Chronicles

Including the unimportant is important.

Last week we lamented that most of our consultants had not yet worked out what to say in their annual Christmas letters.  When faced with describing their accomplishments and failures, triumphs and defeats, outstanding events they participated in or that happened to them, most came up with very little.  On the individual scale this year looked a lot like last year, and similar to the year before.  It hardly seemed worthwhile to send a Christmas card made up of ditto marks.

The writers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mostly had no such problem.  After the standard introduction, Her on þissum geare “Here in this year,” there were deaths and enthronements of kings and archbishops; battles and wars won and lost; famines and storms and comets.  Even in such a small, backward region as Dark Ages England there was much to record.

But also much that went unrecorded that we’d really like to know.  What was the life of a free peasant, a ceorl, really like?  What were the actual mechanics of farming (the activity of most of the people most of the time)?  Did they think of themselves as Angles, Saxons, Jutes, English (Angelcynn) or as inhabitants of a parish or village?  How literate and eloquent was a parish priest, a bishop?  (There are complaints, but we don’t know how well-grounded.)  And how did Old English actually work in conversation?  The material we have, all written, is heavily biased toward heroic poetry, laws and lawsuits.  Imagine a holiday party in which each person either recited alliterative verse, or cited precedents.

It’s the familiar and slowly-changing that doesn’t get a mention in the chronicles.  What we don’t need to explain to our contemporaries gets lost over time.  We’ve noted that working with horses, once a ubiquitous skill, is now unknown to almost all the population.  Think of what’s changed within living memory: the replacement of the land-line telephone with the portable version, the library expedition with the online search.  To enter your hotel room now you wave a plastic card; you used to insert a metal key into the lock.

So we counsel our consultants to think about the small things.  In their chronicles, include the mundane and repeat what they’ve said before.  (Not everyone will remember it.)  It’s the details and the by-the-way that gives life to a written account.  You may not be writing for historians centuries hence, but maybe for friends thousands of miles away.