, texts, facts, and plenty of diphthongs pay much better. You are in danger of mortal heresy, if you think that anything will show you a royal ‘

road to these. If there is one thing which, more than another private sofia tours, is the mark of Oxford to-day, it is belief in contemporary documents, exact testing of authorities, scrupulous verification of citations, minute attention to chronology, geography, palaeography, and inscriptions. When all these are right, you cannot go wrong. For all this we owe our gratitude to the great historian we have lost.’

‘ Oh, yes,’ said Phil airily, for he was quite aware that he was thought to be shaky in his pre-Ecgberht chronicles; ‘ I am not saying a word against accuracy. But all facts are not equally important, nor are all old documents of the same use. I have been grinding all this term at the History of the Norman Conquest, verifying all the citations as I go along, and making maps of every place that is named. I have only got to the third volume, you know, and I don’t know now what it all comes to. Freeman’s West-Saxon scuffles on the downs seem to me duller than Thucydidesfifty hoplites and three hundred sling-men, and I have not yet come to anything to compare with the Syracusan expedition.’

‘ This is a bad beginning for a history man,’ said Baeda. Is this how they talked at Eton of the greatest period of the greatest race in the annals of the world? All history centres round the early records of the English in the three or four centuries before the first coming of the Jutes, and the three or four after it. Let me advise you to take as your period, say, the battle of Ellandun, and get up all about it, and how “ its stream was choked with slain,” and what led up to it and what came after it. Do you know anything more interesting, as you call it, than that? ’

Recklessness of a smart freshman

‘Yes,’ said Phil readily, with all the recklessness of a smart freshman; ‘why, Ellandun was merely the slogging of savages, of whom we know nothing but a few names. What I call fine history is Macaulay’s famous account of the state of England under the Stuarts, or Froude’s splendid picture of the trial and execution of Mary of Scots. That is a piece of writing that no one can ever forget.’

‘Ah, just so !’ said the Venerable, in that awful mono-syllabic way which he had caught from the Master; ‘ splen-did picture ! — piece of writing ! — fine history ! — here we generally take “fine history” to be — ah! false history.’

‘ But fine history need not be false,’ said Phil.

‘We usually find it so,’ replied his tutor, ‘and it is ten times worse than false quantities in a copy of longs and shorts. There is no worse offence outside the statute book (and many offences in it are less immoral) than the crime of making up a picture of actual events for the sake of literary effect, with no real care for exact truthfulness of detail. A historical romance, as they call novels of past ages, is often a source of troublesome errors; but, at any rate, in a novel we know what to expect. It is a pity that Scott should talk nonsense about Robin Hood in Ivanhoe, and that Bulwer introduced Caxton into the Last of the Barons. But no one expects to find truth in such books, and every one reads them at his own peril. In a history of England it is monstrous to be careless about references, and to trust to a late authority.’