How common is common sense?

The besetting problem of the historian

In a fit of optimism, sometime early last year, I committed to three different book chapters. They are all on broadly related themes. They are all about things I know about. They are all fun.

And writing them was meant to be easy because I was going to have finished my book manuscript by June or July (2023) and then have lots of research time, especially after moving jobs. Ah, such high hopes!

Well, now those three chapters are all due and they are all nearly finished but nearly can be such a cruel little word. Still, I am enjoying them. And this week, I have mainly been enjoying (translation: grappling endlessly and pestering my partner with ‘does this make sense?’ type conversations) the question of ephemerality and invisibility.

Obviously, things which are physically ephemeral (like flowers or the froth on a cappuccino, or even leather and wood, depending on how long ago you are looking) are harder to recover as a historian. Things written on parchment or stone or copper plate or made out of brick and iron last longer and are therefore easier to see.

But what about things which are physically ephemeral but which people do or use over and over again? Can we imagine ephemeral objects being part of habitually enduring phenomena?

If people plough the same two patches of field and tend the plants in between them and do this year after year, generation after generation for, say, a thousand years, many of the things involved in this process are ephemeral and will be lost forever: each individual plant, the wood of plough handles, the leather of straps and shoes, the songs sung in the summer sun. But the field system may be so deeply embedded in the landscape that it can be recovered even centuries later from traces of pollen or altered soil density.

In Yorkshire, we have dry stone walls more than hedges. A dry stone wall might be rebuilt or repaired over and over, often using the same stones. Some mark field boundaries which are still in use. Some are obviously irrelevant, as the walls are allowed to crumble, but they could always be put back. Should we classify such walls as ephemeral? Each one, or part of one, might be new or old. There’s no real way to tell as there is no mortar and most don’t even use cut stones. Or are these durable features of the north English landscape?

Dry stone walls and a sunny sky somewhere near Haworth. Oh, it is nice to be home!

What about things that people do, which leave a very clear physical trace but which were a one-off, a moment of madness, or a passing fad?

In the second half of the first century CE (c. 69-96 CE, under the so-called Flavian emperors) young women in the Roman Empire took to wearing extremely elaborate hair styles. Curls were piled up like halos, plaits like snakes’ nests. Presumably, each up-do took several slaves several hours to construct, each time a lady wore it. They would have required pins and combs and may very well have included hair extensions (human hair from South Asia was an import product in first-century CE Rome) and animal fat for fixing. The whole rig probably shifted uncomfortably if you moved your head too quickly.

These hairstyles also coincided with a longer phase of Roman history when lifelike marble busts of the living and recently dead were all the rage. As a result, we have quite a good record of these spectacular, uncomfortable-looking, likely quite unpleasant smelling designs.

You’ve really got to hope that, by around the turn of the first century, younger relatives were already looking at these statues and asking, ‘Did Aunt Livia really do her hair like that?’, with that faint tone of superior adolescent disgust. So, what are we looking at here: ephemeral or durable? A brief moment, a middling fad, or an eternity in stone?

A marble bust of a young Roman woman with a fashionably elaborate hairdo from the Flavian dynasty (c. 69-96 CE).

This really matters for studying some parts of history, especially ones for which we don’t have many narrative texts. When we’re piecing together what happened from a handful of written works, which don’t necessarily tell us exactly what we wanted to know and physical traces which are never exactly what we wanted to find, it really matters whether something we have evidence for was a one-off or something everyday.

If a source tells us that a person did a thing, can we then imagine thousands of other people doing that same thing? Should we take an object and replicate it in our picture of the past, going from one lucky find to a picture of how a ‘usual’ household or marketplace or army barracks worked?

Hundreds of leather shoes found at Vindolanda, a fortress along Hadrian’s Wall, the northernmost boundary of the Roman Empire in the province of Britannia, only survive because of the unique, wet conditions at the site. They reveal a world of different designs, for men, women and children, from sturdy, plain loafers to painstakingly elaborate open-toed sandals.

Suddenly, a small part of every Roman street scene and public assassination and day at the colosseum comes into sharper focus. Sure, maybe not everybody, everywhere in the empire wore exactly these kinds of shoes, but it gives us more of an idea of techniques, materials, fashions and the sheer range of possibilities that people could and did pay for. It would be silly not to add it to our general picture of Roman life, at least not unless we have better evidence for a specific time and place.

Display of Roman leather shoes from the army camp at Vindolanda, on Hadrian’s Wall, northern England.

And anyway, it is common sense: we know Romans wore shoes and sandals, especially in cold weather, because we have statues and writing about it. Now we have a huge range of different kinds of shoes showing what they could look like. Why wouldn’t shoes in other places in the Roman Empire also have looked a bit like these?

I’ve met some historians who swear off common sense completely. If there isn’t hard proof for it, then it isn’t part of the picture. It is a purist position but hardly anybody is as pure as all that. Poke a bit, and those same historians make all kinds of common sense assumptions about their period. It’s almost impossible not to.

Often those assumptions are based on the idea of ‘human nature’. They assume that people looked for ways to enjoy themselves, did things even though they were not allowed to (especially sexual things and things pertaining to other people’s property), doubted things or believed them even though no source directly tells us so. Why? Because people everywhere that we know about do do these things, so why would people only not do them in the times and places for which we don’t have evidence?

I’ve also met some historians who believe firmly in common sense to explain almost everything that isn’t outright stated in our sources, and even sometimes to contradict things that are. Often, when common sense is applied like this, it looks suspiciously like ‘what I think I would do in those circumstances’, or even ‘what I would like to think I would do’.

Did people do extra work to make more money in order to better their lot in [insert any random time or place here]? Ask the right sort of historian and, yes, of course they did! Why? Because it’s just common sense! [It’s what I would do! Or, at least, I it’s what I would like to think I would do!]

I once had a bizarre conversation with somebody who gives public lectures about how Joan of Arc knew that there is no such thing as God. I was surprised. We were both talking about the 15th-century French martyr saint who declared that God had called her to lead the armies of France, so did just that, until she was burned at the stake for her unusual religious convictions, right? Yes, that’s the one. But, as a feminist, she knew that the only way to convince people that she should be allowed to do things like lead an army was by pretending that God was talking to her.

But, what about the pretty extensive and detailed sources we have telling us exactly how Joan described and justified her own actions, which are pretty explicit, literally on pain of death, about talking to God? And what about all of the other evidence that she lived in a society in which almost nobody seems to have thought in terms of either ideological feminism or atheism, but in which communication from God was pretty widely accepted? Granted, we cannot take our sources completely at face value, but to ignore them completely… Why?

It’s just common sense, said my interlocutor. Nobody really believes in God (!). And obviously she was a feminist. That’s common sense, because she did things people didn’t think women should do. But obviously, she had to make do with the world she was in, so talking to God would be the best way to explain her choices to people.

And there we have the problem with common sense: how common is it? You and I might agree with those purist historians that there are some things we can assume. We can elaborate and use other frameworks to justify them - philosophy to decide on fundamental truths about being human, or anthropology or biology to pin down things we think are demonstrably universal, even if the reasons have nothing to do with logic or truth. But where do we cross the line into Joan of Arc territory, where ‘common’ sense really means not being able to imagine anybody thinking differently from us (in the past or the present)?

Obviously, there isn’t a single, easy answer. There is just the question. If we keep reminding ourselves to ask it, keep thinking about what we know about the wider worlds we are trying to understand, keep consciously trying to identify the things we hold to be true without really knowing why, and the reasons we think some things do apply across time, the better our chances of seeing other people (past and present) in their own terms, not just ours.

In the chapter I’m writing, I try to go a step further. Where we can identify things that are physically ephemeral but part of repeated behaviours, we may, cautiously, carefully, oh so tentatively, see the past even when little or no direct evidence survives. The example I use are wooden jetties and landing stages along the rivers of South Asia. They may last only a few years, but they make sense as a response to large, changeable rivers. Assuming their presence in the past would also explain why we have textual references to landing stages but no physical remains of them from the first millennium.

A wooden jetty on the banks of the Hughli River, just outside Kolkata.

By contrast, where we have physically durable remains of something that looks like an ephemeral moment - some unique or brief practice - we may have to admit that what the evidence meant is lost. What makes sense to us, in this situation, is likely to be telling us more about what seems ‘common’ in our own life than it does about the world of the past.

Late Roman copper alloy coins, found in riverbeds in modern Tamil Nadu (southeast India), from the collection of Dr R. Krishnamurthy.

The example I use for this is a group of coins, very different from the ones I’ve talked about before (and here). They are quite numerous (perhaps 10,000 or more, allowing for hoards which were never properly documented). They are usually very badly worn and were never imitated, pierced or treated in any special ways. They were brought from the Roman Empire and disposed of in peninsular South Asia probably over quite a short period (maybe a few decades, but perhaps as little as one sailing season). And, maddeningly, we have absolutely no clue why they were transported, what they were used for or what they meant to people. And, unless new evidence comes to light, we never will.

I’ve tried to come up with theory after theory. So have other people working on coins in South Asia. We talk about them when we see each other at conferences and at the pub. I speculate idly about them in the shower, but in the end, they are leftovers of a moment of uncommon sense and unusual behaviour. They are a reminder that the past wasn’t made for us, and that is what keeps it interesting…