cellio | research methodologies

This afternoon someone mentioned the "fact" that after either the battle of Crecy or the battle of Agincourt (he couldn't remember which), the heralds from the two sides got together to decide what to officially name the battle. (I've heard such assertions in the SCA before.) Now I don't actually know, because neither heraldry nor the history of these particular battles is well-represented in my store of semi-catalogued possibly-useful knowledge, but... this just seems unlikely. It strikes me as a modern back-fill.

Why? Because I have this gut feeling that the notion of a battle (or war) having a single, "official" name used by both sides is a modern construct. My instinct says that it just didn't matter until people started writing textbooks and stuff. (I mean, look, we can't even all agree on the name for a certain mid-19th-century North-American war, and that's recent.)

I'm mildly curious about the answer, but I'm much more curious about the methods one might use to research a question like this. The broader question, I mean -- not whether the sides at Agincourt agreed on a name, but when the idea of names of this sort became important. I generally think of myself as having decent research clues, but if I were in a library trying to puzzle this one out I'm not sure what I would do other than asking the reference librarian. :-) (Which is a fine answer; that's what they're there for. But if I wanted to be self-sufficient...?)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

For Agincourt, some possible leads include:

Curry, Anne The Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations, Boydell Press, 2000. ISBN 0851158021

Loxton, Howard The Battle of Agincourt: a Collection of Contemporary Documents, 1966. [Can't find its ISBN, sorry]

Hansen, Mogens Herman The Little Grey Horse --Henry V's Speech at Agincourt and the Battle Exhortation in Ancient Historiography (http://www.dur.ac.uk/Classics/histos/1998/hansen.html) [useful more for its bibliography]

Oh, and the more answer to the more general question is that since Agincourt and Crecy both feature prominently in both French and English history, I'd hope like crazy that there'd be a decent corpus of contemporary and near-contemporary documents (which, per my previous comment, seems to be the case.) The next step is to see how early both languages were using the same names for the battles, which might either disprove the assertion empirically or alternately provide some more-or-less-primary cite for the assertion.

But yeah, unless you get really lucky it's a long and probably undefinitive slog through primary docs. The only bright spot, as I said, is that this is one case where there is a body of relatively accessible contemporary source docs.

So if you were trying to research the more general question of "when (and maybe why) did they start assigning global names to battles?", how would you go about it? Slogging through primary-source data on a large-enough number of battles might yield an answer, and that's probably what you'd need to do, but I wonder if there's some more clever approach.

(I wonder if

ealdthryth or

alfiechat is listening. :-) )

Just got back from an event 5 hours away!

That's a really interesting question. Since I'm taking a reference class this semester, I should be able to figure it out. :-) I'll think about it some and maybe ask on the class list if I get stuck. I have a paper due tonight, so it will probably be tomorrow before I get to it.

Hey, no rush -- you're the one doing the favor, after all, and it's not a critical question that's keeping anyone up nights. :-) I'll be interested in hearing your ideas when you get a chance!

A quicker lead might be in John Keegan's _Face of Battle_, where Agincourt chapter just this is mentioned (i.e. the two heralds watching the battle from the same vantage, and meet King Henry who names the battle). His bibliography might lead you to the original source answer quicker, or at least give you an idea how far back the easily accessable sources go. Want to borrow my copy?

BTW sounds like a neat research question!

OK, I'm pathetic -- I looked up the Keegan quote on it (p.112). According to him, HRH asked Montjoy what the name of the castle behind the French lines was (Agincourt), so that he could name the battle and sing the praises of the Englishmen. This nuance seems to me that he was choosing the name of the battle that the French would use, and declaring that it will then be the English name too. Whether this was in fact what happened, or was made up by some historian in the late 15th c. I don't know (Keegan's Biblio gave no contemporary references)

In regards to naming of battles, as the Police Action of the 1860's showed us, different sides will name a battle different ways. When it is a meeting engagement between armies, then the nearest geographic marker to the start-lines of either force is used. Hence "Manassas/Bull Run" and others that each side had different names for. If there is a distinct geographic objective for both sides, then that is used. Hence "Gettysburg". I don't know how far back this convention goes, many histories tend to be written by the victors. I was going to write how this was done in the modern era and give the Battle of Stalingrad as an example, but then remembered that for other reasons in Russian language sources it's known as "Battle of Volgagrad" (gotta love the Ministry of Truth...)

Thanks for the information!

The idea of "the" name for a battle is what initially struck me as modern -- I mean, different people will sometimes use different names, and until the winner is actually publishing the history book, it doesn't really matter. (And the idea of the two sides getting together to agree on it just seems odd -- especially as, as you pointed out, geography will usually suggest a name, with no further discussion needed.)

Names of wars, being not so tightly coupled with location, are more varied and more politically charged. "Civil war", "war between the states", and "war of northern aggression" all say different things, after all.

(A related thing I have sometimes wondered about: when were the two world wars commonly called world wars? There are two parts to this: recognizing the scope as such, and then using the name. I found myself wondering this on 9/11 -- were we now on a path to what would later be called the third world war? And when would we know?)

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