This month, I have decided to write in the first person, rather than as ‘Sherds’, for reasons that will emerge as the column unfolds. Back in 2014, I was offered a PhD studentship and was looking forward to joining the lively heritage studies team at the University of Leicester. I was conscious of being several decades older than most of the other graduates, but as Rosemary Cramp said when I told her about my plans, ‘Nobody under 50 should study for a PhD because they don’t have enough experience to make an original contribution.’
That was the problem that I quickly ran into: not the lack of experience in my case, but too much of it. I was planning a history of the heritage movement in England over the last 50 years, but my insights based on personal knowledge were considered unsuitable for a dispassionate and objective thesis. The fact that I had witnessed the events that I was writing about, the personalities, their motives and ambitions, the arguments, the alliances, the enmities, the back-room deals, the obsessions, the lies and obfuscations of politicians and officials – all of this counted for nothing, because it was based solely on my ‘lived experience’ and could not be independently verified by reference to written records.
Wikipedia has the same approach. Keyboard warriors love nothing better than peppering the text of Wikipedia entries with comments along the lines of ‘who says?’ or ‘according to whom?’ when they spot a claim that is not linked to an authoritative source. This poses something of a dilemma, because as R G Collingwood taught us (in The Idea of History, 1946), nothing should ever be taken at face value as an objective record: one has to understand the attitudes, intentions, and views of the author. How can one do that if these vital clues are missing from the record?
Excavating Lincolnshire