[ANSTHRLD] Medieval soldier names database

Tim McDaniel tmcd at panix.com
Fri Nov 16 12:51:52 PST 2007


I'm going to CC this reply to the SCA Heralds' list, just because I
want a sanity check on my answer from a larger pool of scholars.

>> http://www.medievalsoldier.org/index.php
>
> At what level are we going to be accepting documentation from this
> source? Or is this just a "teaser" and we have to discover a copy of
> where they got the information?

You never HAVE to burrow behind ANY secondary or tertiary source.  But
how its accuracy is judged depends on the secondary or tertiary source
itself, not the material that it says it's based on.

For example, I am perfectly free to document a name element with "In a
conversation in a room party at Darkover Grand Council, Tangwystyl
verch Morgant Glasvryn told me that Bardsley says that this is the
most common period spelling".  But I need to cite it as "Heather Rose
Jones, unrecorded oral personal communication", and it needs to be
judged with the grains of salt that those circumstances deserve,
rather than cite it and have it judged as if I was transcribing
straight from Bardsley.  But the salt varies: Tangwystyl orally
telling me that the most common 15th C spelling is "verch" with a "v"
is a lot more credible than her orally telling me something about a
great-granddaughter of Nest, or than ME writing here that "verch" was
most common (I'm not at all sure it was, and which language context(s)
would that be in anyway?).

As an exception: if you cite as documentation an Academy of Saint
Gabriel client letter (that is, "letter #1234" rather than a Medieval
Names Archive article), we do assume that, if it says that Bardsley
says such-and-so, that Bardsley did indeed say such-and-so.  That is,
a Saint Gabriel client letter gets the credibility of the underlying
source rather than the people who wrote the letter.

Daniel de Lyncoln
-- 
Tim McDaniel, tmcd at panix.com



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