The Methods of Historical Study. Eight lectures read in the University of Oxford ... with the inaugural lecture on the Office of the Historical Professor

Preface

. The course of Lectures here printed, with the Inaugural Lecture prefixed, was meant as a call and an introduction to historical study in general. They were followed up in Easter Term 1885 by a course on the Chief Periods of European History. After these two general courses, I began in October 1885 the first of a series of more minute lectures, beginning at the point marked out in the present course as a provisional beginning for the special work of a Professor of so-called "Modern" History. That point is the great barbarian invasion of Gaul in 407, the beginning of Teutonic settlement, strictly so called, in the Western lands of the Empire. I had far rather have begun at 776 b.c. than at 407 a.d. ; but I believe that I have chosen the best point that could be chosen, if an arbitrary divi sion was to be made anywhere.

But I feel more and more the utter worthlessness of the unnatural distinctions which are still drawn, in matters of history and language, between periods and subjects between which no natural distinction can be drawn. An advanced time of life has its draw backs; but I daily feel, and I find that eminent contem poraries of mine feel with me, the great advantage of having spent our youth under the old Oxford system and not under the new. The changes of 1849-50 were premature. The old system needed expansion to bring it up to the actual level of knowledge ; but its principle was good ; it was sound within its own lines. Its examination in sixteen books at the end of four years was

PREFACE.

. IV a real test; it gave no such charming opportunities as are now provided for forgetting one subject before another is learned. It made no attempt to teach history or lan guage beyond a certain point; but it gave a man habits of thought and study by which he might carry on his work further at pleasure. But, instead of enlarging that system so as to take in subjects later in date, the later subjects were set up as something distinct from the earlier, almost as antagonistic to them. It is against this state of things, to say nothing of other difficulties, that a his torical Professor at Oxford has to fight. It is for others to judge whether I have won any ground in my early campaigns. If really sound learning is to be our object, if the great discoveries of modern times are to be made available for the studies of the University, we must rise from the endless petty changes in which academic life seems to be frittered away, to a thorough recasting of our system.

Learning must no longer be sacrificed to an unintelligible delight in an endless whirl of examinations. Instead of the diseased excitement of class-lists— a weak point of the old system which has been exaggerated under the new — we need such tests, in the form of examinations or otherwise, as shall make a bachelor's degree respectable, and a master's degree honourable. Instead of the present unnatural divisions, we need a School of History and a School of Language — better still a School of History and Language — in which both subjects may be studied with out regard to artificial barriers which gender only to shallowness. This I hardly expect to see in my lifetime ; but I do rejoicethat, among many changes for the worse, there is hope of one change for the better, a change which

PREFACE.

. V may do something to bridge over the fatal gap, and which I trust may pave the way for a more thorough reform. I speak of those subjects only of which I conceive myself to be able to judge. As to what may be best for studies other than those of history and language, I venture no opinion, because -my opinion would be worth less. The University ought to welcome real knowledge of every kind, and to do for every branch of knowledge whatever is best for that branch. But that general cultivation and discipline of the mind which is the highest object of the University should surely not be sacrificed to mere specialism in any branch. And in every branch alike the aim should surely be knowledge for its own sake, knowledge as a discipline of the mind. It is surely not the business of the University to teach a man his calling in life, but to teach him something which may be good for him, whatever calling he may choose.

In the most ancient system of all, the professional faculties, those of divinity, law, and medicine, could not be entered on till after long study in the more general faculty of arts. A degree in arts granted as the result of an examination in law or in divinity would have seemed a contradiction in terms. And however much the details of our studies may have changed from the studies of those days, the principle at least is a sound one. On the relations of the professors to other teachers in the University I will not at present enlarge. In the more general lectures here printed, in the minute study of texts with a small class which I would gladly see larger, I have tried to show what I conceive the professor's duty to be. Teachers of other classes must do what they conceive to be their duty. But I am sure that college teaching— at

PREFACE.

. VI least as college teaching was forty years back, when a college lecture was commonly a lecture on the text ot a book carefully construed — might be brought into the closest harmony with professorial teaching. In my day there was very little professorial teaching ; it was an evil that there was so little. The evil now is that there is so much of both kinds of teaching, but that the professor and the tutor seem to stand in no kind of relation to one another. In my small class with whom I have read Gregory and Paul, I have had graduates and undergraduates; I have had men but little younger than myself ; I have had scholars of high renown, to whom on some points I am glad to look as my masters. Among these classes the professed teachers of history have supplied the smallest proportion. I merely state the fact; it is for them to explain it.

I trust that the present volume may be followed by my second course on the Chief Periods of European His tory. The lectures that have followed it, and others that may follow them, I do not propose to publish in the form of lectures ; but I trust that their materials may be found useful in other shapes, as part of some of them has been already made use of in the' first number of the English Historical Review. St. Giles', Oxford, May -j, 1886. CONTENTS. INAUGURAL LECTURE. PACE The Office of the Historical Professor ... 3 LECTURE I. History and its kindred Studies .... 43 LECTURE II. The Difficulties of Historical Study ... 80 LECTURE III. The Nature of Historical Evidence . . . -117 LECTURE IV. Original Authorities . . . . . . -156 LECTURE V. Classical and Mediæval Writers . . . .191 LECTURE VI.

Subsidiary Authorities 226 LECTURE VII. Modern Writers . . . ■ . • • .261 LECTURE VIII. Geography and Travel 296 INDEX -329 INAUGURAL LECTURE. THE OFFICE OF THE HISTOEICAL PROFESSOR. n THE OFFICE OF THE HISTORICAL PROFESSOR. In coming forward for the first time, as I do to-day, to fulfil the new duties which the highest power in the land has laid upon me, I cannot forget how soon my first words necessarily come after the last words of the renowned scholar in whose place I find myself. It is indeed matter of rejoicing for us all that his last words were last words only in an official sense. Our guide is taken from us, and yet not wholly taken from us. Called to other and higher duties, we feel sure that he will not forget the studies of his earlier life ; we feel sure that he will still be ready, from time to time, to stretch out a helping hand to those whose main work still lies in the fields where his own once lay.

And readiest of all, I would fain hope, he will be to stretch forth a hand to him who feels it his highest honour to stand in his place, and to stand in it, I may make bold to say, with his good will and something more. And yet the fact in which we all rejoice that he in whose place I stand still lives and flourishes does but in some sort heighten the natural difficulties of my first appearance before you. I am thereby driven into more direct comparison than I otherwise might have B been with one with whom comparison is indeed dangerous. You have to hear my inaugural profes sions, while what I may call the exaugural confes sions of the Bishop of Chester have as yet hardly passed from your ears. Let me only hope that, if I ever have the same privilege as he had, of parting from you, hardly, like him, to new duties, but when the time may come for me to lay all official duties aside, I may be able to make as good a confession as he made.

I would fain hope that, when the time comes, I may part from you with as cheerful a confidence as his, that I may, like him, feel that I have at least done my best, and that you — or those who may then represent you here — have at least accepted the will, perhaps even, as in his case, the deed also. There is one point of difference, whether I am to count it as a difference for gain or loss, between him who now speaks and him who spoke last in the same character, which comes strongly home to me when I am tempted to glance, as he did, at the history of the post in which I am called to succeed him. As a rule, the younger succeeds the elder. It is by a rather singular lot that I am called on to take the place which has been held in succession by two living men, by two personal friends, by two of the men of whom among all living men I think most highly, but to neither of whom can I look up with that particular form of reverence which we feel towards our elders and official teachers.

Of the last two holders of this chair, the latter is certainly younger than I am by a few years, as even the former is by a few days. And MY PREDECESSORS. 5 this fact, a disadvantage truly in many ways, is no small advantage when I come to look back at times before either of them was called to it. My academic memory goes back further than that of the Bishop of Chester, and I cannot mourn that it does so. There can be but few here who can remember, as I can, listening to lectures from a Regius Professor of Modern History more than two-and-forty years ago. But those whose memory carries them so far back will assuredly not have forgotten the time when they listened to the voice of Arnold. Of that great teacher of historic truth, that greater teacher of moral right, I can speak as one wholly free from local, traditional, or personal bias.

I was not one of his pupils or of his followers. I never spoke to him ; I never heard him speak save with his official voice in the well-filled Theatre. And yet I am bound to honour him as a master in a sense in which I can honour no other. On one side I have learned more from him than I have learned even from my Right Reverend predecessor. For of Arnold I learned what history is and how it should be studied. It is with a special thrill of feeling that I remember that the chair which I hold is his chair, that I venture to hope that my work in that chair may be in some sort, at whatever distance, to go on waging a strife which he began to wage. It vuas from him that I learned a lesson, to set forth which, in season and out of season, I have taken as the true work of my life. It was from Arnold that I first learned the truth which ought to be the centre and life of all our historic studies, the truth of the Unity of History.

If I am sent hither for any special object, it is, I hold, to proclaim that truth, but to proclaim it, not as my own thought, but as the thought of my great master. It is a responsibility indeed to be the successor, even after so many years, of one who united so many gifts. New light has been thrown on many things since his day ; but it surely ill becomes any man of our time who, by climbing on Arnold's shoulders, has learned to see further than Arnold himself could see, to throw the slightest shade of scorn upon so vener able a name. Surely never did any man put forth truths so high and deep in words so artlessly and yet so happily chosen. If he were nothing more than the teller of a tale in the English tongue, he would take his place as one who has told a stirring tale as few could tell it.

It was something to make us quiver at the awful vision of Hannibal, and to show us Marcellus lying dead on the nameless hill. It was a higher <__Iing to show, as no other has shown, that history is a moral lesson. In every page of his story Arnold stands forth as the righteous judge, who, untaught by the more scientific historical philosophy of later days, still looked on crime as no less black because it was successful, and who could acknowledge the rights even of the weak against the strong. But more than all for my immediate purpose, Arnold was the man who taught that the political history of the world should be read as a single whole, who taught that the true life of the tale, the true profit of the teaching, should not be made void and ARNOLD. 7 of none effect by meaningless and unnatural divisions.

It was he who taught us that what, in his own words, is "falsely called ancient history," is in truth the most truly modern, the most truly living, the most rich in practical lessons for every succeeding age. From him I learned that teaching; it will be my highest aim, in the place in which I am now set, to hand that teaching on to others. If I can do ought to break down the middle wall of partition that is against us — if I can do ought to make men feel more deeply that so-called " ancient " history without " modern" is a foundation useless for lack of a superstructure, that so-called " modern " history without " ancient " is a superstructure ready to fall for lack of a foundation — if I can bring home to men's minds that the patriarchs of our own folk, the Angul and Dan of the old legend, the mythical representatives of our speech, our laws, our whole historic being, are as such the equal brethren of Hellen and Latinus — if I can bring but one of you to work, as I have ever worked, with the kindred records side by side, with the fates of one branch of the house ever called in to throw the needful light on the fates of the other branch — if I can bring but one to trace out with me the work of Kleisthenes, of Licinius, of Simon of Montfort, as parts of one living whole, a whole of which every stage needs to be grasped by the same faculties, to be studied by the same methods — then indeed I shall have done the work that I have come to do ; but I shall have done it only as the loyal follower of the master who being dead yet speaketh, if only by the mouth of a distant successor.

I have paid my homage where homage from a holder of this chair is due chiefest and first of all. But there are others, others of whom I have already spoken, of whom, living though they are, I still feel that I have not yet said all that is their due. Arnold was taken from us too soon, taken in the fulness of his strength, when he had indeed done much, but when much more, above all in this place, might have been looked for from him. He was lost to us ; but worthy successors were in time to fill his place. Again, after a season, his chair passed to a memorable man. It passed to one who had indeed drunk in the spirit of Arnold, to one who knew, as few have known, to grasp the truth that history is but past politics and that politics are but present history. It passed to a scholar, a thinker, a master of the English tongue, to one too who is something nobler still, to one whom we may truly call a prophet of righteousness.

The name of Goldwin Smith is honoured in two hemi spheres, honoured as his name should be who never feared the face of man, wherever there was truth to be asserted or wrong to be denounced. He went forth from us of his own will ; but it was but to carry his light to another branch of our own folk, and it may be more graceful in us, if we do not so much regret our own loss as congratulate the kindred lands to which he is gone. And in absence he yet teaches us ; some truths have perhaps become GOLDWIN SMITH. 9 clearer to him on the other side of Ocean than they could ever have been in our elder world. Not the least among his many services to truth and to right reason has been done within this very year. He has taught us, in one of those flitting papers which, when they come from him, speak volumes, where to look for the true Expansion of England.

His keen eye has seen it, not in the spread of " empire," but in the spread of that which is the opposite to empire — not in the mere widening of dominion — an Eastern despot could do that — but in that higher calling which free England in the later world has shared with free Hellas in the elder. He has taught us the meaning of words, the realities of things ; he has taught us to see, if not a " Greater Britain," yet a newer England, in the growth of new lands of Englishmen, new homes of the tongue and law of England, lands which have become more truly colonies of the English folk because they have ceased to be provinces of the British Crown. And one more tribute, not the last, I feel sure, by many, to him in whose immediate place I stand, my predecessor in the University and in one college, my successor in early days in another.

In those early days I may, I think, fairly claim that I was the first to grasp more fully than others all that was in him, to see in him something more than the clever men whom we meet with daily, to pick him out as one with whom his first class and his fellowship were not the ending but the beginning of his career. It seems not so many years since I was often asked, sometimes by men who deemed themselves specially learned, who this Stubbs might be of whom I talked so much but of whom nobody else had heard. No one will ask that now of the historian of the English Consti tution, the enlightening spirit of the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission, and beyond all these, the man who has drawn the life-like portrait of Henry the Second, and who has thereby shown that he has a call before other men to draw a life-like portrait of Henry the Eighth.

I have had in my life the honour and advantage of knowing not a few wise and learned men, some who have passed away from us, some who are still among us. Among them two stand forth before all others ; one of my own time of life, the other of an older generation ; one an intimate friend of many years, the other a master at whose feet I deemed it a privilege to sit now and then as a humble listener. To those two I can honestly pay a special tribute which I can hardly pay to any other. Among many of whom I have learned, those two, the late Bishop of Saint David's and the present Bishop of Chester, Connop Thirlwall and William Stubbs, stand forth as the two from whom one might always learn without any need to doubt or stumble at what one learned of them. Others may know how to tell a more popular tale; others may indulge in more brilliant feats of the imagination ; of none other can I say, as I can say of each of them, that his minute accuracy never fails and his impartial judgement never swerves.

In a long and careful study of the Bishop of Chester's STUBBS. 11 writings, I will not say that I have always agreed with every inference that he has drawn from his evidence ; but I can say that I have never found a flaw in the statement of his evidence. If I have now and then lighted on something that looked like oversight, I have always found in the end that the oversight was mine and not his. After five-and thirty years' knowledge of him and his works, I can say without fear that he is the one man among living scholars to whom one may most freely go as to an oracle, that we may feel more sure with him than with any other that in his answer we carry away words of truth which he must be rash indeed who calls in question. Standing then in the place of such men as these, of predecessors whom we have not wholly lost but to whom I can still look as friends and fellow workers, I feel the responsibility, the burthen of my new office the more keenly.

It is no small matter, at an age when the best part of one's days is gone, to be carried away to a wholly new manner of life, to begin a career at a time when one who had begun it earlier might fairly think of withdrawing from it. To that work then I am the more bound to give the fulness of such powers as I have because I am likely to have a shorter time than others to do it in. In such a post as mine, each man will have his own way of doing things, and he will do his work the better, if he does it in his own way, the way which his own nature and his own studies lead him to. In this case, in defiance of Aristotle and Aristotle's teacher, I venture to think that there may be more good ways than one. I feel sure that my two illustrious predecessors must have done their work, each admirably, but in utterly different ways.

And I feel sure that each of them did his work the better for doing it in his own way, and not trying to follow the way of some other man. To them, as well as to our teachers of past days, I may apply the words which Cicero applies to the great orators whom he followed — " omnes inter se dissimiles fuerunt, sed ita tamen ut neminem sui velis esse dissimilem 1." And I trust it is not presumptuous in me to say that I feel sure that my way of doing the work will also be different from that of any who have gone before me, and moreover that I shah do that work all the better if I do it in my own way and do not try to copy the way of any of those who have gone before me. I need not tell you that I come back to the University after many years, and those years full of great changes. I need not say that much in the present teaching and administration of this place is altogether new and strange to me.

Of its examina tions I once knew something, but even then I found the course of change to be so fast that, each time that I was appointed Examiner, I had to learn my trade afresh ; my experience from the former time had already become a matter of ancient history. Of teaching in the strict sense, in the University or out of it, I have had no experience whatever, unless any one chooses to count two terms' possession, eight- 1 De Oratore, iii. 7. RETURN TO OXFORD. 13 and-thirty years back, of a lowly office in my own college, an office which the progress of reform has since swept away. In the art of preparing — I will not use the ugly word cramming — an undergraduate for his class or for his pass the last bachelor who has won his own class or his own pass is necessarily more skilful than I am.

But I do not feel that my lack of experience of this kind is necessarily a disadvantage ; every man has his own line of duty, and it seems to me, strange as I believe the doctrine will sound in some ears, that to prepare men for examina tions is no part of the duty of a Professor in such a subject as mine. Duties he has, and no small ones ; but they are, as I hold, duties of quite another kind from even the widest and most liberal form of teaching into which the thought of success or failure in an examination is ever allowed to enter. There is surely a certain lurking fallacy in the word " Professor." The name surely means wholly different things according to the subjects to which it is applied. It surely implies a different relation to the Professor's subject, according to the nature of that subject, or rather perhaps according to the position of that subject among the studies of the Uni versity.

When a subject, for whatever cause, is studied by a few only, when the Professor is perhaps the only teacher of the subject in the University, I should conceive that, while it is his duty to stand forth as a representative of the highest learning in his subject, it must also be his duty to bend himself, if need be, to the humblest form of its teaching. A Professor of Arabic, while master of a mighty litera ture from which I daily mourn that I am shut out, must also, I imagine, be ready to teach the Arabic alphabet, even, if need be, to a brother-professor. No such duty lies on a professor of that which is alike the oldest and the newest speech of European freedom ; none such lies on a professor of the un dying tongue of Empire, the tongue of the consuls, the Cæsars, and the pontiffs. A professor of Greek must, I assume, be master alike of every stage and every phase of that still living speech, from the song of Homer to the song of Rhegas, from the prose of Hekataios to the prose of Trikoupes.

A professor of Lathi, I assume, must be alike at home in every page of the long life of the Imperial tongue, from the song of the Arval Brethren to the hymns of Ber nard of Clairvaux, from the sharp sayings exchanged between Nævius and the Metelli to those yet more memorable Saturnians in which the nameless poet of the thirteenth century set forth the earliest platform of Parliamentary Reform. Nay, it might hardly be unreasonable if we even asked him to begin a fresh journey from the oath of Strassburg, if we called on him to trace the fates of the children as well as of the parent, to trace them even to the most wayward shapes which the speech of Latium has put on by the springs of the Rhine or by the mouths of the Danube. Each alike, he who represents Greek and he who represents Latin, is surely set in his place to be the representative of the widest and the deepest, the oldest and the newest, learning that can bear on THE PROFESSOR'S DUTIES. 15 the history of the undying tongue that forms his subject.

But they are spared the lowlier duties which I conceive that a professor of Arabic or Chinese must combine with a learning no less deep and wide of the tongue that forms his subject. And so, I take it, it must be with the professor of every subject which has many followers in this place and of which there are many teachers besides himself. If I may so far magnify an office in which I am myself a sharer, I would say that a professor of any of the great branches of study in this place should hold a place something like that which the prince held in the view of Tiberius Cæsar1. The prince was not called on to discharge the duties of an ædile, a præ tor, or a consul ; so the Professor is not called on to discharge the duties of a college tutor or a private tutor. " Majus aliquid et excelsius a professore postulatur."