IT SEEMS there have been stories about the past as long as human societies existed and at some stage these stories, remembered and passed from generation to generation, were written down. Some chapters of the Bible’s Old Testament, such as Exodus, Joshua, Judges and Kings, are examples. A wish for a sense of the past is inseparable from our humaneness. Herodotus and Thucydides, both Greeks, in the fifth century BC wrote of wars as did the Roman writers Livy (59 BC - AD 17), Tacitus (AD 55-120) and Plutarch (AD 50-120). The form was a story of political and military events and from these histories, it was assumed, lessons could be learned.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire, events of History were recorded by the ecclesiastical chroniclers, of whom Bede (672/3-735) is a well-known example. These chronicles included little reflection or comment and an uncritical acceptance of sources. Medieval historians, such as Froissart (c. 1337-c. 1410), were influenced by St Augustine (see Chapter 4) and although they, too, tended to be uncritical of sources, they had some idea of historical perspective but were inclined to see events as the judgement of God. It was not until the Renaissance period, with its broader appreciation of mankind and a more critical approach to sources, that changes in writing about the past were accomplished. Although both Machiavelli, noted for his handbook on political action, The Prince, and Guicciardini, wrote about recent history, the Italian Wars, they took as their focus the evidence and what arguments could be drawn from it. In England James I’s former Lord Chancellor, Sir Francis Bacon, in The History of Henry VII (1622), wrote from a detailed examination of the evidence from which he sought to draw out the reasons for events.

The religious strife in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the destruction and dispersal of records, which are the historians’ foundation material, was the background to much activity in locating and recollecting documents, both religious and secular, and the compilation of texts such as those of the Jesuits’ Acta Sanctorum, and to a greater awareness of their value.

Widely accepted as the first historian in the sense the word is used today, because he founded his work on the stringently critical use of a wide range of sources, Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), published his first book The Roman and German Peoples in 1824. He was appointed professor of History in Berlin in 1835 and it was his use of extensive records which included diaries, letters, diplomatic and state papers, from many archives (he visited Germany, Austria, France, Italy and England), and his seminars in Berlin on research techniques, which contributed to further developments in historical study. An École des Chartes, to train students in the use of historical sources, was founded in Paris in 1821, and a chair of History in the Collège de France was established in 1831. Much impetus was given to the work with the creation of substantial collections, such as Monumenta Germania Historia. The Historical Manuscripts Commission was established in Britain rather later under the influence of William Stubbs, the Regius Professor at Oxford, in 1870.

Macaulay (1800-1859) is the modern historian most associated with narrative History. Trained as a lawyer, Macaulay was for most of his life a politician but in 1850 he retired in order to write his History of England, five volumes of which were published. While his History is criticised for viewing England’s past from the standpoint of the mid- nineteenth-century parliamentary constitution, he portrayed the past as an enthralling drama through which he masterfully wove strands of several themes. Later British examples of this genre include J.E. Neale’s Queen Elizabeth I and, in recent times, Simon Schama’s Citizens.

Ranke’s History centred on politics and the development of the state but the narrow focus was questioned by later historians and by a greater recognition of the work of earlier writers, such as Robertson in Scotland (1735-1801), who had given weight to social as well as political History and Johann von Herder (1744-1803) had written on the influence of geography in history and history’s onward march. Herder had, also, acknowledged a duty to understand the past in the context of that time. Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), wrote not on the state but on culture and the civilisation of Renaissance Italy.

Henri Pirenne (1862-1935) grounded his work on the sources after the manner of Ranke. While studying Belgian towns and cities he was drawn to economic dimensions of life, most notably illustrated by his Medieval Cities published in 1922. Economic History became an interest in Britain, as illustrated by R.H. Tawney (1880-1962), whose The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, was published in 1912, and in particular by J.H. Clapham (1873-1946). Initially professor in Leeds, John Clapham gained access to industrial records and his first book, The Woollen and Worsted Industries, was published in 1907. He is, however, best remembered for a huge work, published in three volumes between 1926 and 1938, An Economic History of Modern Britain, by which time most university departments had economic History specialists.

In this century the further widening of the historian’s field of study has been led most notably by the French Annales historians, named after the journal of that name founded in 1929 by Lucien Febve (1878-1956) and Marc Bloch (1886-1944). The editors aimed to encourage ‘total’ History which would encompass economic, social, cultural and intellectual History while retaining rigorous standards of scholarship. This ambitiously wide spectrum of study required competence in more skills than mere critical documentary research. Bloch, for example, studied archaeology, agronomy, cartography, folk-lore and linguistics. It is from within the Annales tradition that Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) wrote arguably the most influential work of the twentieth century, The Mediterranean and The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949).