Dr John H. Arnold

The problem with the question, as posed, is that it hides several assumptions behind some apparently innocuous words. Perhaps we should begin by thinking a little harder about these. As various of the commentators on this site have noted, how do we decide what events are 'important'? Let's compare two events:

- the Norman Conquest of England in 1066

- on February 3^rd 1333 at Walsham the gooseherd of the farmer of the Prior of Ixworth was fined 3 pence for damaging the lord's rye.

The former event would probably strike most of us as the more important one. Why? Perhaps because it affected more people; and perhaps therefore because we feel it had something to do with the overall creation of 'Britain'. But the effects of the Norman Conquest - arguably including the growth of literacy, the consolidation of the Catholic church in England, the introduction of particular forms of social structure commonly called "feudalism", the centralisation of government, and the development of bureaucracy - were not things that happened in 1066. They took place over the following period - perhaps, in fact, over the following two centuries. What happened in 1066 - that a fairly small bunch of elite men came over to England and defeated a fairly small bunch of different elite men - had limited importance in and of itself. So learning the date - and the event - does not in itself do very much for us. We need to know what it meant - and we need to understand what we mean by 'what it meant'.

The second 'event' (picked pretty much at random from my bookshelf; from The Court Rolls of Walsham le Willows 1303-1350 to be specific) probably does not strike us as important, and very probably it was not - perhaps not even that important for the gooseherd, so long as he had 3 pence to spare. So as an 'event' it also doesn't do much for us. However, what it does show us - along with the thousands of other court cases detailed alongside it - is a picture of lordship, law and local justice in fourteenth-century England. We glimpse here, ever so briefly, not only the structures of power in medieval England - lordship, justice - but also the fact that there were challenges to those structures (assuming here that the gooseherd allowed his flock to damage the lord's rye). The date - 1333 - might then strike us as quite important: if we already know that in 1381 there was a large-scale uprising of the lower orders in England (commonly called the Peasants' Revolt), we may be interested to find out about peasant-lord relations earlier in that century. What we are glimpsing could be one very tiny event within a very large - but very important - historical change in the power-relations between lords and lower orders.

So 'important' really begs a further question: important to whom? The answer to that question may vary depending on what kinds of questions interest you in history, and what sort of people you want to find out about. We've also, as we've gone along, perhaps began to question what we mean by an 'event'. Certain things happen at particular moments, to which we can append dates. Other things - perhaps most things - happen over a period of time.

But really the assumptions of the question come bundled together: the question assumes that 'important events' will in some way be self-evident, because they will be 'important' to 'us'; and that 'us' means 'the British' (since it is British history that is being presented here). But who are 'the British'? Are all the people who live in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland possessed of the same identity? Do the same things strike them as important? Some people, for example, would find it important that various kings and queens have ruled England in a relatively unbroken succession since 1066; whereas others might find it more important that various cities on the English coast owe their size and past prosperity to the slave trade. What the question points to is the way in which history is related to our own identities. The danger, therefore, in learning 'dates' (and all that apparently 'self-evident', taken-for-granted stuff that comes with them) is that we end up having a particular identity - a particular way of 'being British' - foisted upon us.

Some of the commentators on the site have effectively noted what is, I think, the main point: that dates are not important in themselves, but that chronologies are, since chronologies allow us to see how things have changed over time. For example, if we know that the Peasants' Revolt happened in 1381, and that Ketts Rebellion happened (in Norwich) in 1549, and that the English Civil War happened in the mid seventeenth century, we can sort out in our head a chronology of popular uprisings and perhaps begin to compare them. If we compare them, we can understand them better - and argue more effectively about what they might mean. Dates are obviously a useful way of remembering chronologies, but they are not important in themselves. If somebody says that they are, they are usually trying to sell you a whole lot of assumptions along with the date.

So I'm most persuaded and encouraged by the student voices on this site, which seem to me to be saying two things:

(1) that remembering when something happened can be a useful tool

(2) but what actually matters is understanding why something happened, and to what effect.

To these I would add a further thought:

(3) that what is perhaps most important is knowing why you are looking at a particular bit of history in the first place - because very often this has something to do with your identity: who you are and want to be.

Dr John H. Arnold

School of History

University of East Anglia

Author of History: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2000)

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