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

[lyev.livejournal.com]

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...)

Re:

[cellio]

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?)