Introduction

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Abstract
Historians deal, by preference, with ‘hard’ realities - family, work, and home; politics and government; church and chapel. We cleave to precise locations, dateable periods, delimitable fields of study. Our chronologies are marked in numbered years rather than the succession of generations or lost golden ages. We are happier dealing with aggregates than with images, with functional interests rather than with fantasy selves. Legends are left to the antiquarians, nursery rhymes to the folklorists, proverbs and sayings to the etymologist. Our whole training predisposes us to give a privileged place to the factual, or what G. R. Elton, in The Practice of History, calls ‘exact knowledge’. 1 We look for the reality content in our documents rather than what they may tell us about the symbolic categories through which reality is perceived. We build our arguments on empirically verifiable truths. As R.G. Collingwood put it, summing up the conventional wisdom of the profession, the historian’s decisions ‘shall follow inevitably from the evidence’. 2

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