research methodologies

[cellio]

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...?)

Comments

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

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.

Re:

[cellio]

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. :-) )

Re:

[ealdthryth.livejournal.com]

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.

Re:

[cellio]

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!