I claim for students of history that their study – if properly conducted – can strip the mind of illusions, leading them from heady abstraction back … - David C. Douglas

G. H. Hardy in his apology for pure mathematics placed high among his arguments that the subject was "harmless". I can – alas – make no such plea for history. The correct use of historical study may be debatable, but the consequences of its abuse have been made plain for all the world to see. The propagandist use of history in the Germany of yesterday, in the Russia of today, is a fact of incalculable importance to the future fate of the world. An ignorance of history inviting its fabrications by the unscrupulous cannot be regarded simply as an innocuous academic failure. It has affected all our lives. It has led directly to Belsen and Buchenwald and Katyn Wood. It has contributed its full share to two major European disasters.

The search for wisdom in precedent flourished as if naturally among a people whom foreign observers at a later date have praised especially for its reliance upon tradition rather than upon those wide general theories which claim universal validity.

Perhaps I may also be permitted to add how much the lawyer can teach the historian about the use of evidence, and certainly I learnt most of the little I know about the criticism of medieval charters from a practising lawyer at work from ten to five in the office of the Treasury Solicitor.