As I read the fine work of Simon R. Doubleday about King Alfonso X of Castile, I finally abandoned the book in chapter 31 of 38 because I was losing interest in the qualified picture Doubleday was creating. He may be completely accurate in his portrayal of Rey Alfonso X, but his telling of the life of this remarkable king was, for me, marred by an ocean of statements that were necessarily qualified for a factually presented story of a figure from the 13th century.1
This leads me to ponder the question of historical accuracy and the need to be frank about the gaps in our knowledge. We pretend to understand how the Romans lived and who they were. We pretend to understand who the anglo-saxons were and how they lived. And yet, time and again, as one digs deeper into the history, one is confronted with facts that defy former interpretations and transform the simplified narratives that we may have adopted.
An example of adjusting our thinking is the discovery of Anglo-Saxon burials whose DNA is unambiguously from western Africa.2 These burials were equally treated to others with northern DNA. This puts the racists in an uncomfortable position. In fact, we know already that skin pigment was only an indicator of lesser status after the Portuguese discovery of a naval path to sub-Saharan Africa in 1433.3
This raises a point that I have pondered for some time, and written about. The limits in what we know are real and I feel we often fail to recognise them. We are justly interested in the quotidian life of our ancestors. When we look, however, we realise that there is limited information in the record. This is because preserving records requires effort. It requires a stable and wealthy society. It requires triage in even the best of scenarios for record keeping, such as the English Empire. The line between a record and ephemera is thin, and biased more toward ephemera than records.4 We keep records that are considered important, and only about people or events we consider important. This necessarily leaves the future understanding less complete even than the understanding at the moment.
I encountered this recently related to my own employment more than 30 years ago. In 1992 I began working part-time at a firm called Criterion Inc. based in Irving, Texas, USA. It was a software firm that was begun to solve challenges for larger employers who were required to demonstrate that their hiring practices were in line with affirmative action efforts. This was a statistical work involving machine calculation of US Census data and based on the early statistical work of the founder. I have forgotten his name. For a writing project I have since abandoned, I started searching for information about the firm and the founder. There is almost nothing. And this is my point. A software firm that employed hundreds to solve problems for massive corporations has, within 30 years, disappeared as if it never existed.
And here I pause to marvel at the paucity of our understanding at the moment. Consider the work of a journalist. To report on the activities of a group of leaders in our community is always a question of historical research through the rich compost of the ephemera of tomorrow. And yet the work is difficult. Done well, it is a real challenge to develop a clear understanding of even the most recent events.
And so, how much more qualified must be our understanding of events long past? How much more care must be taken in reading about those events? And how much more open must we be to the revision of our understanding when presented with newly discovered information?
Footnotes
- To be clear, it was a good book and I enjoyed most of it. He was clearly working hard from a strong base of expertise to bring an ancient leader to life for us. I recommend the book, but here I am focusing on a negative aspect.
Doubleday, Simon R. 2015. The Wise King. Basic Books. ↩︎ - Curry, Andrew. 2025-08-12. Youths buried in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries carried West African DNA. Science.org. Accessed 2025-08-14 at https://www.science.org/content/article/youths-buried-anglo-saxon-cemeteries-carried-west-african-dna ↩︎
- “In Ibn Khaldun’s day, most of the captives sold in Western Europe were Eastern Europeans who had been seized by Turkish raiders from areas around the Black Sea. So many of the seized captives were “Slavs” that the ethnic term became the root word for “slave” in most Western European languages. By the mid-1400s, Slavic communities had built forts against slave raiders, causing the supply of Slavs in Western Europe’s slave market to plunge at around the same time that the supply of Africans was increasing. As a result, Western Europeans began to see the natural Slav(e) not as White, but Black.”
Kendi, Ibram X. 2016. Stamped from the Beginning. PublicAffairs. ↩︎ - Ephemera is a word that denotes something that is of the moment. It is a record or object that is indicative of something of passing importance and then it passes away. For more detail, see Wikipedia on Ephemera. ↩︎